Original subtitles

Hi, everybody. You are listening to the filmmaker commentary for The Star.

I'm Timothy Reckart, the director.

And I'm Devon Franklin, the executive producer.

And Devon and I met for the first time about this movie

about two and a half years ago.

And, yeah, two and a half years may sound like a long time,

but truth is, that was a very, very fast journey,

long road, fast journey, I think, for this movie.

And when you say that, you're like... It's, like, shocking.

Like, two and a half years?

I mean, on an animated film, it's almost unheard-of.

Yeah, well, two and a half years

was how long we spent working on it,

but this script actually is much older than that.

This script was originally written for live action.

In 2005,

the script was already being developed.

Jim Henson Company was producing the film.

- Right. - And Walden Media was involved,

and the great Kristine Belson, who runs Sony Pictures Animation,

and oversaw this film for Sony Pictures Animation.

She was one of the executives at the Henson Company at the time.

I think she was running the Henson Company, if I'm correct.

It wasn't until the other project we were doing

didn't quite get there script-wise, that we said,

"Wait a minute, what about that script, The Star?"

- Right. - And here we are.

Right. I think it's a testament to sort of how good an idea it is.

In retrospect, it seems so obvious

I can't believe that no one has already made this film yet.

The story of Christmas from the point of view of the animals

'cause those characters have always been there

as part of everyone's Nativity set.

- They have always been there. - Right.

But no one's decided to do the movie from that point of view.

And I think this scene is a great example

of how we were trying to do it.

Of course, this story has to start with the Annunciation

with the Angel Gabriel visiting Mary.

That's where... That's what you call the inciting incident.

Yeah.

That's what kicks the whole thing off.

But with Abby the mouse

we wanted to try and keep this scene grounded

in the animal point of view to show, "What would an animal think

"if an animal happened to be in the room with Mary when this happened?"

Right.

Fear not,

for you have been favored by God to conceive and bear a son.

A... Ason?

But how?

The Holy Spirit will overshadow you,

and the child will be called the Son of God.

For nothing is impossible with God.

Thank you.

Do I say thank you? I mean, yes.

Let it be done, just as you say.

It's so interesting 'cause I know we went back and forth a lot

on this scene in particular

because, you know, wanting to...

It wasn't just about doing the scriptjustice.

We had the task of making sure that the Bible story and the scripture

was really done justice as well.

And we had so many conversations about the Annunciation.

- Totally. - And how much of scripture

to include, and what should the angel look like,

and too much and too little.

And I think we ultimately ended in a good place

by just doing it the way it was done in the real story.

Right, 'cause it got to sort of the question

of tone for us in the movie.

What was the tone of the movie gonna be?

And we knew that we didn't want to make a movie

that made the Bible story feel like something really distant

and separated from eons of history from us.

So we didn't want to necessarily use King James Bible language

in the way that people spoke.

We wanted to make them feel more contemporary.

Not that they would be using slang,

but just that they would feel like people that we know.

And, yeah, that was part of that negotiation, too,

of just how exactly is Mary going to respond to the angel?

- Because“. - Yes.

...there is a very elevated version of that line,

and then there's also a very casual version of that line,

and neither one is quite right for this movie.

But then the other thing that really helps us

in terms of making this story fresh

and new and accessible to a modern audience

is this thing that...

In other words, making a completely original story

set on the sidelines out in the wings of the stage, so to speak.

Yes.

Because, you know, this character, Dave, is not in the Bible,

Dave the dove.

- So, there's no danger of... - Right, messing that up.

- Yeah, exactly. - Yeah.

These moments with the animals

certainly give a lot of creative license to fill in the gap.

And this is one of my favorite scenes

just because I love the introduction of Bo,

and him being this... Bo the Donkey.

And him being such a dreamer and wanting to do great things,

and I think that is so relatable to so many people

and what they aspire to do.

So I love that we, even from the original script,

preserved Bo as our hero,

in the eyes through which we experience the story.

Yeah, because there is that image

that's so famous of Mary riding into Bethlehem on a donkey.

Yeah.

And again, it's just one of those things

where we know this story so well,

but we've never known the story of that donkey,

and what was he thinking as he rode into Bethlehem with Mary?

I think we had cycled through a lot of different ideas

of what is motivating Bo.

But the thing that really hooked us

was the idea of, "Small donkey, big dreams."

- Yes. - This is a character

who everyone looks at and thinks

that he's not going to really amount to much.

Even the old donkey, his partner in the mill,

doesn't think he's really ever gonna do much.

But he's got a big dream.

He knows in his heart that he's called to do something great.

And as we see, his idea of what...

- Yes. - What great thing he's supposed to do,

he's not quite right about that at first,

but eventually he comes to do this great thing.

Absolutely. Speaking of great things,

watching the film and just seeing it from top to bottom...

With the live action, you see the film as it gets made.

With animation, this is my first animated film,

and the process has been so tedious

that it wasn't until recently

being able to see the whole thing together and in color.

And one of the great things

that I'd love for you to elaborate on is just the animation style.

- Mmm. - Because what I notice in the film,

which was even hard to glean from the shots we were approving

and storyboards was just the texture and the lighting and the hair,

and what was that process like? You were... You are...

Attention to detail and a stickler about this.

- So tell us about the process. - Totally.

Yeah, it's definitely worth going into this.

Actually, this is not my first animated film,

but this is my first film in computer animation.

So, I come from a background of stop-motion animation,

which is... You think of things like Gumby, Wallace and Gromit,

the old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer shorts, that's all

sort of the classic stop-motion stuff we know about.

And what I love about stop-motion is the texture

and sort of the fact

that there's a world full of tactile things

that you can almost feel when you see them on the screen.

And so when we did all of our digital production

up at Cinesite, which is a company in Montreal,

that did our animation, our lighting, our texturing.

They're the people that really sort of brought this world to life

on all of that detail that you can see.

One of the things I really love about this whole scene,

and in particular this location,

is the contrast between

- the light of the world outside... - Outside. Mmm-hmm.

...and the sort of darkness on the inside.

It really gives this mill a feeling of being a prison.

That's thanks not only to the lighting artists at Cinesite

but also the painters at Sony Pictures Animation

who do paintings that we call color keys that give sort of a rough outline

of what the mood and the atmosphere of the location should be.

And then the lighting artists

chase after that and try to achieve that.

So you can see it coming up here.

We're about to cut to Joseph, who's outside

on the happiest day of his life,

the day of his wedding feast.

And the contrast in color is so immediate.

- You go from this... - Absolutely.

...dark jail kind of atmosphere

to this bright, green outdoor atmosphere.

And I mean that's sort of one example

of how in animation we use color and light

to really affect the emotion of the audience.

Yes.

And how were you able to work with the artists and work with Cinesite

to be able to articulate this?

Because when you look at traditional animated films,

CGI films today, they don't look like this.

And I mean that in a good way,

meaning like, you can see hair on his face and pebbles on the ground.

How did you get them to understand your vision?

Words can only go so far, and that's really the importance

of everyone in animation having a certain facility with drawing

or at least with painting, drawing, whatever.

Ultimately, these ideas have to be communicated visually.

And in this case, yeah...

Every film that anyone in Hollywood works on,

you do a little bit of research on what you call the look of picture,

which is like what is the...

What makes the look of this movie unique?

And the thing that I really wanted to draw in for this movie, again,

probably coming from my stop-motion background,

was something that had a more,

I would say, live-action film look to it.

So, in computer animation,

there is no inherent limit on what can be in focus.

Everything in the frame could be in focus.

But we were choosing...

You can see the stone is out of focus in this shot.

And many other examples of that.

That's what's called a narrow depth of field,

and that really...

That gives it a certain look

that, to me, ties it to,

I think, something a little bit more sophisticated

where you're using film language

the way the live-action movie would use film language.

Right.

Definitely, I think everyone who sees it and appreciates it

will appreciate that because it's very unique.

Wait, there's another good example there,

the light outside of the...

It's doing what we call... It's blowing out,

the light outside of the mill.

And that's a limitation that you have in film.

- Yeah. - But again,

you know because film can be over-exposed. In a computer,

- you really have complete freedom. - Right.

And actually the art of making a film

is kind of choosing which freedoms you don't wanna use

because you actually want some limitations and...

In order to give that texture and the feel and the tone...

- Exactly. - ...that you are striving for.

