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The Road to Lake Eerie The Addams Family 2’s co-director Conrad Vernon gives us the scoop on the kooky clan’s summer vacation sequel. By Michael Mallory
W
e’ve all heard about Okie families of the 1930s traveling across the country in hopes of putting their lives back together. This October, we’ll find out whether everyone is ready for an ooky family to do the same thing. The creepiest clan (not in politics) is hitting the open highway in The Addams Family 2, a sequel to the 2019 animated hit from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Bron Creative and Cinesite Animation. In its macabrely wacky way, The Addams Family — based on the ghoulish New Yorker panel cartoons of Charles Addams — has remained one of the most durable entertainment franchises of the last 60 years. The popular (and still aired) 1960s TV sitcom adaptation spawned various other TV incarnations (including an encounter with Scooby-Doo!), two live-action films, a Saturday morning cartoon show, a Broadway musical and, finally, an animated feature. For most of that time the family has stayed cloistered within their nightmarish, Victorian home. But thrusting them into the outside world through The Addams Family 2 was a prospect rife with comedic possibilities, according to Conrad Vernon, who co-directed the film with frequent collaborator Greg Tiernan and “co-cos” Laura Brousseau and Kevin Pavlovic.
A Family that Scares Together “Audiences really like watching the Addamses get into different situations and conversations with what we call normies … normal people,” says Vernon, who co-directed the 2019 Addams Family pic and is best known for co-directing features such as Shrek 2, Monsters vs. Aliens, Madagascar 3 and Sausage Party. Within the context of the story, the reason for the road trip is one with which most parents can identify. “It comes from Gomez’s worry that he is losing touch with his kids,” Vernon says. “He feels they’re starting to drift away as they get older. They don’t hang out in the house anymore and they don’t show up for dinner.” This is particularly true of Wednesday (voiced once more by Chloë Grace Moretz), who in this iteration is the elder sibling, an early teen, and who is experiencing what many girls of that age go through, albeit through a glass darkly. Pyrotechnically-precocious Pugsley, meanwhile, remains a destructive 10-year-old boy, though on an Addams-sized scale. In Addams Family 2, Javon “Wanna” Walton took over the voicing duties for the character from teen star Finn Wolfhard, whose voice had changed since the first film. Gomez’s solution for bringing the family closer together is to see the U.S.A. in his “Shiver-let,” a
suitably gruesome family camper. A major complication arises through the appearance of a mad scientist named Cyrus (voiced by Bill Hader), who not only claims to be Wednesday’s real father, but has DNA evidence to prove it! “Once they find out that Wednesday might not be their daughter, Gomez holds on twice as hard, and that only serves to push her away more,” Vernon says. Over the course of the trip, Gomez (voiced again by Oscar Isaac), Morticia (Charlize Theron), Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll), Lurch (Vernon himself), Wednesday and Pugsley, with scuttling disembodied hand Thing behind the wheel, visit such landmarks as Niagara Falls. (Bette Midler and Snoop Dogg also return as the voices of Grandmama and Cousin It, respectively, but they are not along for the entire ride.) While the characters remain stylized adaptations of Charles Addams’ original designs, the locations bear a photoreal quality … within reason. “The challenge was to exemplify these different locations as beautiful and spot-on as we could while keeping within the design style of our film,” Vernon states. “We didn’t want people coming in and saying, ‘That’s not the way the place looks!’” He praises the team led by production designer Patricia Atchison, who he states “did a phenomenal job bringing that shot
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september|october 21
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