By Michael Mallory
Natural elements figure prominently in many of this year’s top animated features, but none so much as water, which is being presented in its every state from gently lapping waves to vicious snowstorms. Water is, of course, a key element of Disney Animation’s Moana 2, where it even becomes a character of sorts. “The sentient ‘Ocean’ character was quite difficult to achieve from a design perspective,” says production designer Ian Gooding. “We decided on a character animated ‘sock puppet’ shape that could be carefully controlled to look friendly.” As “Ocean,” the water also takes on a warmer blue-green hue.
Where Moana 2’s design took an unnatural turn was inside the netherworld domain of antagonist Matangi. Says Gooding, “The challenge was that it’s a prison and therefore should seem like the sort of place you want to leave, but at the same time we didn’t want it to be gloomy or boring.” Then there’s the fact that it’s inside an enormous clam. “We used shapes, textures and colors found inside mollusk shells,” he says, “but since the environment had no recognizable plants, trees or buildings, there was no sense of scale.” Gooding solved that problem by using shells of varying sizes to represent the scale of foliage.
Liquid Magic
Water is not only a major factor in Flow, the indie from Latvia about a group of disparate animals — a cat, a dog, a secretary bird, a lemur and a capybara, none of whom speak — it is, in a sense, the title character. Led by a black cat, the animals are forced to band together on a boat for survival in an apparently postapocalyptic, flooded world. “The water is a metaphor for the cat’s feelings,” says director/producer/co-writer/co-composer Gints Zilbalodis, who also served as de facto production designer. “When the cat is afraid, the water is aggressive and scary, and when the cat starts becoming friendlier, the water becomes more peaceful and tranquil.”
“The backgrounds are not just decoration … They’re helping us understand these characters by challenging them and being obstacle to them.”
— Flow’s director/writer/production designer Gints Zilbalodis
The painterly look of the CGI film was an attempt to move away from realism but also stop short of being cartoony, and proved to be an asset for the low-budget production because the style minimized the need for detail. “I wanted to have these brushstrokes and use detail only when necessary,” Zilbalodis says. That applied to the character designs as well, according to animation director Léo Silly-Pélissier. “With the cat, we had to find the bounds between the realistic and the imaginative,” he says. Silly-Pélissier adds that from both a design and execution standpoint, the most challenging scene was a shot of the cat overboard, being saved by a whale … because it is about five minutes without a cut! “We started the shot at the beginning of production,” he says, “and finished it at the end.”
For a sequence in which the lifesaving boat floats through an abandoned city, Zilbalodis drew from architecture in Europe, Asia and South America to create a fictional environment. “These backgrounds are not just decoration,” he stresses. “They’re helping us to understand these characters by challenging them and being obstacles to them.”
The cast of animals in DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot may be more anthropomorphic, in that they speak, but the world they live in is still one of stylized realism. Set at some point in the future, the film centers on ROZZUM 7134, or “Roz,” a state-of-the-art helper robot who is shipwrecked on an uninhabited (by humans, anyway) island, and slowly begins to acquire humanity through interaction with the wildlife denizens.
Most of the action takes place within a lush natural forest, one whose character changes greatly with the passage of seasons. “We explored different color palettes, pushing the fall palettes depending on what the sky colors were, versus the changes of leaves,” says production designer Raymond Zibach. One major challenge was a key story point: a life-threatening snowstorm that forces the animals to cram together inside a makeshift lodge. “Anytime you have a big crowd sequence, that’s hard on the art department,” he says.
At the other end of the film’s design spectrum was the futuristic laboratory where Roz and her fellow robots were created, which Zibach says was inspired by the visionary 1970s and 1980s work of conceptual artist Syd Mead. “Syd Mead was creating the images that were selling people on what the future could be,” Zibach explains. “His sleek, beautiful, dynamic spaces and cool vehicles were all very optimistic, and we wanted to show Roz from that optimism.” For the spaceship that drops hunter robots onto the island to capture Roz, Zibach and art director Ritchie Sacilioc had a specific image in mind. “We started thinking of the ship as kind of like a gun,” Zibach says. “The general shape, even though it’s subconscious, would feel threatening when it’s pointed at you.”