You're free, kid. Make it count.

How hard was it to get the donkey right?

'Cause I know we had so many conversations about this donkey,

and how big and how little and how short are the legs?

- How long should the legs be? - Totally.

It's funny because we wanted the donkey to be...

We wanted Bo to be small

because of the idea of, "Small donkey, big dreams."

But at the same time, if he's too small, then he can't really carry Mary.

- Right. - Looks like Mary's riding on a dog

into town, and that's just animal abuse at that point.

But another big piece of finding the character,

which this scene does a really good job of showcasing,

is the vocal performances.

Yes.

It's Keegan-Michael Key playing Dave here, Steven Yeun as Bo.

You can see how all three characters really get so much energy

- from those vocal performances. - Yeah.

And what I loved about Steven's performance as Bo

is that there was a youthfulness...

- Yes. - ...a sort of innocence to him,

but also a ton of energy.

And to me, he kind of reminded me of Marty McFly in Back to the Future

where this is a character that's almost more fun to watch when he is in trouble.

- Yes. - You know? And this is a good example

of that type of...

Watching this guy panic and freak out,

it's totally engaging.

- Yes. - Then, of course, Dave,

in some ways, is the opposite.

He's a guy who never loses his cool.

And sometimes he's a little bit sarcastic

- where Bo is innocent... - Right.

They form a really great odd couple.

Yeah, they really, really do.

And in that scene with the hen,

that was actually a cameo

- by Mariah Carey... - That's right.

...saying, "Oh, it's a donkey."

- "Flying donkey." - Yeah, "Flying donkey."

So speaking of vocal talent,

this movie is filled with some great vocal talent

and a lot of vocal Easter eggs, so to speak...

RECKARTI That is true.

...of people that will surprise you, that they're in the film,

but everyone really lent such incredible talent to it,

and I think you're right.

Steven Yeun does an awesome job,

and his ability to really hold the movie together

through that vocal performance is key,

because you didn't want him to be too young,

but not too old.

It was like a really hard balance to strike...

RECKARTI Right. FRANKLIN; Which...

- 'Cause he's not a kid. - Yeah.

But at the same time he is really at the beginning of his life.

- That's right. - He's at a stage

where he's trying to choose what he's gonna do with his life.

FRAN KL|NI That's right.

Speaking of doing with your life,

it's interesting with Mary because that was also another big conversation

that we all went through in trying to figure out,

"How do you render the Virgin Mary in animation?

"And how do you do that with reverence,

"and how do you do that with still being true to the story

"yet still being true to the retelling of the story that we're doing?"

And there was a lot of conversation about that.

Yeah, the Bible really doesn't give us a...

There's no paragraph of character description

on almost anybody in the Bible.

- But we do have clues... - Right.

...and those were always ourjumping-off points

with our main characters here.

Mary---...

I guess for me one big thing that I thought about Mary is,

"This is a woman who when she's visited by an angel

"who tells her, 'God wants you to be the mother of His son,'

"she's a woman who doesn't say,

"What does the fine print say?‘ She just says yes."

She embraces this proposition from God,

so this is a woman with a lot of faith.

Also, I think that's a sign of a woman who also has a lot of joy and optimism,

a woman who hears something like that and embraces it.

That's someone who's excited

about what life has to offer her in the future.

And so using that as kind of a jumping-off point,

we also realized that you very rarely see pictures of Mary laughing.

- Right. - There are so many representations

of Mary out there,

and for the most part, she looks very reverent,

and she's portrayed in more of a praying kind of thing.

And, of course, that is part of who she is.

-But“ -FRANKLIN: That was only one emotion.

Exactly. FRAN KLINI Right.

And if we're going to be looking at

the life that she led between the lines...

Yes.

I guess that's one way to look at what we're doing here is

we're kind of reading between the lines of what's given in the Bible.

That seemed like a really exciting opportunity

to show Mary as a joyful person, someone who's open to improvisation

and just ready to go where God asks her to go.

And then by contrast, it's always more interesting

when there's a certain sort of opposite complementarity in a married couple,

and so, thinking about, "Who's Joseph gonna be?

"If this is... If Mary is the one who's like,

"'Yeah, everything's gonna be fine. Don't worry, we're cool,‘

- "then Joseph might..." - Has to... Yeah.

He's the one who's super practical,

and he's gotta plan everything out.

You know, here he is cleaning up the house.

Think about it. He's a carpenter 2,000 years ago.

In this day and age, he might be an electrical engineer or something.

So this guy has an engineering mind,

and I think we... Also, you can see in the background

all of his tools are perfectly organized.

- Everything's in its right place. - Mmm-hmm.

And what's great about having Joseph start there

- is that it gives him somewhere to go. - Yeah.

It gives him his journey,

- so we can really invest in his change. - Right.

Because Mary is pretty much the same throughout the story.

she believes at the beginning,

she's very willing, and she remains willing.

Yet Joseph is the one that...

RECKARTI Yeah, in the Bible we're told,

at first when he's presented with this really strange thing

that Mary tells him,

he doesn't know what to make of it and considers divorcing Mary,

so that he can protect her reputation

and just maybe put this thing away quietly.

Of course, God tells him, "No, don't worry.

"This is done by God."

And by the end of the story, by the end of this Nativity narrative,

Joseph is a guy who has a dream

where he's warned he needs to go to Egypt

and gets up the next morning and takes the...

Who leaves everything and takes the family to Egypt.

So you can see there is a real journey there

in terms of a guy who's learning to trust God.

And that's part of what we wanted to show here.

We get to it more halfway through the movie,

but Joseph is a guy who eventually is going to be...

He planned for a perfect trip to Bethlehem for his wife.

And in the end his wife's giving birth in a barn,

and that's hard for a guy

- who really tried... - Right.

...to plan everything out.

But he has to embrace the fact that God's in charge

and that he's gotta let God take the wheel a little bit.

He does.

And I think that journey is very relatable,

and I think that we were trying, when we were doing this script

and also working on the movie...

It's hard to take these Bible characters like Mary and Joseph

and make them relatable to a modern audience.

So I think Joseph is really a key,

a lynch pin to that.

So that anyone watching the film can find their selves

in the Joseph character

and also appreciate the obedience and the commitment of Mary

- to her faith and to what God is... - To God's plan.

Yeah, to God's plan, what God has called her to do.

Yeah, and actually it's great you mentioned

that what God calls you to do

because I think that's really,

in some ways, also the theme of Bo's story.

Yes. RECKARTI Like Bo's...

You could look at Bo's story as a story about vocation,

and Bo trying to discern, "What is God calling me to do?"

Well, of course, Bo doesn't, maybe, think

in terms of what God is calling him to do.

But maybe for him, it's more in terms of the star.

That star means he's supposed to do something great.

And I think that's really true for all of us.

We're part of God's plan,

but the question is exactly how,

and I know that a lot of us are hoping that,

"Well, whatever it is, God,

"l hope it involves me being a zillionaire and being pretty famous,

"and having a really nice car."

For most of us that's not gonna be the case,

but that doesn't mean it's any less great.

And ultimately, that is the message of the Christmas story

because God chose to do something great in the most humble way possible...

Yes.

As a baby born to two peasants in a stable among the animals.

- Correct. - And so, really,

that's what we tried to build a story for Bo

that would be very parallel to that central theme of the Nativity,

which is that great things don't always look great on the outside.

They can look humble, but it doesn't mean they're any less great.

And that applies to all of us.

Whether our vocation is to be a mother, or our vocation is to...

- Be a father, to be... - Be a fifth grade teacher,

- whatever it is. - Yeah.

That's right.

- Executive. .. - Right.

Drive Uber or Lyft. It's all the same, it's the same idea.

God really seeks us where we are.

FRAN KL|NI That's right.

- That's how I would put it. - That's right.

Mary named me.

"Bo." Hmm.

That's got a nice ring to... Wait.

That lady person named you?

I said hide here...

And what's so interesting is even when you see Dave the dove,

it's these characters finding themselves where they are

and embracing that.

And embracing that moment.

I love the dynamic between Dave and Bo because there's such a friendship there,

and there's such a connection there.

And I think that that really underscores

the power of one of the themes of the film, which is friendship,

which is connection, which is community.

These animals didn't do this by themselves.

- Each animal played a part... - Yes.

But it was the collective that really helped.

