Lindsey Olivares

As director Michael Rianda’s first hire, Olivares began with character design, sketching out the Mitchells and some scenario illustrations — like the family at the dinner table — for the pitch. At its core, the film is about embracing family and nurturing relationships with the people who matter to us — everything from the sets to the characters, the homemade cupcakes to the doodles on Katie’s palm, had to reflect that. “The movie is really about celebrating human imperfections, so it felt like Katie’s work should be good, but a little imperfect. She’s making cool things and is not inhibited by having to have them be perfect,” Olivares explained. Once the project was greenlit, she started the momentous task of bringing those sketches, and the Mitchell family, to life.

“What does the texture of skin look like? What does hair look like? Everything’s from scratch,” she says. “Everything is a choice, since you’re creating new worlds. There are a lot of things that are similar to live action where you’re kind of big picture — coming up with a visual structure and color scheme, and design elements — but you’re additionally thinking about things like, What’s the shape language of our movie?” Over a years-long process, Olivares and her team answered these questions to develop a cohesive, binary world of humans versus machines.

To create visual distinctions between the human world and that of the toasters, phones, and other suddenly sentient electronics, each group was assigned its own distinct palette. The look of the machines included bold neons and perfectly straight lines. The Mitchells’ world, by contrast, was designed imperfectly to reflect the family’s humanity: “Things are more lumpy and lines aren’t perfectly straight or parallel.” Olivares’s team used a hand-painted texture, to give a sense of unrefined beauty, a conscious choice that stands in contrast with traditional rendering techniques. “Hair can be rendered really beautifully. That’s a great 3-D achievement,” Olivares admits. “For some movies, that might be the perfect thing to do, but for our movie, anything that was too beautiful or glamorized didn’t feel right. The visual style needed to hold human stories, and that, to me, feels like someone whose hair is messy. That feels familiar.”

Artistic decisions, Olivares explains, ultimately come down to what kind of story you’re trying to tell; in the case of Mitchells, it’s one about human flaws and empathy. “Our worlds are a little crusty, or lived-in, or weird. I think it worked for the movie to highlight those things in a fond, loving way,” Olivares tells us.

The challenge came down to uniting the rigid lines of the robot world with the messy scribbles of the humans, into one cohesive visual story, a balancing act that came down to simplicity and editing. “If you edited things down so that everything felt drawn, it made them fit together — they just weren’t drawn by the same hand.” Rather than mimic reality, details like precise reflections on surfaces were swapped for hand-drawn swishes.

This hand-drawn approach, and mixing and matching of animation styles, extended to the amateur films that the main character makes. “We didn’t want Katie to look like she was a super professional person yet. It felt like she would be someone who was funny and had good ideas and just expressed herself without having to be perfect.” Her funny, homegrown storylines feel like something you’d stumble across on YouTube. Katie’s films used stickers and filters, much like you’d see on Instagram Stories. “Having them look like they were just grabbed off the Internet and done quickly felt like the right energy for it,” Olivares says. The process of making Katie’s short films was as loose and free as the films themselves. “The way we did it was a little scrappy,” Olivares says, recalling how the art team would make puppets and film them in her office, embracing the spontaneity. It felt “almost like a student film energy within a big studio, which I think is kind of rare.”

Olivares discussed her learnings as a first-time production designer and her gratitude for the stellar art team. “While you’re making all these mini decisions, it’s all building to something complete that ends up on screen.” It’s a matter of balancing, she says, and of putting characters first, always. “You have to set a lot of groundwork, and fight for things, and have a vision, but also just trust people,” she adds, “giving people all the tools and the rules, but then letting people really put the most of themselves into it, too.” Olivares sees so much of her crew in the final product, and she’s proud of that.