One major challenge was a a life-threatening snowstorm that forces the animals to cram together inside a makeshift lodge. “Anytime you have a big crowd sequence, that’s hard on the art department.”
— The Wild Robot‘s production designer Raymond Zibach
For Warner Bros.’ The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, the question was not so much how to create the look and design of Middle-earth but how to adapt it into the anime style of Rohirrim. Concept artist John Howe, who had previously worked on Peter Jackson’s live-action trilogy and the Prime Video television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, says that was a burden from which he was relieved. “The anime look is a very particular design, and the production was very understanding in that they did not ask me to adopt that visual style, so I was able to continue drawing as I usually do,” Howe says. “They simply took those designs and translated them into anime.”
The action (and there’s a lot of it) of War of the Rohirrim takes place some 200 years before that of The Lord of the Rings and chronicles the battle that would end up establishing Helm’s Deep. Part of the iconic images of the film is Meduseld, the Great Hall, which had to be depicted as a couple centuries younger. “It’s always interesting to revisit a universe at a period prior to an existing film,” says Howe. “There’s a tendency to ‘retro-design,’ to take what exists and design it backward, but I can’t agree with that. You have to go back and try to find the spark that drove the original designs. I did quite a bit of architecture at the back of Helm’s Deep, which hadn’t been explored in The Lord of the Rings.”
A major aspect of Howe’s design work was creating heraldry. “We’re in a world where banners and emblems and devices are very, very important,” he says. “It needs to be of period … you don’t want your emblems to look like a football team … and that’s exciting, trying to get into the mind of someone who might have been designing in that world, even though he’s fictional.”
Believe it or not, the world of J.R.R. Tolkien shows up fleetingly in another of this year’s animated features: Aardman and Netflix’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. The film introduces Wallace’s latest invention, a robotic garden gnome named Norbot that is co-opted and mass-produced by evil penguin Feathers McGraw. Production designer Matt Perry says, “We had an amazing scene where the Norbots are building a submarine, and it’s an homage to Lord of the Rings, in Isengard, with sparks flying and furnaces.” Other wry cinematic flashbacks include the moated pen where Feathers is being incarcerated (inside a zoo), which looks like a Ken Adam-designed Bond villain lair, and the Captain Nemo-ish pipe organ inside the submarine, a nod to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Garden of Stop-Motion Delights
The backgrounds for Aardman films are largely 3D structures, and many houses and townscape sets were reemployed from earlier Aardman films, notably 2005’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. But Perry says the garden environments in which the original Norbot is put to work were designed and built specifically for this picture. “There are actually two versions of the garden,” he says, “the pre-Norbot version, a beautiful, floral, loose garden, and the post-Norbot garden, which is a very different affair.”
There’s a challenge to creating nature in miniature. “We have to get greenery where we can,” Perry says. “It’s very intensive to build every single flower, so we source out to find leaves and things in the scale that suit our miniature world. Aquarium plants have got quite small-scale leaves, but the problem with those is they tend to be wibbly-wobbly. We need everything to be absolutely static, so we have to re-stalk them with hidden wire.”
Still, there are times when it is easier to build in the computer. “At the finale, there’s an aqueduct at the end of a gorge that had to be as big and massive as we could get it,” Perry says. “We built several sections of it for real, but whenever you see the full aqueduct with its long legs and arches, that’s a CGI element.”
Interestingly, like a few other films this year, Vengeance Most Fowl contains a warning about technology going wrong. “The relationship of best friends is being pushed aside by the use of AI technology,” Perry notes. “I think that’s actually very relevant to the things that are going on.”
Michael Mallory is an award-winning author and journalist whose many books include Universal Studio Monsters: A Legacy of Horror, Marvel: The Characters and Their Universe and Hanna-Barbera Cartoons.
