“The Bob’s Burgers Movie” – interview with Loren Bouchard, Nora Smith and Bernard Derriman
The Bob’s Burgers Movie sees the loveable but hapless Belcher family in their first theatrical outing, striving to save their titular restaurant from going under yet again when a water main ruptures and creates an enormous sinkhole that threatens to destroy the business. Spun off from creator Loren Bouchard’s long-running (thirteen seasons and counting) Emmy®-winning series Bob’s Burgers, the feature-length outing arrives in cinemas today and sees the blue-collar family of creatively eccentric oddballs overcoming their own personal insecurities and distractions to unite in an epic murder-mystery-cum-adventure-musical to foil the dastardly plot of another family in their seaside town. Full of spectacularly choreographed dance routines worthy of any broadway musical and an epic, full-orchestra score that underlines every emotional pang and comical moment, the grander presentation of The Bob’s Burgers Movie never loses the heart of what makes the show itself so successful. Continuing the personal stories of individual characters with knowing nods to in-show jokes, the film is sure to be a hit with fans old and new.
What makes this seemingly simple family sitcom so successful lies with its ensemble of characters that speak to the duelling mundanity and uniqueness in all of us; teen Tina (Dan Mintz)’s penchant for butts and lust for the undead, brother Gene (Eugene Mirman)’s iddy biddy diddy dreams for musical success, mom Linda (John Roberts)’s joyful optimism and naive scheming, dad Bob’s (H Jon Benjamin) world-weary anxiety for the future matched with an unflappable persistence and rabble-rousing third child Louise (Kristen Schaal)’s aggressive precociousness at odds with an attachment to her iconic pink rabbit ears. The film, much like the show, masterfully serves up both the chuckles and the feels, with a dash of peril and ludicrous adventure thrown into the mix. Skwigly spoke to series creator, producer and director Loren Bouchard, co-director and animator Bernard Derriman and writer/producer Nora Smith about bringing the Belchers to the big screen.
The show has such a strong and dedicated fan base. What is it, do you think, that has made the show so successful?
Nora Smith: I don’t like to think of it as successful. I think if we think about it too much, then we get too much in our heads and can’t just write good stories. Every time I think about the fans, some of the fans are more interesting people than I am, definitely. The fact that they dress up, and sew these costumes…at the premiere, a bunch of fans came out and I was just like “Oh my God, you are living life so much better than me”! I’m so happy I can write something that they like, because they’re incredible people.
One of the big reasons I’m a fan is the cast. When we record them together, I could sit in the recording booth and just watch and listen to them talk to each other forever. I think it comes across that they’ve known and worked with each other forever. So, they basically are a family and when you’re in the company of a family that you can tell loves each other, I feel like you feel loved. I think that carries across.
Could you tell me a little bit about how you developed the characters and which of them you each identify with most?
Loren Bouchard: We fit the characters to the actors, we cast first and really thought about the characters in relation to the voice that was going to be coming out of their mouths. We jumped light years ahead in terms of writing, you could write a more fleshed-out character when you already knew who was going to be giving them their voice. We already knew something about who they were and what kind of things they say. Which is just a good trick, for anyone out there who’s developing an animated idea, cast first and you will find your characters jump right off the page!
As far as identifying with the characters, for me it switches all the time. I’m Bob in the morning when I wake up and then, somewhere during the day, I become all of the other characters at least once, if not several times. I like to think at the end of the day after I’ve had a glass of wine I’m Linda.
NS: I do like how the characters can be different facets of a human personality. I personally am a Bob. I wish I was a Linda. Linda is my favourite character but I am the opposite of her. I love her dearly, her optimism.
Bernard Derriman: I have to say, especially after seeing the movie, I realised how much I am like Bob. And Ashley, my wife, is a lot like Linda. I feel like our whole family are a lot of Bobs like me and she runs around picking us all up constantly. I definitely resonate with Bob I think the most. I’m also about his age now and I say, ‘Oh God’ a lot.
I think I’m Louise with Linda rising. So why did you feel that this was the right time to make a movie?
LB: Well, there’s no good time to make a movie – or conversely, it’s always a good time to make a movie. I would say we definitely wanted this to be something that people saw in theatres. And so, in some ways, it was not the right time to make a movie, when theatres were shut down but we really had this extra onus, which is we already made a TV show, it’s already on your screens, in your house, in your living room, so we couldn’t turn it into a streaming movie, we really had to wait. It had to come out in theatres when it was safe to come out in theatres. We’re really big fans of movies, we love them. Not just sitting in a theatre, though, that is wonderful, but also the form itself. It’s a terrific storytelling form. It’s exciting, for a very good reason, which is something is going to fundamentally change for somebody in that story from the beginning to the end. It’s a deal you make when you go into a movie, it has to happen. And with us, we wanted it to happen for all of our characters. So, it was time for us, it wasn’t quite time for the world…and then it was!
On that, the film interweaves multiple story threads, some of which, as you say, come from the series as well. How hard was it to combine all of those threads into one cohesive narrative?