And I love the dynamic between those two.

And this is another scene that we worked very hard on

to really strike the balance because as you mentioned earlier,

in scripture, Joseph is very reluctant.

And an angel visits him in a dream.

And so we were trying to find the balance of this scene

to keep it poetic, which was your vision,

yet at the same time, include enough in this moment

that would show the presence of the angel.

Right.

So I really liked this balance.

Yeah that was... "Balance" is the right word because we...

This movie was never supposed to just be the Nativity.

And there really is a danger of letting...

If you really spent too much time in

the beats of what's in the Bible, then that will...

When I say "beat," what I mean is a story beat or a scene.

Those threatened to overwhelm the story we're actually trying to tell here,

which is the animal point of view,

and so we're trying to include just enough that the audience knows,

- "Here's where we are." - Right.

But there is a bit of a presumption, I think, on our part,

that most of the audience is gonna be familiar

- with the basics of what this story is. - Yes. Right.

And that gives us room to do something like this.

Yes, I know. I love it.

A good friend of mine, Kirk Franklin,

blessed us with this song, this reimagining of We Three Kings.

- I love this song. - I love it, too.

- It's so good. - Yeah, it's so good.

And here's Tracy Morgan, and that's Tyler Perry as Cyrus.

And then there's Oprah as Deborah the camel.

And it's just these three, Tracy, Oprah and Tyler

coming together to do these voices is just an embarrassment of riches...

- RECKARTI Oh, totally. - ...and talent.

And this is also a good example of

how we tried to approach the animal point of view.

Because we all know about the Three Wise Men,

but we thought, "How are we gonna handle these three camels,

"they always have the Wise Men on their backs?

"How are you gonna literally frame the camera

"so that we're focusing on the animals and not the humans."

And the way we decided to treat...

You can see their heads are cut off

at the top of the frame.

The way I put it was,

"They wear these Wise Men like the Wise Men wear hats."

...the Son of God?

Uh-oh. Deborah's crazier than a box of rocks.

I believe the expression is...

And it works so well because,

going back to the original conceit of the script,

we really wanted to do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

- Yeah, that's right. - So it was completely

that point of view where it's like

you really, in that version, would never see the humans.

You would always stay low. So, seeing the animals

and the camels framed in that way is very much in the spirit...

- Yeah... - ...of the original

- reason why we were gonna do the script. - Right.

Yeah, it is sort of an obscure reference,

but that played, and like the play,

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, one of the pleasures

is that you're following this completely separate story

that occasionally dips into Hamlet.

That's exactly what we tried to do here,

where you recognize, "A-ha! King Herod, boom."

But then we're back out of it again.

We're just dipping in and dipping back out

with these beats that you recognize.

FRAN KL|NI Absolutely. Oh, WOW.

So talk about this because this idea...

The dogs were in the original script.

And we have Ving Rhames and Gabriel lglesias,

aka Fluffy, playing the dogs.

- Where did that come from? - We...

This character of the hunter is not in the Bible as such.

But we do know that King Herod sent his soldiers

to hunt down this newborn king.

And ultimately,

if we're trying to let this story be driven by animals,

we can't really have King Herod be the primary bad guy

who's doing all the detective work.

But at the same time, Herod can't be talking to two dogs

and telling two dogs to go do his bidding.

So the figure of this character that we called the Hunter,

he's the master of the dogs.

In some ways, I see him as somewhere halfway between

the animal world and the human world because he never speaks.

You know, there's something a little bit beast-like about him,

and he's there to kind of bridge the gap between King Herod who's,

of course, the originator of all this kind of bad guy plotting.

And then the dogs who are ultimately really our focus in this movie,

and they're the ones who have a beat of redemption at the end.

The other nice thing about it is it means that we don't have to...

We need our bad guys in this movie to be scary,

but because it's also a Christmas movie,

we want there to be room for redemption. So we could...

It allowed us to put a lot of that scary stuff on the Hunter

and let the dogs be a little bit more fun and not so mean,

so that there is room for them to be redeemed at the end.

Yes.

And that we're actually rooting for that

because we've seen they're not all bad.

Right, it's funny 'cause the dogs, their dynamic,

they reminded me of a little more of a sinister version of Abbott and Costello.

Exactly, right.

Yeah, I thought about it, there were a lot of those...

I thought about the... You remember in 101 Dalmatians,

the two bad guys in that, the two sort of bumbling fool bad guys,

and also the thieves in Home Alone.

Oh, yes.

Sort of the comedic bad guy duo.

- And yeah, that was... - The Joe Pesci...

- Yeah. Mmm-hmm. - ...approach.

Get rid of the problem.

When you look at this set,

this was one of the first sets that we actually saw.

That's right.

And to see it come to life is fantastic, and in that scene,

one of the Wise Men, the one with the gray beard was played by Joel Osteen

for those of you who are keeping count of our vocal...

- Cameos. - ...Easter eggs.

- And this is Kristin Chenoweth... - Yeah.

- ...who plays... - Abby the mouse.

Abby the mouse. And she... Her voice is just awesome.

I know, that's the... I mean, it's like...

No one has a better voice for a mouse than Kristin Chenoweth,

- and I love these sounds that she makes. - Yes.

These little squealy...

It's like she's hitting a frequency that I think only dogs can hear.

- Right. - You know what I mean?

Right, and I love Gabriel's...

- I just love this scene. - Yeah, this whole scene...

- It's so good. - And it's just this image

of a mouse saying, "Excuse me, I'm not a rat."

- VVhile she's... - "I'm a pygmy jerboa."

So, yeah, and jerboas are actually amazing creatures.

This is... It's a real desert animal.

And I personally find them really cute.

You can search them on YouTube and find videos of these things.

But they're really remarkable creatures that actually don't need to drink water.

They literally generate water from the dry seeds that they eat.

And so, anyway, that's all to say I love these animals,

and I'm glad that I finally get to put them in a movie.

See, attention to detail. I love it.

And Ving Rhames, come on, just the quintessential

bad guy voice. And he's so good.

Yes, quintessential bad guy voice, but at the same time,

when we talked to him about

why he wanted to be involved in this movie,

it was because

he wanted to do something that he could share with his family.

Although this is a guy

that we all associate with all these kind of R-rated action movies...

- Tough, yeah. - ...and tough things,

this is a guy who like dearly loves his children

and wants to do something that...

It's sort of a change of pace for him in a good way.

Yeah, that was one of the reasons why Tyler Perry wanted to do it.

He has a son and he...

His faith is very important to him, and he loved the Nativity story.

But in the opportunity to do the animated version,

through the animal's point of view, he thought,

"Wow! This'll be a great thing to share with my son."

Right. It's a way to make this...

We've all heard this story so many times,

and this is a way to make it fresh

and make it feel like you're almost hearing it for the first time.

Because the characters, whose eyes we're looking at it from,

have a totally new point of view on it that we've never heard before.

Absolutely and this is, again,

one of those scenes where just the technical ability here

and what you've done, I just always admire.

Mary's feet in the water,

the shadows coming through part...

She's in the shadows, but the other part is in the light.

It's just a very beautiful scene.

Actually that image of Mary with her feet in the pail of water,

that came directly from a drawing done by our character designer, David Colman,

and part of the character design process is not only figuring out

what their face is gonna look like, but also how do they use their body

and what positions are they in.

And he did this just amazingly evocative sketch of Mary

with her feet in a bucket of water with her veil wrapped around her head

like she was having a headache.

Because pregnancy's hard and it was...

I just thought that is such a humanizing image of Mary

that we've never seen before.

And so I was very glad that we could get that in the movie.

I love it.

Well, looks like you got me.

Come here!

Ha-ha!

And with the comedy,

what I appreciate about the balance of what we were able to strike is,

there are broad comedic moments,

but they all are based in character...

- Yeah, right. - ...and in characterization,

and why was that important to you?

Right, because this whole scene,

there's a lot of slapstick pratfalls in this sequence,

but it's all based on building up this rivalry

between Joseph and Bo, which is ultimately serving the story.

It's not just there for laughs.

This is ultimately there because both Joseph and Bo

are going to have to sort of get over their differences

in order to both work together to help Mary.

The thing that unites them is that they both love Mary very deeply.

But, then the difference is, of course,

they sort of resent each other in different ways.

