Tom & Jerry Director Reveals Film’s Biggest Influences

The director of the new Tom & Jerry revealed the movie’s biggest influences. Tim Story is excited for the world to see the latest version of these 80-year-old characters. The filmmaker talked to IGN about how Who Framed Roger Rabbit made a major imprint on him. Tom & Jerry marries the live-action and animation together in a similar fashion. If you’re going to go for a kids movie that mixes both styles, Roger Rabbit would be a clear end goal. But, that wouldn’t stop with just the special effect, the older film also had to make us of some legacy cartoon icons. So, you have to be respectful to the legacy of Hanna-Barbera when approaching a new take. He says that they made a special effort to go and look back before embarking on this journey.

“[Who Framed Roger Rabbit?] was the main one that I went back and checked out,” Story told them. “I must admit, in the world we were trying to create, which many hybrids haven’t done recently, which is to try to recreate the 2D animation with ‘the human world’ or ‘the real world,’ and that’s exactly what we were trying to do. We wanted to be sure that we always kept these two existences, as you might say, separate and let them have their own set of rules. So that was the main thing.”

“And then the other thing I went to was the original shorts,” he continued. “I went back and watched most, if not all, of the original Hanna-Barbera shorts and that’s kind of where I left it. I think pulling from the Roger Rabbit of it all was just kind of right on point, for what I needed.”

Colin Jost also mentioned Roger Rabbit as a big inspiration for taking on this project too.

“I really like the world of seeing 2D animation brought into a live-action world,” Jost said. “You know, in a Roger Rabbit way? That was something that really appealed to me. I just hadn’t seen it in so long. I love Tim Storey as a director, so I wanted to work with him. As the cast came together, I really liked my castmates. It was really fun and funny to work in scenes with Chloe, and Michael Pena, and Rob Delaney and Paula V. I don’t know, it was like a good vibe on set. I think we found a lot of extra stuff. I really like the idea of creating this world, especially for younger people who are going to be watching the movie. And families that are going to be watching the movie. It felt like a total escape, there was a real magic to having these cartoon characters live in a hotel in New York City.”

Have you watched Tom & Jerry now? Let us know down in the comments!