NS: It was hard. It was something we always knew we wanted to do; we didn’t want any of our family characters to feel like they were just along for the ride. And we liked the idea that each character was the hero of the movie in their own head, which is how it is in life. So, I think we just had to trim stuff down because there are a lot of storylines on the show, we have an A plot and a B plot, sometimes a C plot, but never a D, E, F plot. It was a fun challenge to have their emotional story also pushed forward and I think it felt more satisfying when everybody got to have an emotional journey in our family.
Animation wise, there’s a lot more scope for depth and cinematic spectacle in a feature film – how did that affect what you were able to do narratively, visually, and through the individual performances of the characters?
BD: Speaking visually, it was something we really relish because we would love to spend so much more time on the show, and we just never have that opportunity because we’re doing 22 episodes a year. So we’re just constantly churning through stuff. With the movie, we not only had all the characters but the stakes were also raised. So we had a lot of emotional moments in the movie, but we had all this time to really finesse, and we also had some of the best artists from the show working on the movie. Then the three of us just constantly push the animation, asking for little things like “Can we make sure that when that person walks, he’s walking in a straight line?” or whatever else, you know, but here we’re able to just get in there and say “Let’s lift that eyebrow up a little more”, “Let’s make Louise look a little sadder”. Those kinds of little subtle acting things we had the time to keep going back in and really get their performances where we wanted them to be. The other thing is we really wanted to make it part of the show, we didn’t want to do them in 3D or do anything where we recreate the characters in a different way. So, it felt different all of a sudden. We just took our characters from the show, we didn’t do anything to them. Hopefully, it looks prettier with the lighting. I always like to think of it as just the same as the show, but just with a better lens or camera, so you can see more.
Music and musicals are of course, synonymous with the show. Were there any differences or challenges in tackling the songs, specifically for the film over the series?
LB: We were thinking about music from the very beginning, and we knew we were going to try and make it true to us – which is to say, joyful songs that feel like they come right out of the show naturally and could only come from the show. That part we knew. We also wanted to hear just all the way out to the edges, go as big as we could with the sound without losing that sort of childlike innocence that we sometimes have in our music. So, we had horns in there and we purposely arranged the songs right from the very beginning with brass and woodwinds. So that we could really remind ourselves that it wasn’t just a ukulele and a piano, it wasn’t just those instruments that have served us so well on TV, because those are small, those are intimate. It’s great to start the show with a little instrument, because it’s telling you right from the beginning that it’s a fragile little thing, this restaurant that may not survive and this little fragile instrument playing the first few notes. But we didn’t want that for the feature. We wanted the opposite. We wanted people to feel like they were on the runway of a great story that was lifting off. We wanted all those strings and timpanies and every orchestral sound we could squeeze in. On top of that, we wanted dancing. We do dancing on the series when we can, but it’s time-consuming and hard to get right. Bernard is incredibly talented at it, so in some ways, this was a sandbox, turning him loose to play and have the time to draw dancing in the way that we knew we could do if we just had the time and the space on the screen.
Fantastic. As you mentioned you produced quite a lot of the film during COVID. How did this affect you and the crew overall?
BD: I think luckily, animation-wise, we didn’t really miss a beat. We were very fortunate. We all went home and then our producer, Janelle Momary, basically said to everyone “Come in, pick up your computers on Friday”. We had 10-minute windows – everyone had to come in, grab their stuff and run out. It was kind of crazy. Then the very next day we were just sort of back to normal and it weirdly felt like we’d been doing it forever, except we got to look inside everyone’s bedrooms.
Do you think you’ll do another Bob’s Burgers film again in the future?
LB: We would love the opportunity. Who knows how it’s going to do commercially and certainly we won’t do it unless we have the right story, but I can say this – making the movie was a pleasure from beginning to end and every little moment in between. We’d have to be crazy not to want to experience that again, it’s a real honour and it is such a good time.
If you ever wanted to conclude the show, do you have any ideas as to what might happen to any of the characters in the end?
LB: I know we all want for them to be happy and successful, for sure, to the extent that we’re optimists. I think we’re all optimistic about what’s likely to happen to these characters. But we also want to honour the moment, that this story is about a restaurant that is on the edge of failure; it is on the edge of success, too, but it’s on the edge, regardless. In a way, the second we start thinking past that moment I don’t think we’ll write as well. You really have to sit with it, you have to stay there in this moment, this time. The kids too, a fourth-grader, a sixth-grader and an eighth-grader, if you start ageing them up in your head you might start losing some of the grounding that we need to remember their ages. So in a lot of ways, we don’t go there, we resist the urge.
NS: You have to have faith and the optimism. The movie is, of course, a lot about optimism. And we try to tell a story where it’s actually mathematically, maybe better to be an optimist, which is hard for me as a pessimist to hear. But if you see it worked out in the end, I feel like you lose the faith aspect of it. You have to have faith that being hopeful is going to have this energy that takes you there.
LB: Also, success isn’t necessarily going to come in the form that you expect. Being an optimist means knowing it’ll work out somehow, even if it doesn’t work out the way you hoped.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie is out in cinemas today. From May 27th-June 2nd Cardiff-based audiences can catch special presentations of the film presented by Chapter and Cardiff Animation Festival featuring an exclusive Q&A with Welsh animator Simon Chong – more info available here.