Launched into the surprise space adventure of a lifetime, Lisa and Sean discover that their seemingly average dad has a job that is anything but boring. Dodging dangerous aliens, robots, and laser fights galore, family bonding time becomes much more than they bargained for as they try to help their dad in pursuit of his toughest fugitive yet. With his kids along for the ride, Dad must show up for them when they need him most — and they’d better make it home before Mom finds out!

Everett Downing and Patrick Harpin are the creators of this warp-speed adventure across the constellation of ups, downs and moments in-between that shape family life.

Everett is a feature film story artist and animator with over 15 years of experience in the industry, having worked in both capacities at studios such as Blue Sky Studios, Pixar Animation Studios and DreamWorks Animation.

Patrick is also a story artist. As such, he contributed to series and films like Gravity Falls, Hotel Transylvania 2 and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, and also The Smurfs And The Lost Village.

Animated Views: First of all, can you take us through the initial idea and the early development of the series.

Everett Downing: Pat and I frequently had coffee with each other and we would lament about not being able to tell the stories that we wanted to tell. We’d kick around all the films we loved and the types of stories we wanted to tell. We share a mutual love for the Amblin days — stories with kids’ adventures like The Goonies or E.T.

Patrick Harpin: We talked a lot about those stories, about how there’s movies for kids and then there’s movies about kids. Like E.T. and Stand By Me — those are about kids, but they’re more than just kids’ movies. They’ve got more substance. We were just talking a lot about what we’d want to see on screen. And since we’re both big sci-fi heads, we felt the genre could do so much more than it was doing right now.

AV: When did you realize that your sci-fi story wouldn’t just be about kids, but an entire complex family dynamic?

ED: I had two young girls at the time. After spending all this time on movies that I hoped would be great, but sometimes weren’t, I started to wonder, “What am I doing here?” So, I wanted to write a love letter to my family. And Pat and I both felt we wanted to tell stories about dads where the dads weren’t idiots.

PH: That was actually my dad’s request. He was like, “Can you show somebody who’s at least trying?” So, we thought it would be cool to show a more three-dimensional family conflict, but also, any sci-fi story is only as good as the people in it. The people ground it. If they’re grounded and you believe in them, you’re going to believe in the more spectacular elements of the story.

AV: How did you achieve that balance between strong cinematographic references and doing a kids’ series?

ED: There’s this wealth of material that came out in the late 80s – early 90s in sci-fi that we hadn’t seen in a while, and there’s such creativity in it that we wanted to revisit those points of inspiration. From the beginning, we wanted to do something that we were inspired by but we also wanted to try to do a new take on it. So, everything that we were working on comes from very specific points of inspiration, and then we asked ourselves, “what do we add into it?”, like you add value to something.

PH: Also, I think, sci-fi can be about the future, but it’s usually about the time it’s made in. We are inspired by all this stuff, but that’s essentially the medium that we’re using. The message and everything we’ve done is what we feel, and we kinda do it through this genre. And in terms of film language, we referenced things that are not sci-fi all the time. We were just trying to find the best way to shoot like, say, someone crawling through an air duct. Die Hard! They have the best air duct scene. So, let’s get some fish eye on that, just like they did. We were also inspired by David Fincher’s movies, and things like that, like for Blobby’s apartment, and also by the movie Dredd, some harder sci-fi that we could mix in into our kids cartoon. So, it’s more like a general approach, I guess.

AV: The way the series is shot is also very interesting.

PH: Indeed, we tried to shoot a lot of times from the kids’ point of view up at the dad or the dad looking down them. But always keeping a kind of kid-eye level. They’re the ones we want to experience things through, so, that definitely affected our shooting style.

ED: We were very specific. Most of the time, it’s the kids but there are a few times, when we are with the parents, the perspective changes.

AV: Can you tell me about the music, which is very original and very strong for a kids’ series.

