Seth Rogen’s Animated ‘Tangles’: Why Its Specific Storytelling Will Deeply Resonate

Seth Rogen on Tangles: Why an Unconventional, Hand-Drawn Animation Felt Right

At the Middleburg Film Festival, producer Seth Rogen explained why he backed Tangles, a hand-drawn, black-and-white animated drama about a woman who returns to her conservative hometown to care for her mother living with Alzheimer’s. Rogen described the filmmakers’ creative choices — from its graphic-novel origins to its visual style — as assets rather than obstacles.

Trusting the filmmakers’ instincts

Rogen said his instinct is to respect and follow the creative ambitions of collaborators, even when those instincts differ from his own. “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,” he told the festival audience. He added that he’s learned to commit to other people’s visions rather than try to talk them out of choices that might seem arguable on paper.

He noted that some of Tangles’ surreal moments could theoretically be staged in live action with visual effects — “You probably could have talked them out of this. 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.” — but that arguing for a different format wasn’t the right response. Instead, he and his producing partner, Lauren Miller Rogen, chose to support director Leah Nelson and co-writers Sarah Leavitt and Trev Renney in following the look and tone they wanted.

Why the format matters

Rogen emphasized that specificity — the deliberately chosen characteristics that make a work unmistakable — is what gives art its power. “The more I make things, the word ‘specificity’ is the thing that I am telling the people I work with the most to seek and to try to create in their own work,” he said. He pointed to animation, black-and-white photography and hand-drawn craft as specific decisions that help viewers immediately identify the film: “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.”

To illustrate the idea, Rogen referenced well-known visual artists: “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.” In the same way, Rogen believes a single frame of Tangles should feel distinct and recognizable.

How Rogen and Miller Rogen became involved

The move to produce Tangles grew out of the couple’s advocacy for Alzheimer’s research. Rogen and his wife met Leah Nelson and Sarah Leavitt — the latter wrote the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me — at a charity event. They stayed in contact, helped shepherd the screen adaptation, and participated in fundraising for the project over time. That relationship and shared interest in the subject made producing the film a natural fit.

About the film and its rollout

Tangles is an adaptation of Leavitt’s graphic memoir and uses a stripped-down visual approach to tell its intimate story. The voice cast includes Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein and Seth Rogen. The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was picked up by IFC in August; the distributor later positioned the film for a Best Animated Feature Oscar campaign.

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Claude Merritt

Claude Merritt explores the world of entertainment with a keen eye. From music to film, TV series, and popular culture, he covers celebrity news and American cultural trends with a lively and critical approach.