EXCLUSIVE: Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken has a lot going for her.
For starters, says the film’s director Kirk DeMicco (Vivo, The Croods), “she’s a princess, a superhero” and the first female titular character for a DreamWorks Animation movie.
Of course, there have been female lead characters in DreamWorks animated pictures, “but this is the first time where we said the story really is hers,” adds co-director Faryn Pearl (Trolls World Tour). “We changed the title from The Gillmans to Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken because it felt that we really wanted to celebrate that it’s her story, it’s her journey. And she’s our superhero, really.”
Alfred Tennyson wrote a sonnet called “The Kraken” — “far beneath the abysmal sea,” it sleepeth — and the mythical sea creature has made terrifying guest appearances in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the animated movie Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation and other deep-sea escapades made for the screen over the years.
Poor krakens. They’ve had the most awful reputation to deal with these past few centuries; all those arms and legs flailing about in the ocean depths.
But having spent awhile getting to know her during a scoring session at the fabled Abbey Road Studios in London (yeah, yeah, yeah, the Beatles recorded there), Ruby Gillman seems like such a nice young girl.
That’s how we’re first introduced to her; she’s a 16-year-old high school student living in the seafaring town of Oceanside. You know, the kind of place where pupils take a boat to school.
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken debuts at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival on Thursday, June 15, and will be theatrically released worldwide on June 30.
Ruby’s an ordinary girl living under extraordinary circumstances. “She’s quirky and lovable and empathetic — empathy is her superpower– she has a wonderful group of friends, but she has a secret that she’s hiding from the world,” ,” says Kelly Cooney, the film’s producer. “That secret becomes too big to hide anymore.”
Cooney describes her as “a really normal teenager” who then finds out she’s a kraken, this monster creature from the deep. “I think with anyone with any insecurity about something, that feels, for her, literally monstrous,” Clooney adds.
Ruby struggles with that identity: When she comes into contact with salt water, she becomes a kraken.
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The film’s really about how Ruby, voiced by Lana Condor (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) comes to terms with being different, “so it’s that idea of embracing your monstrous side in a way, or what other people would think is monstrous, really,” notes Cooney. “I think that’s a huge journey and kind of goal for her.”
Ruby can’t tell her friends who she really is. It’s easy for her overprotective mum, voiced by Toni Collette (Knives Out, Hereditary), because she knows she’s a sea monster. But like any parent, she’s concerned that people won’t accept her daughter for who she really is.
We’re always afraid of that unknown, aren’t we? That kid with dark blue spots when all the other kids have light blue spots.
“Yeah, and something that maybe society doesn’t deem normal,” Cooney observes.
“I mean,” she adds “we have so many different people, artists on this crew, and it’s funny because I’ve noticed that everyone relates to Ruby, but they relate in a different way. They have a different quality that they kind of project as, ‘This is how I came to accept it.’ I think it’s just universal, that struggle.”
Ruby’s grandmama, voiced by Oscar winner Jane Fonda, is The Warrior Queen of the Seven Seas, and as you can imagine, “she tolerates no nonsense,” cautions DeMicco.
DeMicco’s mother was born and raised in Falmouth, Cornwall, and DiMicco spent summer holidays with his grandparents in the West Country, where he ate Cornish pasties, scones with cream and jam, and attention was paid to the late Queen and the Royal Family.
DeMicco grew up to understand that the Queen “and I mean Queen Elizabeth II, was definitely not to be trifled with, and there’s a flavor of that in the film.”
The Warrior Queen wants to impart some of her wisdom to Ruby. But it’s not all cut and dried because Ruby’s mum and grandmama don’t rub along so well, and in casting Collette and Fonda, there was a super opportunity for them to ”get their moment and they fight like cats and dogs, and then they make up,” says DeMicco.
The point of it all was to be able to show that we’re all flawed.
For instance, the town loves mermaids. The Oceanside High mascot is an emblem of a mermaid, but the idea of the sea goddesses as creatures of perfection is flipped on its head.
Chelsea, the gorgeous gal the local lads adore, voiced by Annie Murphy, “is this sort of idealized version and the way that people immediately just fawn over her and treat her almost like a TikTok star,” explains Cooney. But Chelsea ain’t as lovable as she looks. Literature tells us that mermaids have a dark side.
Spoiler: Watch that Chelsea, carefully.
