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The Director Of 'Home' On Its Immigration Storyline

Tip (Rihanna) shares a moment with her mom Lucy (Jennifer Lopez).
DreamWorks Animation
Tip (Rihanna) shares a moment with her mom Lucy (Jennifer Lopez).

There's no place like home. Or is there? At least, that seems to be the premise of the new animated film Home,which is about a "Boov" alien named Oh who flees to Earth and meets Tip, a 12-year-old girl (voiced by Rihanna), and her mother Lucy (voiced by Jennifer Lopez), who both recently moved from Barbados to the U.S.

Homedirector Tim Johnson talked with The Huffington Post's Latino Voices about the film's "immigrant theme."

"I think an immigrant story can be a very large story, and that this one is very large. When you think about an immigrant story it's fundamentally about starting over with new prospects and new friends and new family and trying to build a better life. Even though they're selfish about it, that's really all the Boov are trying to do. And it's certainly what Lucy and Tip tried to do in moving to the States.

"When you're an immigrant, you're a stranger in a strange land and all the faces you see are new faces and that's true for both of our big characters."

Read more about why director Tim Johnson decided to cast Jennifer Lopez and Rihanna in their roles at Latino Voices.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Kat Chow is a reporter with NPR and a founding member of the Code Switch team. She is currently on sabbatical, working on her first book (forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette). It's a memoir that digs into the questions about grief, race and identity that her mother's sudden death triggered when Kat was young.