‘The Mitchells vs the Machines’ channels the power of memes: Interview

Welcome to Thanks, I Love It, our series highlighting something onscreen we’re obsessed with this week.

Netflix’s The Mitchells vs. The Machines looks like few other animated films we’ve seen before, combining CG sleekness with an almost hand-painted texture and then scribbling over all of it with doodles, captions, and surrealist clip art. Yet it’s a look that might also feel oddly familiar, at least if you’ve spent enough time online: With its floating emoji and bouncing GIFs, the film looks a lot like, well, the internet.

It’s not an accident. “Something that we liked the idea of was taking something really expensive and well-crafted, like an animated film, and then just messing it up,” says co-director Jeff Rowe in a Zoom call with Mashable. “Just doodling on top of it, screwing it up, breaking it, bad font choices, that interplay between something really high end and something really human and expressive.” 

It’s an impulse that channels the creative energy of film’s protagonist, Katie, a teenager headed to film school. The Mitchells vs. The Machines is literally told from her perspective — she provides the narration, voiced by Abbi Jacobson — and it only makes sense that she’d draw from the visual language she’s grown up with on the internet. The movie looks like the best of social media feels: playful, clever, and a little bit chaotic. 

So her dad’s screaming face is intercut with a live-action viral video of a screaming gibbon monkey. A particularly dangerous escape (and there are many, since The Mitchells vs. The Machines pits Katie’s family against megalomaniacal robots) is made to look less horrifying with a cat filter. Particularly sweet moments are punctuated with a flurry of hearts, a la Instagram, and dramatic ones with big captions and jokey GIFs. 

All those bells and whistles help give The Mitchells vs. The Machines the immediacy and homespun appeal of a really good meme. “I do think that’s why memes, people react to them, because even if they’re crude and they have black scrawled in Microsoft Paint over a word and then typed in, you’re like, Oh, someone made that, a person made that. A person had a human desire to express themselves and then they just did it, and now it’s out in the world,” says director Mike Rianda, also on the Zoom call. 

“You feel the speed in memes. There’s no thought,” adds Rowe. “It’s just like, impulse for joke, executed as quickly and crudely as possible, and that’s how you know that it’s sincere or that it’s not overwrought. There’s no artifice. It’s just sincere human expression, which is awesome.” 

That authenticity also sets Katie and her family apart from the high-tech antagonists of the film, an army of robots controlled by a Siri equivalent known as PAL. Furious at being rendered obsolete by her human creator, PAL commands every object with PAL software — including smart tennis rackets, smart toasters, and, in one especially memorable sequence, smart Furbies — to capture all of humanity and exile them into outer space.

Where PAL and her AI forces are all cold, slick efficiency, as reflected in their sharp edges, clean surfaces, and superhumanly quick movements, the Mitchells and the movie around them delight in warmth and creativity. Even underneath Katie’s Gen Z art kid flourishes, the world she inhabits is crafted with visible brush strokes and sketchy lines, and decorated with odd trinkets, playful doodles, and messy handwriting.

Creating that look on a computer took no small amount of effort, Rianda says — but it was worth it. There’s a video of [Hayao] Miyazaki watching a 3D animation [Ed. note: Miyazaki is actually watching animation created by an AI] and he’s like, This is a grotesque, this is an affront to humanity or whatever. And I do think that when CG is bad, it’s almost a little bit of that,” he tells me. 

“CG wants to make everything look inhuman. So we just wanted to throw everything in our disposal at the movie, because it’s a movie about humanity, to make every frame feel like you could feel the hand of a human being on it.” 

Despite its robots-versus-humans premise, however, The Mitchells vs. The Machine isn’t anti-machine. Far from it. While the film does get in a few good digs at Big Tech (“It’s almost like stealing people’s data and giving it to a hyper-intelligent AI as part of an unregulated tech monopoly was a bad thing,” muses PAL’s Zuckerbergian founder), it also embraces the social media-friendly perspective of Katie’s generation. 

“I think people just respond well to the fact that we actually really like the internet, and we’re not trying to destroy it,” says Rianda. “Like, we think all the fun things about the internet are fun and we want to celebrate those. And I think people have at least enjoyed that aspect of it, where we’re taking joy from that instead of trying to take the air out of it and say like, You teenagers with your TikToks.”

“We just wanted to throw everything in our disposal at the movie…to make every frame feel like you could feel the hand of a human being on it.”

To the contrary, when Katie’s Luddite dad, Rick, gently scolds her for documenting their road trip via PAL phone instead of actually experiencing it, she pushes back: “I am experiencing things. This is how I experience things.” The Mitchells vs. The Machines offers a glimpse, even for the Ricks of the world, of what exactly that means. 

“Because [Katie, the protagonist] is a filmmaker, we thought it would be, at first, just fun to be where it’s almost like she’s editing the movie,” says Rianda. “And then we found that it actually helped the movie because it let you understand her perspective on a deeper level.” 

Katie and Rick’s differing outlooks on life comprise much of the emotional conflict of the movie, and Rowe freely admits he sees himself on both sides of the cultural gap. “I think some of the funniest people writing jokes today are just people making memes. They’re so funny and they do so much of what I love about comedy, which is taking a really big idea and then distilling it down to these few words or this single image, and it’s such an effective, fun way to communicate.” 

At the same time, he continues, “I also see myself like Rick, where I’m like, I don’t get this. How do you write these? How do you create a meme? It really lended itself to the divide between the two characters.”

“I’m thrilled that we aren’t just being pelted with tomatoes by the children of America for having outdated memes,” laughs Rianda. Given how quickly viral content can go from cool to cringe, the filmmakers knew The Mitchells vs. The Machines would do better to focus on broader concepts over specific recreations (for example, incorporating the general idea of a face filter rather than trying to imitate an existing one), and to make sure their internet-inspired jokes would still work for people who didn’t get the reference.

“I’m thrilled that we aren’t just being pelted with tomatoes by the children of America for having outdated memes.”

In the end, however, what finally brings father and daughter together has nothing to do with newfangled technology. “The whole movie is trying to get these people to see the world from each other’s eyes,” says Rianda — and it’s not hard to imagine the meme-tastic aesthetic of The Mitchells vs. The Machines sparking similar understanding by clueless adults of a younger, more tech-savvy generation. 

For Katie and Rick, the reconciliation comes not a moment too soon: Their ultimate strategy for defeating the robot apocalypse combines Katie’s creativity and tech savvy (in the form of her popular “Dog Cop” YouTube videos) with Rick’s more analog tendencies (like his insistence on carrying a #3 Robertson head non-slip screwdriver everywhere he goes). Rick may never quite feel comfortable on the internet — his idea of “friending” someone involves snail-mailing a handwritten note halfway across the country — but he does, at least, come to accept that Katie and her generation do things differently. 

Including, for The Mitchells vs. The Machines, watching films like The Mitchells vs. The Machines. “There was a point where it’s like, How are we not going to have this in theaters? And I’m honestly so stoked that it’s been on Netflix, because so many people have seen it and engaged with it, and been able to pause it and look at the density of jokes,” says Rowe. 

“It’s just a new way to experience things that isn’t better or worse, it’s just different and exciting. Maybe better.”

The Mitchells vs. The Machines is now streaming on Netflix.