How do animal rather than human characters enhance the movie’s theme of learning to love one’s self?
Cripps: You see a lot of heightened emotion within animals that comes out of their physicality. The way a snake moves can be a bigger expression of what we ourselves sometimes feel even if we don’t understand it. So having these extraordinary-looking animals who have such big physical characteristics and movements, it helps children visualize some of the things that maybe they’re feeling inside. I also think it just naturally piques their interest. Kids are drawn in more by a thorny devil lizard than by some other kid.
Knight: There are the emotions you can feel with the animals. We’ve purposely made them very appealing so you’re not fearful of them and can recognize and have empathy for them. But then our hope is that you also look and go, oh, I’ll find out what a thorny devil lizard does. There are so many extraordinary facts about these animals. The thorny devil lizard, they take water in from their belly. They have a fake head on their back as camouflage. There are many aspects we used, [and] we hope that people now research and learn more about them.
Claire, what did your past experience as an editor bring to directing this film?
It’s very different being an animation editor to being a live-action editor. You’re there from the beginning with animation. Every part of the animation process comes through you and goes out, and in some cases the movie can be made in the editing room. We were very fortunate in this case that Harry wrote a fantastic script. I felt really comfortable with the structure of how the whole movie was going and could recognize and analyze that as an editor. And then it was great to be able to partner with him to creatively solve the puzzle of how it will look and how we will animate it. I felt like I used all my knowledge of everything I’ve ever done in the last I-don’t-know-how-many years. It took 15 years to make the three Kung Fu Panda films as an editor. So you get a lot of sense of how things are done and how the pipeline is and how the creative process is.
Harry, how did your personal experience with the flora and fauna of Australia affect your work on this film?
It was all in my back yard. In Sydney, on the beaches, with the sharks right near where we swam. And in the Blue Mountains where my grandparents lived, there were these deadly snakes and spiders above your bed at night. You grew up with them. You knew they were deadly, you couldn’t touch them, but they were very much a part of our lives. And as an adult moving to America and traveling around, I felt like I had lost touch a little bit with that experience. Working on this movie made me realize that it was very much a part of who I am, of being an Australian, and what my childhood was about. I felt privileged to be able to step back into my childhood when it came to creating these animals, giving them their own voices and feelings.
With such deadly creatures, how do you make them appealing?
Knight: This was something that we were very clear we wanted to do. We wanted to bring Maddie, the female lead character, to life, and have her be a snake. They’re hard to animate as well, so we had a lot going against us.
Cripps: The first design of Maddie, we went back to a lot of early images of Audrey Hepburn. She had that beautiful quality of innocence but playfulness. And that’s what we talked to the designer about. You see that in her—the chin down and the eyes. Coltish, a little unsure of herself.
Were there any other animals that had such specific influences?
Knight: The thorny devil lizard. We looked at the idea of that animal and all the things we learned about it [and we came up with] a goth. We wanted her to have a dark sense of humor, be quite dry and cheeky, but super intelligent.
Cripps: We particularly wanted the character of Frank to be an awkward young teenager. That naturally fitted in with what spiders do—the shagginess and the long awkward legs.
What makes Back to the Outback special?
Cripps: I also don’t think there have been many [movies] that have focused on the deadly and venomous, poisonous and spiky. You know, the creepy-looking ones. Just the bizarre nature of these animations makes it quite unique. And I think also it’s this big escape movie, which we’ve seen a lot of, but within that, there’s this very touching buddy comedy between two extremes. Between the beautiful koala and the deadly snake. They have to come to understand each other and recognize they are not that different, in spite of all the things that seem to make them different.
Knight: I feel like this is a story about beauty within. I know there are so many of them, but this is about perceptions. Again, people are scared of these animals, so the idea of placing a perception on the koala you think is going to be cuddly, and it’s not so much. And then the snake with a heart of gold. It helps children realize that everyone has something special, and that something special can save the day in the end.
What do you feel this movie has to say to kids as they navigate the world today?
Knight: When lockdown happened, we were working on this movie that had all these animals in little boxes. It felt very similar to how we were working, with everyone in our own little boxes and hoping we could break out and emerge. Also, our animals realize what home is and who their family is, and I felt—everyone felt—when we were working on this, that we were in the trenches together, and we would always remember this time together. To feel similar to our own characters is interesting. And hopefully, this movie will be part of the coming out of the gloom and people will be uplifted.
Cripps: Seeing what’s happening around the world and in this country during the pandemic, you’d expect people to come together, and they didn’t a lot of the time. It’s shifted them further apart because of our differences and what we believe or how we look. So a big thing we would love kids to take away is that differences should not divide us. We shouldn’t fear others or be scared of others or hate others because they’re different. It’s our differences that should bring us together, to make us realize that the things that are different about us are the things that make us unique. That should make us want to reach out and learn from each other, not push each other away. I guess the big thing is, there are a lot of us on a very small planet. We need to live together. We need to do that by understanding each other. In the microcosm, that’s what this little film is about.
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