“Ratchet And Clank” is slated for an April 29th release, and we had the chance to chat with Director Kevin Munroe, discussing characters, how today’s children’s films don’t depict real danger, and more. Check it out!
How excited are you to release the film?
Kevin: It’s always funny because animation is one of those things where it exponentially keeps getting crazier and crazier and then all of sudden there’s something really super quiet … then the movie comes out and the craziness starts all over again, but this is the fun crazy. Especially with the game too, it’s like two campaigns going on, and it’s all in different places – sometimes you can get away from the chatter if you need to, but here it’s everywhere, and it’s fun.
How much of the actual storyline of the video game were you influenced by for the film?
Kevin: As much as we could, I think. We really partnered strongly on the story, the characters, the look, it all had to be translated into the movie.
Were there any challenges in the project?
Kevin: Story wise, it was dealing with so many different points of view and some stories have already been told and characters have been done. It wasn’t we had a lack of good ideas, we had too many good ideas, so a lot of it was narrowing it down. In terms of acting, it’s funny because if you do it right, people will look at the characters they’ll say ‘oh, that’s so Ratchet’. If you look at the game, they didn’t have the same facial expressions, technically speaking, but a lot of the times, even if you’re a kid playing with an action figure, you see so much more than just an action figure and I think it’s the same thing with a comic book. There’s so much personality there.
What direction would you take the sequel?
Kevin: I would love to have that problem and make that decision. I think if the stars aligned and they wanted to do more movies, its such a big universe and even the notion with the story line of Ratchet’s dad, and further adventures with the rangers and Clank has his own back story as well. There’s a lot more to tell.
Tell us about when you first encountered the Ratchet & Clank story?
Kevin: When I first started working in California I was working in a video game company that had a lot of the big video games back in that time.
Tell us about putting together this cast?
Kevin: For me it was all about the characters. To me if the characters from the game are working than it was no need to change that for a hollywood name. The thing about video games, it’s really easy to stay true to the source material. We really found actors who fit those characters. Sly [Sylvester Stallone] whose known for these tough guy roles but he had a way to do something interesting and bring something different to this role
There were some scenes that were intense and a little scary. Can you speak about those?
Kevin: The movie was great because it goes back to the Star Wars trilogy – having a sense of real danger, even if it’s silly. Finding a balance is important but it’s like how can we take a colorful cartoon world, but make it have a time of ups and down. I think we do our kids a disservice today by safety-padding everything too much. And of course there’s no blood in it; nobody is getting decapitated. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a couple of intense things as long it’s nothing malicious or mean. Just part of the drama and to me, that’s one of our worst developments in kid’s entertainment. This movie never was considered to go to a big studio. They would have taken out the guns, making it much more sweeter, a silly string of ups and downs, and to me that’s not [the point].