But if looks are superficial and it’s what’s inside that counts, you know that score, right? It was, nonetheless, important to make Ruby’s transformation from teenager to monster as alluring as possible. “I think one of our challenges in designing her as a character is, how do you make a kraken beautiful? How do you make that big, bold character that historically, as it’s been portrayed in movies, really look like a monster,” Cooney queried.
Well, hire Pierre-Oliver Vincent (Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, How to Train Your Dragon) as your production designer and have faith that he will do an “incredible job of making it so beautiful and so magical and that big is beautiful. So, again, we’re flipping the expectations of what we’ve come to understand is the ideal,” says Cooney.
Kelly thinks a lot of Ruby’s appeal is down to Condor’s performance. “The character design is that she’s such a charming, appealing character that you just immediately, within the first few minutes of the movie, you’re immediately on her side and rooting for her.”
Sitting in a control room at Abbey Road Studios with DeMicco, Cooney and Pearl, as we watch composer Stephanie Economou add her musical colors to the film, I get an intimate sense of who Ruby Gillman is. The trailer caught me unawares, and it’s rare that I’m so struck by an animated movie about a teenage girl but, it has many layers that intrigue me.
And now I’m seeing more footage as drums and percussion orchestrator Hal Rosenfeld and Scott Michael Smith record and mix the score, painstakingly listening out for any discordant note.
Now and again they’ll holler for more brass when Ruby jumps in the sea to save her beau (it’s in the trailer). ”That’s some good tuba,” Pearl roars in appreciation.
Economou’s having a ball conducting “some of the best musicians in the world in one of the best rooms in the world,” and she has enjoyed weaving orchestral and dream pop colors into the score. Her husband Jon Monroe plays guitar, and he’s one of three key soloists on the score, which is what he did on her composition for Jupiter’s Legacy.
“Faryn, Kelly and Kirk,” she tells me, urged her to ”do my thing with the music.”
Although the movie’s quietly underpinned by a sense of female empowerment, it doesn’t shove that view in your face.
Economou agrees. “I feel like there was a at one point a discussion of, ‘Oh, well, this song, maybe we should have a female singer,’ and they said, ‘It doesn’t have to be that.’ It doesn’t have to be so literal that we have a woman singing on top of the scene with Ruby. We can have men, we can have it all. It’s so clear what the theme of this film is, and it is the beauty of the three generations of women. But how do we create the depth there? We don’t need to be so heavy-handed with the power of feminism in this, it’s already there for you.”
DeMicco jokes that the film goes as deep as you want “it’s like a James L. Brooks’ movie hidden inside an animated movie.”
It’s that sensibility that gives the film, or what I’ve seen of it, its stamp of originality.
And it’s part of a plan, says Margie Cohn, president of DreamWorks Animation.
The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish exemplified “our new vision for DreamWorks Animation,” Cohn wrote me in an email.
That vision was to “expand, reimagine and celebrate our existing franchises while forging a bold patch with daring, delightful and deeply personal new original new films,” Cohn explains, “each with the potential to ignite new franchises to be enjoyed by generations to come..”
Cohn notes, the intergenerational story of of Ruby Gillman “taps into the cultural chorus surrounding teen empowerment, and we feel that Ruby has the potential to become the girl-power movie of the summer.”
During our conversation at Abbey Road, Cooney notes that ”one of the very cool parts of our studio [DreamWorks] is that we are given a very open play … just freedom to try different styles and really make a movie feel like its own specific thing” and that Pierre-Oliver Vincent and Carlos Fernandez Puertolas were given the freedom to create “an animation style that’s completely different than any of the other movies at our studio,” she adds.
“I think the fact that we are given that very long leash with it has really made so many different kinds of special projects.”
And the fact that there’s “no house style,” as DeMicco put it, “that helps the artist feel free to invent and to explore and to express themselves.”
In this day and age, it’s tricky releasing an original movie of any stripe, but the Universal animated studios — DreamWorks and Illumination Entertainment — have become rather good at it, though they’re developed with all due care. Of course they are.
Now, just to be clear about Ruby and her family: Ruby has two arms and three leg tentacles, as a kraken. Her mother has four, and grandma has five, though Pearl says it’s six.
Apparently kraken grow more tentacles as they grow older.
“Who even knows how old grandmama is? You know, she’s maybe hundreds of years old. We haven’t talked about that,” DeMicco laughs.
Ruby has to go away from her home to find out who she really is, and I idly wondered if there was any echo of, say, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, who had to depart the UK to be more clear about who they are and what they stand for.
Cooney nods that there’s “some art imitating life there, yeah.”