The noted actor and comedian teams up with fellow ‘SNL’ alum Robert Smigel, of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog fame, to produce the clever and charming coming-of-age animated musical comedy about a 74-year-old iguana plotting an escape from his decades-long classroom terrarium home, only to find himself dispensing funny and actually sound advice to a bunch of elementary school kids, debuting today on Netflix.
Hitting Netflix today is Leo, a clever and charming coming-of-age animated musical comedy starring noted actor and comedian Adam Sandler as a curmudgeonly 74-year-old iguana, stuck living for decades in an elementary school class terrarium, who plots his escape – complete with an odd bucket list - after learning he only has one year to live. At the same time, he can’t help but offer friendly advice to a bunch of kids who each must take him home for a weekend, only to discover – and swear to keep secret – that he can talk.
Sandler is no stranger to animation, having served as writer, executive producer, and voice of Dracula in various combinations of Sony Pictures Animation’s highly successful Hotel Transylvania franchise.
Smigel, of course, is the brilliant, multiple Emmy Award-winning writer, producer, and comedian behind Saturday Night Live’s famous Saturday TV Funhouse animated shorts (alongside J. J. Sedelmaier), including The Ambiguously Gay Duo, that ran first on The Dana Carvey Show before moving over to Saturday Night Live. A writer and executive producer (along with Sandler) on Hotel Transylvania, he’s equally famous for his work as Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, a savagely funny, foul-mouthed puppet whose savage mocking of celebrities in the style of a Catskill comedian is legendary.
They both know funny.
Maybe it’s not that much of a stretch – well, OK, it’s quite a stretch – to imagine Smigel channeling his well-known snarky, off-color wit into an animated movie both kids and adults will enjoy that isn’t yet another safe and sane animated family eye-rolling snoozer. And Leo, an animated labor of love he wrote with Sandler and directed with David Wachtenheim and Robert Marianetti (also of Saturday TV Funhouse fame), brings a bit of that SNL humor to the film. Bill Burr, playing Squirtle the terrarium-mate turtle, Jason Alexander as Jayda’s Dad, and Cecily Strong as an impossibly mean substitute teacher, help things move along in fun fashion.
“What I love about the movie,” Smigel told AWN, “is that it's looking at every character with a somewhat, I don't want to say ‘snarky,’ but ‘knowing’ eye, and laughing a little bit at everybody, like Leo. And we set Leo and Squirtle up as being jaded and snarky, providing them the opportunity to make fun of the kids by pigeonholing them. And then we see the kids, and there's a little bit of laughing at them and their parents. My kids were in fourth grade when I started writing this. I love the idea that kids' problems at that age that are just the biggest thing in the world to them seem trivial to us.”
He continues, “I loved the idea of a character, a class pet, being able to give advice to the funniest, most minute kind of problems because he's seen every problem a kid's had in the last 75 years. And that really stuck with me.”
The idea for the film gestated with Sandler for eight years. “Basically, I had the idea of looking at an elementary school graduation, almost like in Grease, the kids’ last year of elementary school, and how you're moving on to the big leagues after that,” he shares. “And me and my friend, Paul Sado, were working on that idea. And then I told Robert Smigel about it, and he said, ‘What about if you do it that year, but through the eyes of a class pet that's been involved in that grade forever?’ And we got excited, and that's when everything got flowing.”
Returning to animation full force after his 2018 Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation effort, Sandler explains that, though difficult, the effort was highly enjoyable. “You know what? Hotel T [released in 2012], Sony at the time had that idea, and they brought us on. And we had the best time doing Hotel T, by the way, working with Gendy [Tartakovsky] and everybody over at Sony. But this one, I had this idea for, I don't even know, eight years or something, and then we finally stumbled upon the proper way to do it.”
“And just the day-to-day world of making this movie, it was long, and it was hard,” he adds. “But the fact that creatively, every day you can attack a new idea, or a new thought, and try to squeeze it in, and everybody works as a team together to do it. And when you get to the finish line, there is so much pride with everyone who worked on it. Every department, every person. It was a great team effort, and that's nice.”
Smigel notes, “Well, to be honest, my first passion was animation as a child. Or cartoons. The first time I thought I had any kind of talent at anything was when I drew Fred Flintstone when I was five years old. And actually, I was a very good cartoonist when I was a kid. I became obsessed with ‘Peanuts’ in particular. And that was my dream - to be a cartoonist - when I was like seven years old. So, this is just coming full circle for me. I love cartoons, obviously. I did them at Saturday Night Live forever. Those were for a completely different purpose. That gave me the ability to go crazier and do even cruder, insane concepts that you can get away with in cartoon form. Now I have kids, and I'm writing about my life to some degree.”
Describing his extensive involvement as one of the film’s writers, producers, and stars, Sandler concludes he got the most satisfaction from “the Zoom calls we were all on. There's so many of us on a call, and everybody is dialing in the proper and best way to attack a scene and make it look as funny as possible. I have to tell you, at the end of the day, that was my favorite part of the whole process.”
Leo is now streaming on Netflix. Don’t miss it!
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
