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Animated Feature Directors Reflect on the Challenge of Bringing Stories to Life: ‘Animation is Now Accessible to Everyone’


Animated feature directors celebrate the medium’s freedom and their experiences shaping their films like "Inside Out 2," "The Wild Robot" and "Flow."

Regular moviegoers — and even some Academy members — often believe that directing an animated feature means standing over an artist’s shoulder and simply saying, “Draw this.” But the six directors selected for Variety ’s third annual Pixels and Pencils series at this year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival — Josh Cooley (“Transformers One”), Adam Elliot (“ Memoir of a Snail ”), Kelsey Mann (“ Inside Out 2 ”), Morgan Neville (“Piece by Piece”), Chris Sanders (“ The Wild Robot ”) and Gints Zilbalodis (“Flow”) — want the industry to see animation directing on par with live-action work. There is a freedom that animation offers today, but Sanders finds it vitally important to market a film truthfully to avoid misleading audiences. Writer, director and composer Zilbalodis, best-known for his solo work on “Away,” embraced the collaborative process for the first time with “Flow,” a dialogue-free film that leans heavily on visual storytelling.

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