|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
It’s been six years since Chris and Shane Houghton’s charming animated show Big City Greens debuted on Disney Channel. Fans of the series get a special treat this week when Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation premieres on Disney Channel and Disney+. In the 82-minute movie, the Green family embark on an wild trip to outer space when Cricket tricks his family into taking a road strip aboard the Space Station and save the world from intergalactic disaster.
The voice cast includes Chris Houghton, Marieve Herington, Bob Joles, Artemis Pebdani, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Zeno Robinson and Anna Akana. Guest voices include Renée Elise Goldsberry, Cheri Oteri, Astronaut Scott Kelly, Joe Lo Truglio, Jack McBrayer and Raven-Symoné. The movie is exec produced by Chris and Shane Houghton and produced by Michael Coughlin. Series director-writer-storyboarder Anna O’Brian is the movie’s director.
We had the chance to chat with the talented Houghton brothers about this spectacular way to kick off the summer vacation:
Chris Houghton: You know, we’ve been in production for eight years and on the air for six years and we just finished our 100th half-hour in season four. The movie took three years to complete, and we were working on the show and the movie at the same time. It was pretty chaotic and we were stretched kind of between some of season three and the majority of season four, but I’m very happy with the movie and how season four is turning out as well. We started writing the movie in the summer of 2021.
How come the movie is arriving in the middle of season four?
Shane Houghton: We wanted the movie to be completely stand-alone and didn’t want anyone to have to do any homework to able to watch it so it will have a big reach. It reintroduces the Greens and all the concepts you need to know to enjoy the movie on its own if it’s the first time you are seeing the Greens. For people who are long-time viewers of the series, they’ll be surprised and delighted by all the recurring things and the little Easter eggs that we have included.
What was it about the story that sparked your interest? It has a kind of fun National Lampoon’s Vacation vibe to it.
Chris: It’s funny that you should bring that up. We initially pitched the movie as National Lampoon’s Vacation meets Armageddon. We really like the idea of an asteroid heading towards Earth, and we need to train some oil drillers or miners to astronaut rather than the other way around. That’s such a funny concept. We thought, well, we’d love to do a big road trip vacation movie, and we’d love to them to send them to space. We have our crazy tech billionaire Gwendolyn Zapp (voiced by Cheri Oteri) who would love to take them to space. We wanted to give them a farming mission, and we thought she is crazy enough to think that it would be easier to train farmers to be astronauts rather than the other way around.
We were trying to answer our own question: Why should we make a movie? Just because you have a TV series doesn’t mean you should necessarily make a movie. We wanted the movie to feel grounded, to still feel like Big City Greens, even though we are taking them literally to outer space. So, we wanted everything to just feel a little bigger tell in the series.
Which studios helped you produce the animation for the project?
Shane: Our partner studios are Rough Draft in Korea and Sugar Cube, both of whom have worked with us on the series from the beginning. We also have a little bit of CG help from Lemon Sky Studios in Malaysia.
Chris: Similar to us, their crews had to expand to work on the movie because it was a massive undertaking. We went over to Korea and met with them, and had some great drawing demos and discussions. It was a great group effort to keep both projects going on a t the same time as we were all working on the series as we well as the movie.
Shane: We were dipping our toes into some CG elements because our show has always been traditionally animated, so it was a great learning opportunity for us. We really wanted to challenge ourselves with this feature-length storytelling. We’ve gotten very good at running the show for eight years, so we were looking for that kind of next-level challenge.
What would you say was the biggest lesson you learned from the experience of making the movie?
Chris: When you start to run multiple projects, you really have to rely on your team. You should rely on your team even if you’re only running one project, but taking on the series and the movie and we also help oversee the multi-platform team at [Disney Television Animation] with all their Big City Greens short-form content. So, Big City Greens has expanded beyond our wildest dreams, and just to make it possible we’ve really had to hire great people and trust them to do the best work they can. It was very busy and difficult, but there was very little drama. Everyone just poured their energy into the work and they all cared about making good stuff.