And I guess, yeah,

we found that to be like a very heartfelt thing

about this story was that two guys sort of find what they have in common,

again, looking ahead to the middle of the movie

when Bo tells Joseph, "Hey, man, you gotta go check on your wife."

- Right. - "Leave all this stuff here.

"You gotta focus on what's important."

Yeah.

And it's interesting to see how

their dynamic evolves over the course of the story

and they both come to realize that they actually need one another.

This sequence, this is one of my favorite sequences in the movie.

This is when the dogs burst in to investigate,

and this is a good example of the process

because now our head of story,

Louie del Carmen, was working on this sequence with Karina McBeth,

and we were trying to find a way to make this sequence more fun.

And they hit on this idea of the dance of the royal dove.

And it was... That's all it was. It was just an idea.

It was a few drawings of a dancing bird.

And it seemed really promising.

But it didn't really come to life

until we presented this idea to Keegan-Michael Key,

and it was just so amorphous.

I remember in that session, I was like, "Okay, look, Keegan,

"l don't know what to tell you, but at this part,

"what we need is we need Dave to start singing,

"and he's gonna dance, and so, I don't know,

"can you like improvise something like that?"

And he was like, "Yeah, I think I got something.

"Just give me a sec."

And he proceeded to do two and a half minutes straight

of this incredible scat singing,

and everyone in there was holding their breath

because they did not wanna ruin the take.

And what he said was that he and Jordan Peele

used to kind of scat like that backstage on Key and Peele...

ls that right? RECKARTI ...and that

he was glad to finally be able to put it in a movie.

Oh, my goodness.

And in this scene, this dancing,

his improv right here and the scat,

it's like this scene kills with kids.

I guess... ls "kill" the right word?

This scene performed so well with kids.

It was in our teaser trailer. It's in our trailer.

When we screened the film,

this is one of the standout moments that kids really respond to and love.

And that's the beautiful thing about animation is that

it didn't start out as good as it turned out

because then the next stage, of course,

is that then having gotten Keegan's vocal performance, then an animator

- has to... - Now you gotta go match that.

And there's that great shot where Dave the dove

is kind of doing this dainty little catwalk towards the camera.

There is video reference of an animator named Kyle Moy doing that.

He was one of our animators up at Cinesite.

And, yeah, that's... The combination of all these different artists

is what ultimately leads to something that functions that well.

And it's, yeah... This is such a collaborative process,

and it's so satisfying when something comes together

that way with the contribution of so many different people.

And it's interesting because the process behind the scenes mirrors

the story in front of the camera, which is,

it really does take everyone working together in order for

the story to progress and for the heroes to be victorious,

and then behind the scenes,

this being my first animated film,

it was a surprise to me

how much collaboration is required on all fronts

from everyone involved in the story on every single sequence.

And what people don't always realize is that

when you see one sequence of animation,

there are so many different people...

From the person doing the lighting to yourself, the director,

to the painters, to the animators, to the performance artists,

to the vocal talent that have to come together.

Yeah, it's funny, we haven't talked about it yet,

but just looking in the background of this,

you can see this house with the sort of yellow and red painting,

and then ultimately in a second we're gonna cut wide

and see all of the buildings in town, and it's the background,

so it's easy to ignore it, but everything you see on screen

had to be designed and was designed by painters whose really...

Our task in this was to find a way to make a Biblical movie

that was not just shades of brown.

Because we've seen the Bible that way too many times.

And this is a movie with a lot of joy in it and excitement and liveliness.

So, you could see these yellow wildflowers,

a lot of lush greens.

And, of course, painting the sides of buildings,

which really, at least from our research we found,

was a custom that the ancient Romans would do.

So, even though we're maybe used to thinking of ancient Rome

as just being all white marble and sort of white marble statues,

in reality it was a lot more colorful than that.

And what's interesting, though,

is then how that influence made its way into Israel,

into Jerusalem, which is fascinating

because I've never seen... We've never seen this area of the world

and our history rendered with so much vibrancy.

Yeah, it's one of the things...

So many of the live-action films set in the Holy Land

take their cue from the fact that

a lot of these buildings are in ruins now.

Yes.

Of course, they weren't in ruins 2,000 years ago.

They all had a fresh coat of paint.

Everything was shiny and new.

Not everything, of course, but people were living in it.

It was... And so, really, it should have

the feel of a village that's currently being lived in

more than anything with sort of a patent of historical age on it.

Right, which I love, having been to the Holy Land before.

It's an incredible experience, and so the opportunity to render it

in an animated way was a great one.

And I love the way that it looks, and it just...

We see it in a different lens that we've never seen before,

and I think that was also one of the keys to making the story feel modern.

- This is a period piece... - Right.

...yet you don't feel that.

You feel like you're in a world that you can access that has texture,

that has light, that is a world you wanna be in.

- RECKARTI Yeah. - And I love that dynamic Of it.

And then this is an awesome...

Yeah, I wanted to talk about this scene.

This is where we introduce Ruth who's voiced by Aidy Bryant.

And, yeah, there were so many...

Again, this is one of those pieces where

in storyboards this scene was pretty funny.

But then when the animator got in here and gave us expressions like that on Bo,

the comedy quotient just really jumped.

And it's also really cute because ultimately

- Ruth's heart is in such a good place. - Yes.

She just really wants a friend. She's a sheep without a flock.

- And that's really hard for a sheep. - Yes.

Because sheep are used to being surrounded by friends.

And so when she's alone,

she's just really not gonna let go of those friends

that she finds along the way.

No, not at all.

And I love the joke about the personal space.

- RECKARTI Yeah, right. {FRANKLIN LAUGHS)

You gotta think, if you're a sheep, you don't know.

FRAN KL|NI Yeah, totally.

And also what I love about this sequence is the animation of Bo's ears.

And they really come to life, and even the moment

when his ears were covering his eyes,

there's such a great opportunity with animation

to use so many different things, too.

Yeah, there's the ears, the tail.

And then with quadrupeds, with four-legged animals,

there's different ways that they can move.

They can bound up and down if they're feeling joy.

They can sort of trudge, they can gallop.

So you can get a lot of emotion using the whole body.

- Yes. - And see those,

- Bo's ears just popped up. - Yep.

"Where is Dave?"

I love this.

Now that's another comic beat

which we talked a lot about just trying to find the right tone for the comedy,

so that it would still feel fresh

but not irreverent or out of place for the story.

Right. And to me, I... Maybe it's just me,

but I'm a real sucker for taking the character that deserves it

and then just pummeling him.

I think there's probably like 16 times

that Dave gets squashed or smashed in this movie.

And the truth is, I think it's funny because he kind of deserves it.

Because he's occasionally a little bit of a jerk.

So, you know?

Yes, and that's another moment the audience loves.

And I love this dynamic here

where you have just the friendship building.

And Dave could not tolerate Ruth.

He's like, "No, we don't need her."

But interestingly enough, she is needed and...

Well, yeah, and that's where we end up.

Right? We start out with this rivalry.

And at first, it seems competitive, but then at the end of the movie,

Dave and Ruth are really working together to help save the day.

Yes.

- Felix, come on. - Shouldn't we be sneaking out?

Here are the camels, again,

and Tracy Morgan just does a fantastic job

of adding so much humor,

and then Tyler does a great job of playing the...

He's snobby basically.

Snobby, there you go, thank you.

That little... I just wanna say that guard falling down

is one of my favorite bits of animation in this whole movie.

That's done by Jason Ryan who's a many-year veteran of animation.

It's just so beautifully timed with that finger up in the air

and then, clunk, when he hits the ground.

Yeah, and Oprah does a great job of delivering that line.

RECKARTI Yes.

And this is actually one of my favorite sequences here,

so creative.

RECKARTI This, yeah, it's... ltjust is.

- Almost surrealistic. - Yeah.

It's completely absurd.

And this came from storyboard, all these...

Everything you see on screen

starts in the storyboard stage, and when this gag was first boarded,

I thought, "Okay, good luck to them.

"We'll see how they're gonna actually do it."

I thought they'd have to cheat by creating a 2D element,

a two-dimensional element or something like that.

But actually that shadow is literally created

by just shaping those camel bodies into that shape.

Wow. They did such a good job.

See, there's the Joel Osteen character on the right.

And I love... We have the Laker fans represented here.

- That's true. - And then we have the Warrior fans

represented on the left. I'm from the Bay area,

- so I'm a big Golden State Warriors fan. - Mmm-hmm.

