Mike Rianda puts an ordinary, bickering family in a car, ends the world around them and draws the result in felt-tip. On one feature and a season of Gravity Falls, he writes families better than most and does not yet know when to stop.
Fi1m perspective
Katie Mitchell makes films in the garage with a pug, some cardboard and a great deal of felt-tip, and her father cannot open a laptop without breaking it. That is Mike Rianda's whole method in one shot: take a family you recognise, give them a gadget they cannot work, and let the doodles run over the edge of the frame. He has said he wanted The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) to feel "just as imperfect and weird and messed up as your family", and the drawing agrees with him. The humans wobble; the robots do not.
He is a writer with one feature and a season of television to his name, so this is a view of a beginning. He was a writer and creative director on the first season of Gravity Falls (2012), Alex Hirsch's series about twins in a strange Oregon town, and voiced a handful of its townsfolk. The writers' room there let children be selfish, wrong and occasionally cruel, and then let them notice, and the habit has stayed with him. The Mitchells vs. the Machines, written and directed with Jeff Rowe and produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, took about six years from pitch to screen. Since then he has lent voices and advice to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023), other people's films.
What he does well is fathers. Rick Mitchell fixes things with a screwdriver because he cannot fix them with words, and Danny McBride plays him half a step behind his own daughter and aware of it. Rianda has said his own father wanted to go hunting when he wanted to be an artist, and you can hear it in every line Rick fails to finish. There is a moment in the second half, involving an old camcorder, that we will not describe. We had braced for the lesson and were handed a father's face instead, and in a film this loud it caught us out; it is the one place the film goes quiet, and it is the best thing in it. The production design, by Lindsey Olivares, draws felt-tip over the end of the world until it looks like something Katie might have made in the garage.
What he does less well is stop. The film is twenty minutes longer than it needs to be, its jokes arrive at a volume that leaves no room to notice the good ones, and its story goes exactly where anyone who has seen a family cartoon expects. Rianda himself voices Aaron, the small boy who rings strangers to ask whether they would like to talk about dinosaurs, and there is something of Aaron in the writing. It is sincere, it is charming, and it has not learnt to tell when the other person has stopped listening.
One film is not a career. But it is a film we would put on for a family evening without apology, and a writer who can make a father's face the point of a robot apocalypse is worth waiting for. The next one should be quieter. We doubt it will be.
Biography
Michael Rianda, also credited as Mike Rianda, is an American cartoonist, director, screenwriter and voice actor. Born on 25 December 1984 in Salinas, California, he studied character animation at the California Institute of the Arts, where he made the short films Everybody Dies in 90 Seconds (2008) and Work (2010).
Rianda worked on the animated series Gravity Falls (2012–2016) as a writer and creative director for season 1, and as creative consultant for season 2. He also provided voices for characters including Lee, Thompson and Mr Poolcheck.
His feature directorial debut was the animated film The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021), which he co-wrote and in which he voiced Aaron Mitchell. He has provided additional voices for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023).
