Director Robert Smigel on Choosing the Perspective of ‘Leo’

Robert Smigel co-wrote, directed, and lent his voice to the character of Miniature Horse in Leo. The animated musical comedy is currently streaming on Netflix.

Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Netflix

Jaded 74-year-old lizard Leo (Adam Sandler) has been stuck in the same Florida classroom for decades with his terrarium-mate turtle (Bill Burr). When he learns he only has one year left to live, he plans to escape to experience life on the outside but instead gets caught up in the problems of his anxious students — including an impossibly mean substitute teacher. It ends up being the strangest but most rewarding bucket list ever…

“[Adam] had an idea in his head to write a musical about kids in middle school, but it was a very, completely different story. It had a couple of elements in it, the kid who has a drone and the crazy kindergartners. There was a narrator, but it only happened once or twice in the whole movie and at the very end, it was revealed that it was a snake in the room and that triggered the whole story for me,” Smigel explained to me. “This whole thing felt like, ‘Okay, this is a nice, cute story,’ but it didn’t feel like an animated movie. Then I saw that little last part and I thought, ‘Okay, wait a minute, so he can be the observer and he can be very jaded at the very top of the movie,’ you know? Then we created this Bill Burr character, I love Bill Burr. I just loved the idea of starting from that point and then juxtaposing the snarky, jaded class pet who’s seen every kind of kid somehow connecting with these kids.”