This sequence, I also really like just because it's so unique.

The idea of putting the flowers here

and then creating business around the flower

and the joke, and not only just the joke,

but also a story point to show,

"Oh, my goodness, this guy is actually much more sinister than we thought

"because of what he does to the flower."

Very, very detailed.

Yeah, and so that's kind of the trick

that we were exploring here is,

"What if it was really the camels that

"clued into the fact that Herod was up to no good?"

Mmm-hmm.

So it was one of those things that helps us contrast the difference

between the human point of view and the animal point of view.

Yes.

Mary-

Are you sure you don't want to sit in the cart?

It's worth commenting on the score here written by John Paesano.

What John was going for is

what we were going for throughout the movie,

which was something that gave us the flavor

of kind of a time and place.

There's a little bit of presence

of what we called the ethnic wind instruments,

which are sort of not what you'd normally have

in your big orchestra to give it a sense of place,

but at the same time,

something really classical and universal

and timeless that just feels like a big epic film score.

And a big inspiration for us was

the big Biblical epics of the mid-20th century.

Ben Hur and Jesus of Nazareth,

The Greatest Story Ever Told, and all those big historical epics,

The Ten Commandments.

And John does an awesome job

of taking those ideas and references, but yet modernizing them.

And it really makes the story feel much bigger.

Bigger and more epic.

And like an epic journey. Absolutely.

An epic journey that also has animals doing charades.

Which I love, this is another one of my favorite sequences.

But you gotta look at Dave in this shot.

That's the best part of this shot.

I always wonder how many in the audience

are actually looking at Dave when Ruth is doing her dog impression,

but he is hilarious.

- Probably very few. - Yeah, it's great.

I love it.

But the challenge of Dave is that Dave was small.

And so there was a challenge in some of these scenes

to make sure that we could see his expression.

Right, that's true. Yeah, and at the same time,

we had to not make him look like a seagull

by just blowing him up that big.

So, yeah, it was...

We adjusted a few shots after we saw

how small he was to make sure that he was gonna

- be featured properly. - Yes.

Yeah, it's one of those things about an animal movie is that

you can have two best friends, one of which is

- a tenth the size of his best friend. - Right.

Yeah, they've been following us since we came down the cliff.

Couldn't you have pointed that out sooner?

Oh, no. They followed us right to her.

Well, why don't we hide...

So this big set piece coming up here,

we knew we wanted to do

an action set piece at a watering hole, essentially a well.

We would treat it like sort of

a highway rest stop but from 2,000 years ago.

And this whole sequence was boarded by Stephan Franck,

who's an animation director at Sony Pictures Animation.

He sort of did the first draft on it, and we were fine from there.

But so many of these beats, really,

from the very first draft that he did stuck with us.

He's really the guy that gave structure to this scene.

But then you've got little things like this gag, which I love.

This came out of a story... Sort of a comedy brainstorm meeting.

I love this guy.

FRAN KL|NI It's great.

It just underscores that this guy's not to be messed with.

And also there's just so many little things

that go into making sure that the story

never loses energy, never loses tension,

and so that's a great moment of comedy and tension and character, too.

Right. It's like you want some comedy,

but you don't want the comedy to deflate the scene.

Yes. RECKARTI Yeah.

And that's where, really, all of the tools available to us

come into play, in particular the music.

The music but also the camera work and the way that we frame these things

and the way that the editing is paced.

Yes.

And what I love about this sequence, it's just... I love it.

I love...

Aidy Bryant does such an awesome job,

and you get a chance to see these animals do their best to save Mary

without Mary really being able to understand

what it is that they're trying to do.

Yeah, that was another thing in crafting all these sequences

that we had to negotiate, because the fact that none of...

That there's no mention of the Hunter or his dogs in the Bible meant that

somehow we're gonna have to need Mary and Joseph to be totally in the dark,

oblivious about the fact that this guy's chasing them.

The animals can know

because the animals ultimately weren't part of writing the Bible.

- So... - Right.

But as, yeah... So it was kind of this tricky thing

of how do you keep Mary and Joseph involved in the story

but also keep them in the dark.

And it works really well.

Right, because ultimately, then,

Joseph doesn't understand why Bo is doing this.

Right.

And it helps create the misunderstanding that creates more conflict for them.

Right.

And this is kind of your Rube Goldberg...

Rube Goldberg machine, yeah.

Yeah, so Bo has a talent for this sort of thing,

these crazy ideas that go badly wrong

until at the end they actually work.

Yes. RECKARTI You know?

FRAN KL|NI Exactly.

Did you do this?

And what I love about this dynamic, and I think it rings true with

when you have pets or you have animals, there is this communication.

You're always constantly trying...

They're trying to communicate to us, and we're trying to communicate to them.

And then we're trying to understand what they're saying,

and they're trying to understand what we're saying.

And so I do think a sequence like this brings the truth of that dynamic

to life in a very entertaining way.

RECKARTI Yes.

And he's just this... I love it.

Gabriel lglesias is just... His delivery is just spot on.

- RECKARTI Yeah. - You know?

He's really fun to work with.

Oh, yeah.

That's one of the great things that every artist, every actor

that brought their voice to the movie

completely threw themselves in the story.

Yeah, and actually it's... We haven't talked

about Zachary Levi who plays Joseph or Gina Rodriguez who plays Mary.

Both of them were really amazing voice artists.

As we've mentioned,

that's when the characters really come to life

and acquire some kind of specificity.

Zachary Levi, in particular,

would always, kind of, craft these lines

that we'd written in a very specific individual way

so that Joseph would feel like a specific guy, not just...

Yes.

And then what Gina Rodriguez brought to Mary

was part of what we were talking about where

Mary would feel contemporary

and would feel like someone that you know, someone familiar.

She's not playing Mary like some distant Holy person.

She's just playing her like a teenage...

Well, teen, however old she was, young woman anyway,

who has a big struggle.

And that struggle is one that through this medium

you can really see it in a different way.

Through animation and through this story,

you're able to really understand her struggle.

And I do think that Gina Rodriguez did an awesome job of bringing Mary to life

and giving her so much heart and humor and love.

And Zachary's performance, he does do such a good job

of grounding the heart of Joseph and grounding the reality

that he is tasked with doing something that he feels inadequate to do.

Right.

And Zachary does a really fantastic job of communicating that

through how he reads the lines

and how he brings Joseph's story to life.

And the Hunter is back. You can't keep a good villain down.

RECKARTI No.

What was the process of putting the Hunter together?

Because he is clearly much larger than any other human in the story.

Right, part of our design thing was what I mentioned earlier,

was the idea that this guy's

somewhere halfway between the animal and the human world.

And so in order to communicate that, we gave him this fur cape.

He's got a bracer on his wrist that's made of alligator hide.

- It's got these alligator spikes. - Right.

And then even his armor could have been,

sort of, like a plate mail,

but actually it's what's called scale mail,

which gives him also a little bit of a reptilian look.

So a combination of alligator, reptile and wolf fur,

which as far as we know could have been one of his previous dogs.

- Right. Or a meal, so to speak. - Yeah.

The music in the film is such an important character,

and this song, His Eye is on the Sparrow, is just

a very, very famous and well-known gospel/Christian song

and performed by the Casting Crowns, which did a...

They did a phenomenal job on this rendition, too.

And it's so cinematic, the singing,

not only the singing, but also the orchestration behind it.

Ron Fair.

That's right, Ron Fair was the producer of our album.

Yes, he did a really incredible job

of cinematically bringing these songs to life

in a way that really fit with the movie.

That's the key thing for me because too often you see movies

where there's a song that feels shoehorned in,

and what I really wanted to do,

given that we also wanted to do a big Christmas album along with the movie,

I just wanted to make sure they really worked together.

And I think, earlier we saw the part where Joseph's looking at Mary.

He's not sure. That's the perfect moment for What Child is This?

And we... That song really actually helps tell the story.

It's not just there for music.

It's there to help us tell the story

and tell us what's going on in his head, "What child is this?"

And then here as well, "Why should I feel discouraged?"

As Bo, in theory, he's walking towards the thing

that's really the joy of his heart, he thinks, it's really the goal.

But somewhere...

Which is following the royal caravan.

The royal caravan, but somewhere deep down,

he knows, "You know what? This is not..."

