The Mitchells vs. the Machines

Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe drop a family driving their daughter to film school into a machine uprising. Both came from Gravity Falls and this is their first feature. Sony Pictures Animation produced it; when the pandemic ruled out a cinema release, Netflix took over distribution in January 2021 and the title reverted from Connected. Netflix reported in its quarterly figures that 53 million households watched it in the first 28 days. Three drawing systems run at once: the human side looks hand painted, the robot side sharp clean computer imagery, and Katie’s doodles are drawn by hand over finished three dimensional frames. Visual effects supervisor Mike Lasker described stripping soft gradients out of the lighting, breaking it into bands and turning those into brush strokes; outlines take the colour of the object they sit on and are lit too. About three thousand shots were built this way. The film won eight Annie Awards, among them best feature, directing, writing, production design and character design. The Academy nominated it for animated feature; the award went to Encanto. A good fit if you enjoy how dense the frame gets and will pause to look at the doodles. Not for viewers who will find the robot apocalypse constantly cutting into a father and daughter argument about film school messy.