Shane: In terms of storytelling, we had a version of the movie where everything was working really well up until the end. We had so many threads and storylines in play, and they were arranged in a certain order that made sense when we were scripting. But when we put it all in animatic, something was feeling unsatisfied. What we realized after doing multiple screenings was the order of resolution for our stories was out of place. We had internal conflict between Bill and Cricket, and then there’s external conflict with the asteroid heading for Big City. We needed to remix the order of information within those scenes, so we basically rewrote and re-storyboarded our Act Three climax after having these very beneficial screenings with executives, crew members and guests.
We realized it was just like what we’ve done in the series. We’re running into these storytelling problems where, you know, you need the internal conflict to resolve at almost the same time as the external conflict. If you can merge those two conflicts and they resolve in the same moment or right around the same then it will feel so satisfying to an audience. It was just more challenging on the movie because it’s so big and massive to move those big chunky pieces around — it was not as easy as an 11-minute episode.
What made you really happy about it when you saw the finished version?
Chris: I’m just so proud we pulled it off. When we started off, we wanted the movie to look better than the series. The show great but there’s an expectation for a movie that it’s got to look even better, so we wanted the animation to be better. We wanted the stakes to be bigger and the emotional depths to be deeper. I’m really proud of the fact that I feel we really achieved those things. You know in TV production and also in life, you do the best you can with what you have at any given moment, and I felt like with the movie we really did that. You know it’s not a $200 million blockbuster: It was a little scrappier and everyone really brought their all and we had to get very creative and very efficient with how we made this thing. I’m really, really proud of the teamwork that was showcased through it all.
Shane: I’m going to reiterate something Chris always says. You have to go for the three Gs: Gasps, Gags and Guffaws. I feel like it’s always so satisfying if you can get those reactions from an audience. We did a couple of screenings, and we got the amazing reactions we were hoping for. There were tons of laughs: Some people were crying at the emotional moments and then there are moments where people even gasped in awe. Honestly, if you can hit those three, you feel that we’ve done our job.
I believe we have time for one last question: Can you tell us a bit about the voice cast and also what to expect in the rest of the fourth season?
Shane: Our incredible core cast really stepped up for this movie. They sang songs, did voices and acted their hearts out yeah. Chris (Cricket) and Bob Joles (Bill) have these incredibly emotional moments together. We recorded a couple of their sessions together and I have to say, I was so choked up during those moments. These guys were just acting their hearts out and, even though we were doing take after take of the same lines, I was crying in the booth. When you’re directing those sessions, that is the like gold standard when you feel that energy and you know it’s going to be a performance: Now all we got to do is to get the board artists to bring that to life.
Overall, the whole cast is so great and everyone did phenomenal work. We had Renée Elise Goldsberry (Hamilton, She-Hulk), and she’s so funny and so good and she came in and just totally embodied her character. It was such an amazing joy to watch her work and then she sings a song which is an absolute banger. Cheri Oteri is also so funny as the voice of Gwendolyn, who has been in the series for a long time. She has a big role in the movie: She sings a very silly song which has a Bob Fosse-inspired dance choreography; it’s so bizarre, and she really dug in and worked really hard to make that song as funny and polished as it could be. Everything turned out so great.
Chris: Season 4 is still rocking and rolling, and we’ve got lots of episodes to premiere, including our 100th half-hour special, which is really fun and really crazy. Shane wrote the script and it centers on a delightful idea and I think it’s a great celebration of 100 episodes.
We also have our Chip Whistler saga that comes to a head this season. Fans are really clamoring for Chip, as he has become a breakout character. He’s such a fun and evil character and [voice actor] Paul Scheer is such a delight. We certainly haven’t forgotten about Chip! He’s not in the movie, but we have a number of tentpole episodes coming up, which will build up to this massive special. I think fans are going to be excited about it all.
Big City Green the Movie: Spacecation premieres at 8 p.m. on Thursday, June 6, on Disney Channel and on Friday, June 7, on Disney+.