- "Something's not right." - Yeah.

Something's not right. It's not what he's supposed to do.

And I think that struggle is so relatable.

When you think you want something,

but there's something inside you that says,

"Mmm, maybe I'm supposed to do something else,"

and Bo really listens to that and follows the star

and follows what's in his heart, and as a result,

it ultimately leads him on the journey he needs to be on,

even though it may be different than the journey he wants to be on.

RECKARTI Yes.

And I think this scene is also a great scene

that underscores the value and the power of friendship.

Because this is where Dave explains for the first time like,

"l could have done it already. I can fly.

"But the whole point wasn't me doing it by myself,

"l wanted us to do it together."

And so really Dave is saying the same thing that Bo is saying,

which is that,

you could do something really great,

but if you don't have people that you love around you,

- then what's the value in it? - Yes.

That's why Dave's not going to leave Bo,

and that's why Bo is not going to leave Mary

because ultimately that relationship is more important than what you're doing.

Yes, there's an old Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams movie

where the famous line is,

"What good is success if you have no one to share it with?"

- That's right. - And that's apropos.

That's exactly right.

And then, with the animation here and the lighting...

The lighting tells the story so much in this film,

and so here are...

Darkness is falling, the mist is starting to rise,

things in the movie are not going well,

and the environment reflects that.

And this is all in service of giving Joseph,

really, the turning point for his arc, where all is lost for Joseph.

Joseph is a guy who this whole time's been fighting to make this trip work,

to make this trip work for Mary, for his wife who's pregnant,

and the cart is breaking.

All of the stuff has fallen apart.

Mary's not happy with him for kicking the donkey out.

And, ultimately, in that moment of desperation,

he turns to God and asks for help,

and help comes in the form of not some amazing miracle

but actually in the form of something humble,

that same donkey that he kicked out,

and oftentimes that's how prayers are answered.

It's not with some lightning bolt that solves your problems,

it's just more of a flash of awareness of what you already have around you.

FRAN KL|NI Absolutely.

And we really wanted to embrace prayer in this movie

in a way that felt organic to the story and not be afraid of showing

Joseph and our characters in moments of great need

and in that need resorting to prayer and calling out to God.

And it was really important to include that in the story,

and even though we're telling the story in a new way,

those were integral parts of the story that we felt were necessary to preserve.

Well, because God is never exactly seen in this movie,

but His presence is felt by the way the characters relate to Him.

Yeah.

I'm a sheep.

Thank you for coming back.

Coming up here, is what you can call Mary's low point,

where Mary gets scared about what's coming, and now this...

The thinking behind this is a little bit out of order

in terms of how the story goes,

but of course, down the road, in the real Biblical Nativity story,

Mary's going to take Baby Jesus after he's born to the temple and present him,

and she's told by... She meets Simeon and Anna in that scene.

And that's where she's told that

this child of yours is going to be a stumbling block,

and he's going to be a sign of contradiction,

and I think what's key about that

is that if God chose to use these figures to tell this to Mary,

it's something that Mary needed to hear,

and I think that's what I'm trying to represent,

I think, here with this scene, is that Mary may not...

She accepted God's invitation, but that doesn't mean

she fully knew what was coming, at least not at first,

and I think here what we're trying to show is that

Mary's having this intuition that the road ahead may be painful,

and ultimately does lead to the cross, you know?

There is a lot of joy in it, but there's also a lot of sorrow,

and that's something

that she really does embrace in the Bible story,

and given the sort of chronology of this movie,

the only place to put it, really, was here.

Was here, and this is one of the most emotional scenes

in the movie for me,

to see the real emotion of Mary and her expressing her fear

yet still having the courage to push through it.

Definitely.

And this song that is now playing is an original song

by Mariah Carey and Marc Shaiman, The Star,

and Mariah's contribution to the film is just very, very personal,

and I'll never forget going to the studio

with her watching some of the scenes,

and then within 48 hours,

- she came back. - No kidding.

Forty eight hours, she came...

Her and Mark Shaman, 48 hours, wrote this song,

and it was so interesting because it's a mix

of really articulating what's happening in the movie

and doubt and fear

but still wanting to follow the star and acknowledging that God is there,

yet we still have to follow what we hear,

no matter what anxiety or frustration or conflict we may face.

Right. That's what just really worked for me about this song

is how well it fits with the story

we're trying to tell at this point.

Just thunder and rain, and that even

in the darkest of circumstances there's that beam of light.

Yes.

And I think it's so anthemic to anyone watching and anyone listening

that, similar to Bo,

Bo just felt like, "You know what, I have to follow what I feel,

"even though it goes against the facts,"

and I think that this song does a great job of doing that, and she has...

She's a legend,

and for us to be blessed with her was pretty amazing.

It was fantastic.

And that sequence, that looking out over Bethlehem,

one of my favorite artistic moments in the film, so beautiful.

Yeah, it's really one of those iconic things,

that is one of the things we've seen a million times, but I think,

yeah, the goal here was to kind of

finally have this connection point of, boom,

Mary's riding the donkey,

they're cresting over the hill to Bethlehem,

that's what you think of as the O Little Town of Bethlehem moment,

and so it's one of those little beats that I think you get a little

sort of boost of emotion when you really recognize, "Ah, we're here."

FRAN KL|NI Yes, definitely,

and this sequence is the famous "No room at an inn."

Yeah, but what I think is really cool

about the way we handled it here

is that everyone thinks, "Oh, we're done, movie's over.

"We got to Bethlehem, they're at the inn."

No one knows necessarily that this whole story is going to end in a stable.

Correct.

And that's one of the cool things about doing it

from the animal point of view is that we can

- explore what went wrong. - Yes.

Bo disappeared in a moment of need,

Mary and Joseph are left without any money,

without any stuff.

The inns are full, but they're also just desperate,

and all of these pieces kind of stack on each other

to make the whole thing a lot more stressful.

Yes, and seeing it in this way,

I think, again, just shows us the story of...

I've heard the, "No room at an inn" part of the story my whole life,

but never had I looked at it like this.

Never had I really thought about the fear of, "Where are we going to go?"

And the desperation of, "What are we going to do?"

And then when you see the animals

express the desire to want to help, but they aren't sure what to do,

it really brings this moment to a reality

I had never embraced before doing the film.

Yeah, and so what I love about this sequence here

is just that this is where finally all the threads of the story converge.

We've got Bo and the miller having their sort of interaction there,

Mary and Joseph are stressed out, Ruth and Dave,

and then meanwhile the dogs are arriving,

also the Three Wise Men are arriving.

Everything is finally converging in Bethlehem right here in this scene.

Yes.

And, yeah, that tells us, "Here we are in Act Ill,

"everything's coming together, and let's see what happens."

You know, this joke about Bethle-ham,

it's, sort of, based in reality because

so many of our sessions with voice artists,

the voice artists would say "Beth|e-ham," and I would have to...

"BethIe-hem."

I would very pedantically get on the mic and say, "Actually,

"can we try that again, and can you say 'Bethle-hem' this time?"

So, actually I'm Cyrus in this scene.

Right. It's like, "Why not use it?"

And I love this joke,

of just the plebeians and the hats and...

Thinking this guy's a king.

Yeah, correct.

Run for your life!

- Run like the wind! - Will you cut that out?

And what's interesting is that,

with someone like Tracy Morgan, who does so much improv,

that really, really helped bring so much of these sequences to life.

Definitely, yeah.

Yeah, we thought we knew the character, and then we cast Tracy Morgan,

and then we really knew who the character was.

And the amazing thing about Tracy Morgan

is that he can make a line funny, even if it's not funny on paper.

If it's not, that's right.

It's funny when his voice... It comes out of his voice, you know?

FRAN KL|NI That's right.

And I love the idea of the callback to the miller.

This was really unexpected, and of course he gets to the location,

he puts them in the location that ultimately history knows.

Right.

Yet, it's so much fun to see how we get to the manger

in a way that has never been seen before, the stable.

Yeah, Bo's low point turns out to be really his destination.

Correct.

The miller, played by Phil Morris.

Yeah.

It's fine.

And maybe there's a lesson here for us all, where he thinks,

"I'm stuck, God, this is not where I want to be."

It turns out, "No, this is exactly where I want you to be."

And it's exactly where he needs to be.

Right.

