Seth Rogen Says 'Specificity' Will Make 'Tangles' Resonate

Seth Rogen told the Middleburg Film Festival this weekend that a hand-drawn, black-and-white animated film about Alzheimer's disease appealed to him precisely because it was unlike anything else on a screen. "Tangles," directed by Leah Nelson and written with Sarah Leavitt and Trev Renney, follows a woman who returns to her small conservative town to care for her mother, who has Alzheimer's.

Rogen produced the film with his wife, director Lauren Miller Rogen. The couple's involvement grew out of their advocacy work for Alzheimer's research. They met Nelson and Leavitt — author of the graphic novel the film adapts, "Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother and Me" — at a charity event, then stayed in touch to develop the adaptation and fundraise for it over time.

Why keep it animated?

Rogen said Nelson and her co-writers came to the producers wanting animation from the start. "Truthfully, they came to us wanting it to be animated. It was based on a graphic novel. They had a look, they had a vision," he said. "And rather than try to poke holes in that, we all chose to support it."

He admitted the choice could have been argued down. "You probably could have talked them out of this," Rogen said of the film's format. "You probably could have argued there are surreal sequences [that] you could probably do in live-action if you really wanted to. There's visual effects, you can make a wave come into a room. It's not impossible."

Instead, he framed restraint as his method. "To me, animation is a medium and it is my instinct to trust the creative ambitions and instincts of the people that I work with and to not question them too much, honestly," Rogen said.

What does specificity buy a film?

Rogen's answer: instant recognizability. "The more I make things, the word 'specificity' is the thing that I am telling the people I work with the most to seek," he said. "Animation, that's specific, black and white, that's specific. Hand drawn, that's specific. And I think in art, the more specific art is, the more it seems to resonate."

He reached for two names from painting to make the point. "Andy Warhol isn't the best painter. He's one of the most specific painters. Jackson Pollock you can argue is not even a good painter, but it's unbelievably specific. You see it, you know who did it right away," Rogen said.

Applied to "Tangles," the test is blunt. "You could put 10 movies on the screen. If this was one of them, the specificity of it is what would make you instantly recognize it," he said.

The Oscar runway

"Tangles" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. IFC acquired it in August — a timing Rogen's team no doubt noticed leaves room to mount a Best Animated Feature Oscar campaign.

The voice cast includes Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein and Rogen himself. Whether an adult drama in monochrome can survive an awards field built for studio animation is the open question; the source does not say how the campaign will position it.

What the film does have is a distributor, a festival pedigree and a producer arguing that distinction itself is the strategy. The next test comes when voters, not festival audiences, decide how far specificity carries it.