We interview co-creator, co-director and producer Josh Nelson Youssef and producer Phil Robertson on the making of Nevatars, working with Andy Serkis, mixed reality, embracing imperfection, and more.
For years, aspiring artist Aya (Leah Abraham) has been devoting all her energies to creating quirky digital avatars that reflected the most intimate parts of herself. When the time comes to show her art to the world, Aya decides to hide her past work and start making art that comes not from her own creative needs but from her desire to fit in. But just when she has finally created Hauser (Daisy Ridley), her very own “perfect” avatar – who’s actually more of a generic, futuristic Tron-like hero with no defining traits – she accidentally drops her into her “Nevatars” folder, where all her old creations are stuck, knowing all too well they’ll be destined for the recycle bin. But that day hasn’t come yet, and our protagonist’s flawed, lovable creations are determined to get out of there, and more than happy to return Hauser to her rightful folder too.
And so, guided by a ruthless antivirus bot named Wasam (Andy Serkis) who occasionally makes us part of the narrative too, we meet a cute marshmallow named Marshy (Kelly Marie Tran), a sketchy but incredibly detailed black-and-white character named Trace (Josh Gad), a colorful, larger-than-life cow in a kilt named Yarna (Aisling Bea), a kindhearted elderly lady with fluffy pigtail buns and a mad-scientist vibe named Kooks (Kathleen Turner), and the appropriately named Farty McFly (Steve Zahn), who’d look like a blend of a Mandalorian and Marty’s “Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan” if the bottom half of his body wasn’t stuck in a toilet. As all these wonderfully resourceful, empathetic avatars team up to escape the “Nevatars” folder, they might just manage to reach Aya in time to remind her of who she is.
Born out of a collaboration between production studio The Imaginarium, founded by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish; Boona, Josh Nelson Youssef’s production company dedicated to developing story-first experiences across film, XR, and emerging media; and 100 Zeros, Google’s immersive production division, Nevatars is a mixed-reality work co-created and co-directed by Serkis and Youssef. It was one of two works at Venice Immersive that used Google’s XREAL Aura smart glasses, which remove the need for a bulky headset while also allowing for interesting uses of depth. It’s a seated experience, but a highly immersive one; this ode to creation and individuality invites us to embrace the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, reminding us that it’s our flaws that make us who we are. It might seem predictable or clichéd, but it’s this story’s simplicity that gives it a heart, and you might even find yourself tearing up.
At the Venice Film Festival, we sat down for an interview with director, writer and producer Josh Nelson Youssef and producer Phil Robertson. Here’s what they told us about embracing imperfection, bringing the story to life in mixed reality, the “Nevatars” themselves, and more.
“It Was a Match Made in Heaven.” – Josh Nelson Youssef & Phil Robertson on the Origins of Nevatars
Congratulations for Nevatars! How did it all come together? What was the first idea behind it?
Phil Robertson: What came first is what it says on the trailer, which is “from the mind of Andy Serkis.” [smiles] Andy has been thinking about this for years. He’s always wondered, a bit like if you’re a writer, what happens to those stories that sit at the bottom of the drawer and never see the light of day?
And that expanded to: what if you were a character artist, and you had all of those drawings and pieces of art that you’d created over time but had never shown to anyone? Where do they go? They go into an old file somewhere on your computer that is likely never to see the day. But what if those characters were able to see the day?
That was the genesis of the story, and he’d always been looking for a way to make it. Andy has consistently been at the forefront of new technology and cinema, combining the two and wanting to tell stories in a very forward-thinking way. Suddenly, an opportunity arose where, in this mixed-reality world, which is now increasingly more prevalent and easier to find and consume, he realized that there was an opportunity to tell this story.
Enter our marvelous colleague Josh, who lives and breathes this world! We met with Josh because we were looking for a partner, so we partnered with both Josh as a director in his own right and his company, Boona, which works in this space. Then Google came along: they wanted to work with Imaginarium and Andy and asked us if we had anything that we might be able to make. And Nevatars found a home.
How did you approach the project when you first became involved, Josh?
Josh Nelson Youssef: It was a match made in heaven, truly. It’s very rare that, from a first conversation – when I had the privilege of first getting to meet with Andy and the Imaginarium team – it was clear that we were unified in our vision.
Andy has such an incredible legacy of utilizing technology in a way where it disappears and the performance comes through; the humanity comes through. With a technology like mixed reality, there’s a great opportunity to bring that humanity and that sense of presence and connection with characters, a story, and a world to a completely different level.
It’s been phenomenal. There are so many different disciplines that inform the production process because we use a lot of cinematic language from film, but there are also interactive elements that are inspired by video games. And then, of course, Andy and I both share a theater background, so telling stories through physical space translates so nicely when we’re tasked with finding ways to tell our story through virtual space and in the viewer’s space.
Josh Nelson Youssef & Phil Robertson on Farty McFly’s Journey, the “Nevatars,” and the Main Antagonist
This story hit me on such a personal level! It reminded me of my own creations! You know those DeviantArt wallpapers with so many overlayed textures and fonts that used to be all the rage in the 2000s? I used to make tons of those! I actually found them again in some folder a couple of months ago.
Josh Nelson Youssef: No way! Your “Nevatars”?
Yeah! And they’re so low-quality now, obviously, because of computer resolution and all that, but your story really hit something within me. In this day and age, a story like this is so needed. People need to be reminded that, as clichéd as it sounds, imperfection is what makes something real, especially in the age of bots.
J.N.Y.: And AI.
How did you approach creating these characters?
