‘Ruby Gillman’ Is ‘Mean Girls’ in the Sea With Its Regina George-Like Mermaid – Armessa Movie News

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is a coming-of-age tale from DreamWorks Animation with a mythical spin. Under the direction of Academy Award nominee Kirk DeMicco (The Croods) and co-director Faryn Pearl, the tale of young Ruby Gillman (Lana Condor) flips the lore of Kraken and mermaids on its head.

It takes a village to create the scale of “visual splendor” displayed in the whimsical world of Ruby Gillman. In a one-on-one chat, DeMicco tells Collider’s Perri Nemiroff about his collaboration with DreamWorks Animation’s Pierre-Olivier Vincent, the production designer for Ruby. Vincent was responsible for developing the splashy, colorful Oceanside and kingdom beneath the sea for a backdrop as exciting as the legendary Kraken. DeMicco also shares what qualities made Pearl, who began her journey as head of story, the perfect co-director to bring Ruby’s story from page to screen.

Check out the video above or read the full transcript below to find out how DeMicco and his team of “multiple imaginations” ultimately found the heart and story for original characters like Chelsea (Annie Murphy), the popular girl at Oceanside High with a sinister secret, Ruby’s mom and dad, Agatha (Toni Collette) and Arthur (Colman Domingo), and her kraken queen Grandmamah, voiced by Jane Fonda.

PERRI NEMIROFF: Because you’ve worked with a couple of the major animation studios at this point, what do you think is a shared quality they have that allows you to deliver your best work, but then also I want something specific to DreamWorks that you really appreciate?

KIRK DEMICCO: We were just at the Annecy Film Festival, which is an animation festival in France, and it is an incredible experience to see the amount of students worldwide in animation. Any studio right now around the world, there’s so much talent, there’s so much energy, and there’s so much imagination that these young voices are bringing into animation, which is just exciting to be around. So, I think that everyone’s sharing in that. We’re all sharing the boon of how much people love animation and how much great education there is in students.

But for DreamWorks, I find one thing really particularly wonderful in working on this film was our design department, Pierre-Olivier Vincent, our production designer who did all the How to Train Your Dragon [movies], the way that DreamWorks can render and bend believability and build worlds and the effects, that I think is really – the team that I’ve worked with are Pierre-Olivier Vincent, Carlos Puertolas. That ability to bend believability and also to give that level of sophistication, but at the same time, super appealing.

That makes this movie for my four-year-old niece, and for me also!

Speaking of how much talent there is in the animation sphere right now, I wanted to ask you about the choice to or to not have a co-director, because you’ve worked both ways. What signals to you that a story or a production requires a co-director, and then ultimately, why was Faryn [Pearl] the perfect pick for that role?

DEMICCO: I was very lucky because when I came on to the movie Faryn was already the head of story. I’m a writer by birth/trade, I guess, and she’s a story artist, and so she brings a completely different set of tools that helps us crack a story. And along with my producer, Kelly Cooney, it made perfect sense to elevate her to a co-director because she had a real connection to Ruby, number one, which is the most important thing, the emotional connection to your characters, but then also an incredible sense of humor. And there are things that people who came up through story look at differently when you’re trying to solve, because our day is just solving problems, especially with an original film. An original film is wonderful because the world is wide open, but it’s also hard because everything’s wide open, so there’s a lot of lanes you can go down, and you wanna try them. We all wanna try everything because we’re all creative, but we have to make choices. So it’s really nice to have somebody that compliments you, and also, in this one, having a female director that could bring, this was the story we were telling, and bring her experience to the movie.

I have a perfect follow-up to that because there’s a quote from her about you in our production notes that I love. She was talking about how your directing style is “open and collaborative yet declarative. When a hard decision had to be made, he knew exactly what to do.” Can you give me an example of one of those hard decisions and then how you went about overcoming that challenge and executing the decision you made?

DEMICCO: Wow, that’s really nice. Thank you, Faryn. One thing is that I always try to come knowing that multiple imaginations working on a movie gives it more breadth of appeal. There’s always a better idea. You can always beat the idea, but there’s times when we need to, for the longer arc of the movie or the longer sequences, it’s things that happen that you have to just say, “That would be really cool, but that’s gonna send that part too far.” It’s really just keeping the spine intact and letting the artist iterate and improv. It’s an improv, but if we enter a scene one way, we have to get out the other. What happens during it is where all the magic happens, where the fun happens. So yeah, I think that’s what it is. It’s trying to keep that spine.

What do you think is the biggest difference between the story and how you envision the film turning out on day one when you first signed on compared to what we see now in the final film?

DEMICCO: Oh, honestly, I could never have imagined, and I don’t even know if they could have imagined the level of visual splendor in the water treatment and the underwater world. And a lot came from their story because she’s a Kraken, and a Kraken usually ends stories. They are the most powerful creatures on the planet in every mythology we’ve ever read, so we had to keep upping the challenges for Ruby during the course of the film and the entire second act when we would be like, “Well, she would just get this. It was hidden behind a wall.” “Well, that wouldn’t do anything. She’s a Kraken.” So, building these challenges took all of the departments to come together and really work in a room trying to figure out what we could do production-wise, but what was best for the story and most challenging for our lead.

Was the choice to have your mermaid’s hair red deliberate?

DEMICCO: [Laughs] Well, I think that sort of story was playing very much into the teen comedy of the movie, which was the new girl, the Mean Girls of the sea, the Regina George, had to have been that girl. And it just worked so fast, when she turns her head around, and she’s the new girl in, and that’s the one that becomes most popular in an instant?

I mean, that and it happens to align with something else. I was amused by that. [Laughs]

I have one other Faryn quote that I wanted to ask you about because she also said you have a “wealth of knowledge and references” in terms of movies. So now I absolutely must know, what is the movie you know top to bottom, the one you quote the most?

DEMICCO: Oh, wow. You know, I can do – which I probably won’t – but when I started Croods at DreamWorks I was writing with John Cleese, so I can do a lot of Monty Python, which I won’t do right now, but I wrote two scripts with John, and I can do a lot of Monty Python.

Can I get your favorite line?

DEMICCO: Oh, I don’t even know! I’m not even sure if it’s PC. I have to be careful.

Collider has older viewers! [Laughs]

DEMICCO: Okay, well then, I can do some French Taunter. I do accents. [Laughs] No, I’ll leave that up to – they also have access to the internet so that they can look up the best clips.

[Laughs] Okay, fair enough, fair enough.

So we were talking about my niece earlier, and she’s first discovering movies now and the thought that she could see anything at this point that she can look back on and think to herself, “That was the first time I was totally enveloped by movie magic to the point that it made me believe something out of this world was actually real,” it’s such a special thing. What was that movie for you, the first time that you really recognized the power that movie magic and big-screen storytelling could have?

DEMICCO: I’m a Star Wars kid and an E.T. kid. I’m right in that area of where it was, and I think that E.T. was probably the most surprising in the sense that we didn’t know a lot about movies walking in, you know? We were kids, we walked in, we saw the movie I think because I liked a girl in the class, or whatever it was, and we went, and I remember just being so touched by that story. And then in Star Wars, I think it was the fact that I play acted in my mind after, you know? That was what really took me. It took me so far that the experience lasted.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken makes waves in theaters on June 30th. Check out Perri’s interview with Annie Murphy below to find out which aspect of that suspiciously red-haired mermaid came so naturally to her!