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Writer-director Mike Rianda gives us a special sneak peek at his inventive, funny and ultimately poignant family feature The Mitchells vs. the Machines. By Ramin Zahed
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riter-director Mike Rianda has a lot of great memories growing up with his brother and sister in a tightly knit family in Salinas, Calif. He also loves dinosaurs, robots, apocalyptic movies and pop culture. You can find a lot of his favorite things in the hilarious and highly original new animated feature The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Although the theatrical release of the Sony Pictures Animation title (which was renamed Connected for a while) fell victim to the pandemic last fall, audiences can finally enjoy the feature when it premieres on Netflix in May. Rianda, who was the creative director on Disney Channel’s acclaimed series Gravity Falls, recalls how he came up with the idea for the movie back in December 2014. “I wanted to make the kind of animated movie that my friends and I would want to see,” he explains. “I remember taking a long car drive from L.A. to Salinas, so I turned on my tape recorder and came up with the story that eventually became this movie. I love my own weird family, and I love robots. My own dad (who is the in-
spiration for Rick Mitchell, the father in the movie) is an outdoors person, and he hates technology so much. I thought it would be really funny if he was caught up in a robocalypse. I also know that every family is dealing with technology and how it can come between parents and their kids. So all these ideas merged
together as I sat down to write the movie.” The film, which is co-directed by Jeff Rowe (writer on Gravity Falls and Disenchantment), follows the adventures of a typical suburban family who take a road trip to drop off artistic older daughter Katie (Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson) at film school in California. However, they
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may 21
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