ANIMATION IS THE MOST TIMELESS KIND OF STORYTELLING

Divisions between red and blue, left and right, wokes and deplorables fall away when we collectively gather in a movie theater to hear stories of inner emotions transformed into quippy cartoons, to watch the adventures of elemental gods and sentient robots (or sentient garden gnomes), to ponder the marvels of real-world creativity through the medium of children's building blocks. THR invited the directors of some of the biggest and buzziest animated films in this year's awards season - Josh Cooley, director of Paramount's Transformers One; Kelsey Mann, the helmer behind Pixar's Inside Out 2, the highest-grossing animated film of all time; Dana Ledoux Miller, one of the directors of Disney's Moana 2 (along with David Derrick and Jason Hand); Morgan Neville, who helmed Piece by Piece, the Focus Features' Legoanimated documentary about the life of Pharrell Williams; Nick Park, co-director (with Merlin Crossingham) of the Netflix claymation film Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl; and Chris Sanders, director of Universal Pictures' The Wild Robot - about personal inspiration, technical challenges (including shooting the first Lego drug deal) and why, despite the looming threat of AI, the future of animation looks brighter than ever. Just everything in camera, people flying airplanes through billboards. Josh, was it robots that drove you to Transformers One? COOLEY The idea was that this was totally different from all the other Transformers films because it was only on [the Transformers' home planet] Cybertron.