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Ryan Crego, the creator behind Netflix’s Arlo the Alligator Boy, shares a few secrets about his super fun new musical movie. By Tom McLean
“A
t heart, I’m a story person,” says Ryan Crego, creator, writer and director of the animated musical feature Arlo the Alligator Boy. “And so a lot of ideas really come from sketches rather than words. I just tend to find that that’s where I build characters and start to create stories, so that’s where Arlo came from.” When the movie premieres this month on Netflix, audiences will discover that Arlo is an unrelenting optimist. And his positivity is as infectious as the energetic, thoroughly modern pop tunes that propel his story through the feature and toward an upcoming follow-up series, titled I Heart Arlo. Arlo’s arrival has been a long time coming for Crego, who first came up with the character more than 10 years ago. Crego says his initial pitch for an Arlo project was rejected back then and he shelved it for several years before returning to the optimistic little ‘gator from the swamp.
A Pure Heart vs. the World The character was inspired by Crego’s love for movies like Elf, where a pure-hearted character is thrown out into the world to see how they measure up. Crego says Arlo was his first attempt at pitching a movie, and looking back at it, he understands why his original version failed to gain traction. “I go back and look at that now and I just think I didn’t know what I was doing, and I get why no one wanted it,” he says. When finishing his commitments for other projects, Crego says his wife suggested he revisit the project. “I was like, ’Yeah, but I can think of something fresh! I need something new,’” he says. But revisiting it with new skills and a fresh perspective revealed the project’s potential. ”I kind of realized I never really fleshed it out the way that it could have been fleshed out,” he says. ”And then I just fell in love with the world again, and the characters again, and really started to build the journey out.” The movie kicks things off with Arlo, voiced
by singer and American Idol contestant Michael J. Woodard, set adrift at birth in a basket that floats downriver until it delivers him to the swamps of Louisiana, where he’s taken in by kindly Edmée, voiced by Annie Potts. Arlo grows up happy until Edmée reveals the truth about Arlo’s origin and his parents, prompting him to leave home for New York City in search of his real father, wealthy Ansel Beauregard, voiced by Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Vincent Rodriguez III. Along the way, Arlo meets friends and foes. The former include Bertie, voiced by singer Mary Lambert, a mountain of a girl with a heart to match; an oddball fur ball named Furlecia, voiced by Jonathan Ness of Queer Eye; cat girl Alia, voiced by Haley Tju; an elf with an Italian-American perspective on life, Teeny Tiny Tony, voiced by Tony Hale; and man-fish Marcellus, voiced by Brett Gelman of Stranger Things fame. Opposing them are Stucky, voiced by Jennifer Coolidge; and Ruff, voiced by the
www.animationmagazine.net 10
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may 21
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