And this is another moment that I just find so endearing

where we have Bo emulate prayer, because he's seen it with Mary,

and he's seen it with Joseph,

and this is just such a cute moment to me.

RECKARTI Yeah, it is.

Where he's trying to put his hooves together, and he calls out,

and then his prayers get answered,

but again, in a way that he never expected.

Yeah, it was another really great example

of how Steven Yeun's really great performance of that prayer,

which is human, it's not a preachy prayer.

It's very innocent and stumbling and stuff,

and then taking that, and an animator named Gabriel Bégin

is the one that animated it, and really, I think, brought him to life

in a way that really was true to everything

that Steven was doing in the vocal performance.

Yeah, and we have such incredible actors

who brought the stable animals to life.

We have Anthony Anderson playing Zach the goat,

Kelly Clarkson playing Leah the horse,

and Patricia Heaton playing Edith the cow.

And Zach was one of the first characters that we actually saw,

going way back to... We were doing the character development...

That's true.

Zach was one of the first ones that we saw very, very early.

It's one of those things where you can just take so much inspiration

from the way these animals naturally look,

and actually all three characters are great examples of that

because cows, the way they chew their cud,

it just reminded me of the way people chew gum.

So, we thought, "Okay, maybe Edith the cow is this sort of bored,

"gum-chewing, cud-chewing character, and then Zach..."

Goats have really crazy looking eyes,

and so we thought,

"What if we actually have Zach's eyes..."

Going in different directions.

Exactly, yeah, and then, of course...

And it's so fun to see him come to life.

Horses are gorgeous animals, and we thought,

you know, especially after casting Kelly Clarkson,

"Wouldn't it be fun if she was like almost the teenage older sister

"who's always preening and fawning over herself?"

Right.

If she had a phone, she'd be taking the selfies all the time.

Exactly, yeah.

And I love these runs

that we were able to get Kelly to do, they're the best.

RECKARTI I know, it was like,

"Okay, Kelly, then you're supposed to do a run,"

and she did it, and everyone was floored.

She was like, "Do you guys want another one?" It's like, "Uh, sure."

"Yes."

In this particular scene, we talked a lot about Bo being active

and Bo putting it together that, "Oh, the star is here.

"This is where it's led me.

"Oh, now I understand why,"

and so his desire to escape as he understands

that now he has to go get Mary and Joseph

and bring them here.

Just as we're leaving this scene, something's occurring to me,

talk about the sound design of the movie,

because that's a phase that maybe a lot of people don't think about.

There's just a really cool example of sound design.

Our sound designer, Tim Chau, recorded Mahjong tiles

clacking against each other for Bo's hooves

clacking against each other when he's trying to pray.

And it's a really cool job, actually, doing the sound design

because it's all sorts of things like that where

the sound of one thing actually sounds like a totally different thing

- when it's put up to picture. - Absolutely,

and those sounds are what bring the story to life.

And what bring you into the environment

because if something is off in the sound, you know it.

And if it's not, it's invisible.

If it's not, it's invisible.

Right, and especially in an animated film.

In a live-action film, you have microphones there on set,

and you're actually recording the sounds that are happening in real life.

Of course, all of this is created in a computer, so there are no sounds.

Every sound you hear has to be recorded

and chosen and edited by someone whose job that is,

so this whole world and its sound is built from scratch.

Which makes it that much more profound

and that much more powerful to do that.

Well, you could really design it.

Yes.

- It's all custom. - Yes.

Anybody!

Oh, look, a flock of sheep.

That kind of looks like my... Oh.

We wrote that line specifically for Aidy.

We wrote, "Oh, that kind of looks like my F-L-O-O-O-O-0" on the script,

because we knew that just from her work on Saturday Night Live

that she's so good with the...

Kind of freaking out stuff.

And she does such a good job of bringing that to life.

And this is also... When you go back to the Bible story,

one of the things that we were looking to do was to make sure

that the full story was represented, and so this moment is important.

This moment when the sheep and the shepherd get the visitation,

that's a big part of the Bible story.

Right, and the fun is presenting it in our own...

- That's right. - Sort of with our twist.

That's right, exactly, and it gives Ruth her heroic moment.

Right, it's like we all knew the angels appeared to the shepherds,

but what you didn't know is that that was the assist that Ruth really needed

- to get her flock to help. - That's right.

That's right.

One thing you can see in this scene

is the way that we're presenting the angel, which,

because this is an animated version of the Nativity,

it seemed like an opportunity to do

something really different with the angel,

and the first thoughts were like,

the scene not too far off from this is the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio,

the idea of something magical coming down into the house with Mary,

and using that as a jumping-off point and really going off some sketches

that were done by our story artist, Art Hernandez,

we came up with this idea of an angel that

is kind of hard for your eyes to focus on.

It's almost like there's someone in the room with you,

but your eyes are not built to actually see this person.

But ultimately the goal being to make it feel magical,

more than, let's say, Biblical.

Please, God, help us.

Mary! Joseph!

Traditionally, we always, in a Christmas pageant,

it's an innkeeper who says, "Oh, you can come use my stable,"

but here we're exploring the idea of what if they just really thought,

"Okay, we're stuck.

"We might be having this baby on the streets,"

and what's great about that is that it means that our animals,

ultimately, can be the ones who invite Mary and Joseph into their space

because Mary and Joseph

didn't give birth to the baby in the worst possible place.

It wasn't a trash heap... It was just a home that belonged to animals,

and because this story is from the animals' point of view,

it's worth pointing out that

that's actually a sign of hospitality.

And that there's a certain nobility that's conferred on the animals

by the fact that they were the ones who were able to welcome Mary and Joseph.

And it's sacrifice.

It's really a sacrifice and out of their love and kindness.

Mmm-hmm.

And this sequence was actually very difficult to do

because so much of it takes place... It's all at night,

so still trying to keep it inviting, entertaining.

You've got tobe able to see what's happening.

Correct.

I love this coming up,

so this shot here where the dogs just look so scary.

- With the red eyes. - The red eyes,

and also the teeth are glowing a little bit,

and that was really a great effect that Cinesite pulled off,

ultimately, based on some storyboards by Denise Koyama,

where she drew it like that, and all of us were like, "Whoa, that's scary."

So it's one of those things

where an idea comes in, and you just...

Wherever the idea comes from, it rises to the top

- and ultimately makes it into the movie. - Absolutely.

Joseph.

It's time.

It's the moment where Joseph just lets go

and says, "Okay, this is what we're doing."

And accepts the moment and says, "Okay, we can do it."

It may not have been the ideal situation,

but it's better than the other options.

And of course here, all of the odds are stacked against Bo,

and this is really where the character becomes the hero that he's been

building up to this whole time,

because he's been up against these dogs earlier in the movie and was hiding.

Yes. RECKARTI You know?

And now here's a moment where he puts his life on the line,

puts himself between Mary and the dogs.

And this kind of reminds me of an old Western,

where the town has all gone indoors.

It's deserted.

The leaves are blowing,

and our hero and the villains are getting ready to square off.

Definitely.

Yeah, that was definitely part of the goal for the look.

Ultimately, the Hunter shows up,

like this little remote figure down the street,

just like an old gunslinger would.

You're mine!

It might be interesting to talk about figuring out exactly

where to put the dial for how scary the Hunter could be

because there was a point where John Paesano had scored

some really scary-sounding male choir going...

Like, "Wait a minute, too heavy."

RECKARTI And it was...

All the kids are going to be running out of the theater.

So, scary, yes, but not completely terrifying and traumatizing.

That's right. But one thing to note,

which is a very important detail,

the Hunter has taken the garment of Mary...

That's right. It was the bandage

that Mary put on Bo's leg that flew away.

He found it along his sort ofjourney searching for them,

and then now that's what he sets on fire for his torch.

Yes, and so that, Mary's bandage,

subtly plays a very important part

in the movie because it's also when Bo sees the bandage flying in the air,

it's what reminds him of what's really important.

So that awesome battle cry you just heard

is straight out of Oprah's mouth.

We said, "Okay, Oprah, here we need a battle cry, what do you have for us?"

And she was silent for like 30 seconds and then suddenly did that,

and we were like, "Oh, wow! That's it. That's the one!"

She went to town on that. It was great, absolutely great,

and she really had so much fun doing the part and brings so much life...

That was what really impressed me.

