Spellbound: Shrek director Vicky Jenson on her new animation

“I loved fairy tales as a kid,” says Vicky Jenson, writer and director of new Netflix and Skydance fantasy animation, Spellbound, landing on Netflix today. “I liked really dark ones. I like it when the character has things to overcome, they have a deep wish and a spell makes that possible.”

It’s not really surprising that Jenson is a fan of fairy tales – she played around with the genre in her directing debut, Shrek, back in 2001 (which she co-directed with Andrew Adamson), though she’s been involved in animation for longer than that. 

“I kind of came up through the ranks,” she explains. “I was a cell painter for my brother-in-law and my sister’s little animation company, doing commercials and that led to one of my earliest jobs as a background painter on The Smurfs. So while I didn’t exactly get to paint on movies, I did carve a name for myself in some kind of influential relics like He-Man And The Masters Of Universe and Ren And Stimpy, which really helped me shape my sense of color. But it was working on He-Man as a story artist that sparked my interest in directing. So while I pursued avenues for that kind of unsuccessfully for a while, I jumped a lot between art directing and storyboarding, which gave me a really good foundation for directing.”

After Shrek, Jenson would go on to direct Shark Tale in 2004 and then move on to live action series and movies. Spellbound lured Jenson back into animation, though it’s been a long process from that very first conversation to what we’ll see this November on Netflix.

“It’s been over almost seven years since Skydance first approached me on this project,” she remembers. “It’s been amazing. I was drawn to the story right from the start. I’m kind of known for a modern take on fairy tales but the thing is, this movie is more of a fairy tale take on a very modern story.” 

Spellbound follows the adventures of Ellian, the tenacious young daughter of the rulers of Lumbria who must go on a daring quest to save her family and kingdom after a mysterious spell transforms her parents into monsters. Yep, in this story, the princess is the one saving the day! Her mission to restore her parents to their original form leads her not only on a long physical journey but an emotional one where she discovers that not everything can go back to the way they were when she was little… and that’s okay.

“Fairy tales define through allegory, truths about the many different stages of being a human,” Jensen explains. “We started with familiar things like a kingdom, a king, a queen, a princess and a spell. And we use those well loved elements to craft a new allegory and a new myth about family, and what truly binds us together, even as things in that family might change.”

Playing the central character of Ellian is Rachel Zegler who Jensen says was perfect for the role. 

“It was important that the world of Spellbound be colorful, but also representative of a world like ours, where there are all different kinds of people, shapes, sizes, and colours. So we peopled our kingdom of Lumbria in a really colorful way. And it started with our cast. We discovered Rachel Ziegler very early. I like to think we discovered her when Steven Spielberg did because we found her online before she started shooting West Side Story. She’s an amazing singer, an amazing actress, and one of the most professional people I’ve ever met. We met her at probably 18 or 19 years old, and some of the recordings that she did for us that early are still in the movie. She was perfect for our character of Ellian, who is just on the cusp of becoming a young woman.”

Zegler is joined by an equally impressive cast including John Lithgow as Ellian’s side-kick/advisor Bolinar, Tituss Burgess and Nathan Lane as the two magical oracles who set her on her adventure, and Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as Ellian’s parents, Queen Ellsmere and King Solon.

“Javier really wanted to understand the character of the father and what his personality might be like. He wanted to do his own monster noises, and we kept a lot of them, so he informed [the animation] right from the get go. Animation follows. We don’t animate first and then do the ADR on top. It’s their performance that leads the animators. So they are the characters before the animators even get their hands on them.”

The big names don’t stop there. Not only does Spellbound have the co-director of Shrek and an impressive voice cast, but its songs have been composed by the one and only Alan Menken, the man behind classic animated musicals like Beauty And The Beast, The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. For Spellbound, Menken has worked with lyricist Glenn Slater, who worked on Tangled and Ralph Breaks The Internet.

Strangely enough, it was never intended that Spellbound was to have musical numbers in it: “The movie did not start as a musical,” Jensen confirms. “But one night at dinner the head of creative, Bill Damaschke, just said ‘what about a musical?’ And from that moment there was no turning back. It was so early in the stages of the film that it was perfect timing. 

“I can’t say enough about how amazing Alan and Glenn have been. We’ve been joking that this movie has taken a long time, seven years, but Skydance gave the movie the attention it needed and the time for these guys to do what they know how to do. The songs went through the same evolutions as our story, but they were always part of the story. There’s this saying that when the feelings are too big to speak, you sing, and the feelings in this movie are really big!”

Indeed, Ellian’s journey takes an unexpected turn and for Jensen, she hopes that the movie will give families the opportunity to sit and talk about some big things. “There are a lot of things that make up a family, and a lot of ways a family is a family,” she says. “It’s really love that is the spell that holds us all together, no matter what that family looks like.

“I really hope that families – adults and kids alike – will go home and talk about that.”

Spellbound is out now on Netflix