Mitchells vs The Machines Writer Asked Hasbro For Furby Rights 7 Times

The Mitchells vs The Machines co-writer asked Hasbro seven different times whether they could use Furbys in their movie. The Netflix and Sony collaboration released in November 2021 and has since been receiving awards and nominations, including an Annie Award for Best Animated Feature Film. The movie follows young Katie Mitchell as she is about to attend film school. After a few plans change, Katie is forced on a road trip to her new school with her parents, younger brother, and pug. Meanwhile, a robot uprising is in the works.

Director and co-writer Michael Rianda became well known for his previous work on the adventure animation series, Gravity Falls. The Mitchell family is loosely based on Rianda’s own family and technology-averse father. One of the best twists in the movie is the family pug’s resistance to all facial and body recognition by the robot uprising, giving his bread-loaf body the God-like powers of anonymity that breaks the software of every robot he meets.

In an interview with Joe.IE, Rianda explains how persistent he had to be before Hasbro finally agreed to allow Furbys into the movie. The toy cameo happens later in the movie, revealing an evil Furby at the heart of the robotic uprising. Rianda explained that the Mitchells writers and animators had their hearts so set on a Furby reveal that he kept returning to his phone to try and make contact with someone at Hasbro. Luckily, Rianda’s persistence paid off and made for an even funnier flick. Read Rianda’s full quote about the process below.

“That was how we originally wrote it, we were laughing and saying ‘This is going to be amazing!’ And then the producer was like ‘This is never going to be in the movie! What are you doing??’ And I was like ‘Nah, we’ll get it to work!’ And then, eventually, it was kind of like this wasn’t actually gonna work. We couldn’t get a hold of Hasbro, so then we had to change it. We called it Tickle-Me Melmo, and it was basically a Tickle-Me Elmo with an eye-patch and a metal arm and it was like Mad Max and it was like ‘Come, brothers!’ But then when we showed it to the artists and the studio, they rioted. They were like ‘Where are the Furbys? What is happening??’ So we doubled-down, and I talked to some people I knew. And then the Hasbro people were really nice! They were like ‘Yeah, cool!’. I was saying that we love Furbys and that it would be free advertising. And they eventually were down, and I was so happy about it, because it is the craziest thing. It was like that moment when we’re a film student and you think ‘Oh, we can’t do this! We’re just messing around!’, but then the studio says ‘No, you can do it!’, and we were all like ‘Yeah!'”

Producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller also worked on The Mitchells vs the Machines. The Lord and Miller duo is now in the realm of animation royalty after their groundbreaking work on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which raised the bar more than a couple notches on creative animation techniques and world-class storytelling. A lot of the detail and innovation that fans saw in Spider-Verse could also be seen in The Mitchells vs The Machines, including a steady stream of absurd humor that leans into mixed media and the chaotic visual lives of teens using screens all day.

With an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature, The Mitchells vs. The Machines is poised to become a classic in the animation world. The final reveal of a Furby being behind the robot uprising is certainly unexpected, and it’s likely this twist is part of what’s made the film such a standout. Furby was a landmark product for robotics in toy design, and including it in The Mitchells vs. The Machines is a stroke of genius the team behind the film recognized from the get-go. Luckily, Hasbro eventually made the right call when they let their Furby empire join this fresh new addition to the animation world.

Source: Joe.IE

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