J.N.Y.: The story came together so beautifully. We had so many beautiful minds working together on this project, with such great shepherding from Andy and Imaginarium. My co-writer Daniel Floren and I got to delight ourselves in talking to so many different concept artists and artists we’d worked with and hearing about their journeys, as well as thinking about our own journeys: art that we’ve created that we’ve been embarrassed about, that connection with shame and delight, and just childhood play.
We followed that trajectory in building out who these characters are and what they represent of Aya: all these different prototypes and different parts of an artist. Marshy is the energetic, anxious ADHD part; Yarna, our cow, is the sweet, heartfelt part of Aya; Trace is the unfinished part, the unfinished sketch filled with potential; and Farty McFly is her silliness.
Do either of you have a favorite character? Mine is Yarna.
Phil Robertson: Yarna has something that everyone really, really loves. I actually like Kooks the most, played by Kathleen Turner.
Oh, she’s great! She feels like she’s come out of a Ghibli movie!
P.R.: Oh, yeah. There are lots of influences from all sorts of places.
J.N.Y.: And that’s a perfect role for Kathleen Turner, too. She’s also a professor, so she does a lot of teaching and mentoring of young, up-and-coming kids finding their way. It’s very fitting.
P.R.: We were very lucky with the voice work. We were blessed that literally the actors that Andy and Josh wanted all said yes: “Yes, we’d love to work on this.” They fell in love with the story and the idea of this, and they work incredibly well. We had a lot of fun doing it.
The thing about this film is that it’s all about an artist, and so many different artists were involved in creating it. It started with Andy, and then Josh took on the mantle together with Andy, and then you have the development team: character artists and a whole heap of people who have all done these things. They’ve all doodled, they’ve all written words, they’ve all colored something in, and all of that has come into it.
What about you, Josh? Do you have a favorite character?
J.N.Y.: I don’t think I can have a favorite child! But what I will say is that I’m incredibly grateful to have Farty McFly in the film, because that was my own avatar. I drew little comics of him in fourth and fifth grade with my friends, when we made playing cards that we would exchange with each other. That was my avatar that I would have been so embarrassed for anyone to have seen, and now he’s flying around in mixed reality.
That’s amazing! What a wonderful journey for Farty! Where did the idea for Wasam, Andy Serkis’s antivirus bot, come from?
J.N.Y.: Andy is such a brilliant storyteller, and that’s obvious and well known. But one of the things he identified when we were working on the script together was that we really needed to make sure there was a present sense of danger and threat. There needed to be stakes for our characters as they were escaping.
Because they’re living in this digital world, we were trying to think about our antagonist. Our bad guy is perfectionism, so what’s the best way to represent that? We came up with an antivirus bot that coldly and ruthlessly deletes anything that has imperfections or the human touch to it.
I think we all have parts of ourselves that we’ve wanted to delete in order to feel like we’re enough, and so that’s where our antivirus bot came from. It was brilliantly performed by Andy. I’ll never forget when he first did the lines for our antivirus bot. It was chilling. We all got chills; everybody was like, “Oh my gosh.” He did such an amazing job.
Josh Nelson Youssef & Phil Robertson on Google’s XREAL Aura Smart Glasses, Mixed Reality, and Visual Influences
What were some of the challenges of telling this particular story in mixed reality and using this new technology?
Josh Nelson Youssef: One of the challenges was that we didn’t actually have access to the developer kits or the devices for a very long time. We didn’t know how big the shots should be! We did our best guess with the hardware we had available at the time, but we were kind of praying that it was going to translate once we finally got the device.
I think all of us can remember the moment when we first put the glasses on. We’ve been working in immersive for so long, and we’ve seen so many different headsets come and go, but it’s hard to come across a device that feels like your grandmother would enjoy it. She could put it on, it’s not going to ruin her hair, and it looks spectacular.
Phil Robertson: The fidelity is really incredible. It’s quite extraordinary.
Do you think glasses like these could help make VR and mixed-reality experiences more accessible to people?
P.R.: We’d all like to think that they will, and hope that they will. We don’t have a crystal ball, but it would be great. It’s a field we work in, and we want to find the platform to make more stories, make them bigger and better, and incorporate this new way of telling stories. So I very much hope so.
There are so many different visual styles within the film, and the journey itself reminded me a bit of Inside Out: instead of exploring the different emotions inside a person, here we’re exploring their creations. Were there any specific visual influences behind Nevatars?
J.N.Y.: Many! I had the privilege of working with 3DAR, the animation and developer partners, on a project in the past and getting to see the amazing artists that they are. As soon as Andy told me about the project and what it was about, I thought of them immediately because they have so much care for their craft, and each person in that company is a true artist’s artist.
They brought some really great visual influences because we wanted it to feel like you’re living inside her raw creativity, like the unfinished nature of art that’s in process. So we looked at the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and a lot of other things that were blending mediums.
The tricky thing was that we needed to have those same effects happen in full 3D. In a film, you can kind of cheat with a toon shader that works from one angle, but we have to make it work from any perspective. The team did such an incredible job and developed a lot of technology specific to this art style to make that possible.
The experience is incredibly immersive, but we remain seated throughout it. Did you ever consider having people move around instead?
J.N.Y.: Certainly. We spent a lot of time exploring what the highest and best version would be to bring people into the story and into this world. Ultimately, it felt most appropriate to present this as a mixed-reality film that someone can lean back and engage with as a film that comes out into their world.
Thank you for speaking with us!
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Nevatars had its World Premiere at Venice Immersive 2026.