I was just so glad that she was so game,

because she could have come in and sort of

been skeptical about what we wanted to do there,

but she just was so generous with us and gave us everything we asked for.

Yes, and the movie really benefits because of it.

And in this scene, I really appreciate

because Bo shows such humanity here.

Thatjust because they have made...

These animals have made a bad choice, they're not bad inherently.

Right, and they're characters in need.

When Bo sees them dangling off the cliff,

they're not so scary anymore, in fact, they need someone to help them.

And here's Bo, sacrificially,

going to help the very ones that have looked to destroy him.

And using the skills that he's acquired over the movie,

because at the beginning,

we get the sense that Bo's got a fear of heights,

but Ruth teaches him how to climb,

and now he uses those skills to save the dogs,

with the help of the camels.

The collars are broken off, so really everyone works together

to open a path for these dogs and their redemption,

but they can only open the door.

It's really the dogs that have to choose

- what's ahead of them. - The path they want to go on.

We're bad dogs.

You don't have to be.

You're free now.

That's really what that chain represented.

The chain represented, in some ways, being enslaved by the forces of evil,

and now that those chains are broken, they have a choice.

And I think that was so important,

and one of the reasons why we wanted to do that

is it's so important to show that sometimes we just look at people

who make bad choices as inherently bad,

but there are sometimes circumstances

from which those bad choices are created,

but under different circumstances,

the real humanity and the goodness in someone can come out,

and it was important to not just treat the dogs as bad,

but they were under duress.

They were in prison, and as a result,

they were making the choice under duress.

But hopefully, with freedom, they might make a different choice.

And then now here is the...

With this great O Holy Night sung by Yolanda Adams,

who's a real legend of gospel music,

and actually this track is extended beyond what you see in the movie,

so I hope that you can all hear it on the album

where it sort of turns into this really cool gospel breakdown at the end.

- Yeah, she takes it to church. - But there's no other song

than O Holy Night for this ending beat, it'sjust so...

It sort of conveys the power of the moment and the intimacy of it.

And that moment when she sings "Fall on your knees..."

Oh, my goodness, it just really brings me to tears when you...

You'll see how all the animals and everyone

are in line with the lyrics of the song.

I think this is so many people's favorite Christmas carol.

I know it's a lot of my aunts' favorite Christmas carol,

they always try to hit the high note after having a few too many eggnogs,

it never quite sounds as good as Yolanda Adams.

My aunts do the same thing.

One of my aunts used to... Aunt Donna, she used to be able to hit it.

She can't hit it anymore, but there were days that she'd get that note.

...this is Mary and Joseph.

And that's their new baby.

The flock is growing.

And here come the dogs.

We were trying to use the visuals to tell the story here.

The eyes are glowing red, just 'cause that's how dogs work at night,

but it doesn't mean... Just 'cause they look scary,

it doesn't mean that's what's inside.

Yeah, and I love how Rufus and Thaddeus come in at this moment,

and they want to be a part of it.

Yeah, and this thing from Tracy Morgan is great, too, because

it's also reasonable to be a little skeptical of this.

- Completely. - I love this.

Look with your eyes.

See?

He's just a baby.

Aw. Look at him.

I love this. This is just the best scene. ltjust is.

RECKART Well, and it's important, too,

that Thaddeus' response is not "Yeah, we're good dogs now."

His response is, "We have to try," 'cause it's hard.

- It's a process. - Well, and all of us...

You don't just have to stop struggling ever.

- You're always trying to be a good dog. - That's right.

This was great. This was, to me,

one of the really great opportunities

in this tone for the movie was the awkwardness

of these three guys in big costumes

wandering in when Mary and Joseph just had a baby and like,

"Um... Can we help you? What are you guys doing here?"

Right, and I love this scene also because it's the first time

that the animals, specifically Bo,

realize that they've been in the midst of the King the whole time,

and that Bo ultimately did what he had wanted to do the whole time,

but he was able to do it by sacrificing himself

- for the greater good. - Sacrificing his dream,

and ultimately his dream was fulfilled.

And I love this, all the animals bowing.

This is why we do it.

It's where the whole movie's been leading.

Yes, and it's so powerful,

having been in the church my whole life

and been part of so many Nativity plays and read the story a million times,

but to see it rendered this way is so powerful, and then to have

Deborah played by Oprah articulate the power of the moment,

it just takes it to another level.

Right, and as always, every time we go a little bit,

sort of a little bit heartfelt and sappy,

we've got to undercut it with a little bit of our comedy tone to it.

-Okay, Deborah. -She's back to talking crazy again.

- Just great, yeah. - Yes,

and we talked a lot about Baby Jesus.

There was a lot of conversation of...

Yeah, one thing we haven't talked about at all yet

is representing the ethnicity of Mary and Joseph.

And one thing we really wanted to be true to

was the idea of them as people from the Middle East.

People who live on the coast of the Mediterranean,

- people with darker skin, black hair. - Yep, ethnicity.

- Color. - More so than what

we've been accustomed to, which is the portrayal

in the Italian Renaissance where they look like Northern Italian people.

Right, and that was really important

to portray Mary and Joseph and Baby Jesus...

That's right.

...with the cultural and geographical ethnicity

that history has told us that they had.

And we talked a lot about how much to show him,

and I'm glad that we ultimately decided to show the Baby Jesus.

RECKARTI I think it's...

Yeah, 'cause the Savior came to Earth as this little,

innocent little guy who's just yawning,

and it's a beautiful thing.

So, that little image you saw there just briefly,

Joseph buying Bo from the miller, that used to be a whole scene.

We used to have a whole scene at the end of this movie,

but ultimately we realized people want to see the Nativity,

so we kind of deleted that scene

and just put that little image in there to tell you,

"Look, eventually the miller does come back and he's like,

"'Who are all these people sleeping in this stable?“

- And Joseph buys him, so... - Right,

but it was the right choice just to end

on the quintessential moment that everyone has come to see

and has the most famous moment of the whole story,

which is the birth of Jesus underneath the stars.

I do really also love these images, this is another thing

that I was really interested in doing was just having the opportunity

to show Mary and Joseph as young parents,

Mary throwing Baby Jesus in the air.

Why didn't Da Vinci paint that?

Mothers have been doing that for thousands of years.

Maybe sometimes it's the dad, and the mother's going,

"Do you have to? Not so high."

But the way that we portrayed Mary, I think that's Mary's job there.

And, then, ultimately, Jesus was Joseph's apprentice,

and who's to say how early it started?

As soon as the kid was able to hold a little toy hammer...

That's right, you never know.

You never know. But it's fun to speculate.

RECKARTI Yeah.

Whoo! Life is good

You know, we really couldn't have made this movie

without the support of everyone at Sony Pictures Animation,

especially Kristine Belson.

Yes, Jenny Marchick, our producer, Jenni Magee-Cook,

all of the executives at Sony and all the artists.

And casting and we just had a village.

And the team at Affirm Films as well,

who helped guide us and make sure

that we were making a really good film for a faith-based audience.

The music in the film is such a big character,

because we really wanted to make sure that the film

not only represented the time in which it's being released,

but we wanted to find great songs of the season,

and of the Christmas season that were familiar songs,

but also find some new songs as well,

and Spring Aspers who is just...

She's been in the music business for a very long time,

one of the most talented music executives that I know,

her and I have actually worked on five films together.

This is our fifth collaboration,

and she does such a great job of making sure

that every song that is in the film services the story.

And one of her top lieutenants is Tim Ahlering,

and he is fantastic, and Epic Records has Joey Arbagey.

And Epic Records partnered with us on this, on the music,

and Joey Arbagey, who is the EVP of music over there,

really was a partner along with Sylvia Rhone from day one

when we started talking to them about how to do the music,

and they were so open, and they said, "Listen, we want to get Mariah,

"we want to get Fifth Harmony,

"we want to help you do this as best as it could be done."

They really hit some home runs

as far as attracting talent to this project.

They did. Zara Larsson, Great Big World,

Casting Crowns, Kirk Franklin, Fifth Harmony, Mariah Carey,

Jesse James Decker.

The soundtrack is as star-studded as the cast of the movie.

Right, so true.

Thanks so much for listening, this has been a lot of fun.

Thank you so much for listening. It's been a blast.

I hope you've had as much fun as we have.

I've waited all my life to feel this feeling

That I feel right now

Open up your eyes and see the world is brighter now