ED: Music is such a big factor in our show. We really wanted to feel different. First, we wanted it to be influenced by what the dad could like when he was younger, like hip hop from the 90s. Also, the king of sci-fi for us is John Carpenter, and Pat came up with this idea of “hip-pop John Carpenter”. Then, they gave us a list of composers. It was a long list, and Pat and I listened to the whole thing separately, and we both agreed Joshua Mosley was the best person for our show.

PH: Everybody on this production treated it like a movie, even if they weren’t supposed to. That was just a ripple effect throughout the production. And Joshua did the same. For him, the series looked like a movie, so, he wanted to treat it like a movie. It’s really big, both music and sound in general.

AV: How did your collaboration go with Dwarf Studio, which is based in France?

ED: It was really a great experience. When we got our okay for the development of the series and wanted to test some studios, we got in touch with 4 different ones. In the end, we got 2 contenders, one of them being Dwarf. They both had really strong animation tests but there was just something about Dwarf that felt really cinematic. It felt like an animated movie. The quality was so high. And they did their best to adopt all the elements that we put together and displayed them to us. So, that was clear to us.

PH: Their tech sci-fi design was so elevated, the hair on the characters, the textures, everything that Dwarf was doing was at such a high level. So, we had to go with these guys. And French sci-fi is best. The Fifth Element was more of an influence on us than Star Wars! Because Fifth Element is more playful. Dwarf brough such a level of believability to the whole world and a feature quality to what could have been a cheap-looking series.

ED: And at a time when everyone was working remotely because of Covid, the distance wasn’t a problem. Our schedules worked out very well. When they were finishing their days, the day we would start out for us, so that made a very good point of contact.

PH: It was definitely a learning process. This was not an easy show to do. And Dwarf, to their credit, has never wavered in quality. We’re still finishing stuff right now (the interview was done November 30th, 2022) and it still looks as good as the first episodes, and sometimes even better!

With our thanks to Fumi Kitahara, Everett Downing, Patrick Harpin and Amber Bracken.

A film that can be watched by both young and old equally, it has the feel of something that can bring families together. “Obviously, our hope is that people will sit and watch it together,” says producer Cara Speller.

We had the chance to meet three of the creators of this magnificent film: Charlie Mackesy himself, producer Cara Speller, and co-director Peter Baynton.

British artist, illustrator and author Charlie Mackesy began his career as a cartoonist for The Spectator, before becoming a book illustrator for Oxford University Press. His award-winning work has featured in books, private collections, galleries, and public spaces around the world. His internationally bestselling book, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse, was published in October 2019 and holds the record for the most consecutive weeks in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction Chart across all formats, as well as being the longest running Sunday Times Non-Fiction Number One of all time.

Cara Speller is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy-nominated, BAFTA-winning and triple Grammy-nominated producer, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Short Films and Feature Animation branch at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She was best known for her work with Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett on their animated band Gorillaz, with responsibility for the visual side of the band. She also developed and produced a slate of projects including Robert Valley’s Oscar-nominated and Annie-winning film Pear Cider And Cigarettes; the Emmy-nominated Marvel’s Rocket & Groot and Marvel’s Ant Man; Zima Blue and the Emmy-winning Ice from Tim Miller and David Fincher’s critically acclaimed anthology series Love, Death and Robots for Netflix; and 101 Dalmatian Street for Disney Channel. In 2020, she teamed up with Charlie Mackesy to form a new film and television production company, NoneMore Productions, to develop multiple projects based on the world of Mackesy’s books.

And Peter Baynton has been directing animated shorts, music promos and commercials for 14 years, and has picked up over 30 awards at film festivals around the world along the way, including an Annecy Crystal in 2013 and a couple of British Animation Awards. After years of making shorts and commercials, in 2015 he decided to follow his heart and pursue longer form animation, working as a storyboard artist on the BAFTA-winning CBeebies show Sarah & Duck, and then as 2D Animation Director for Paddington 2. In 2019 he was Animation Director for C4’s Emmy award-winning The Tiger Who Came For Tea. After directing The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse, he’s now in the early stages of directing a feature film for Lupus Films Ltd, to be released in 2024.

Charlie Mackesy: When I first started drawing, it wasn’t really at school. It was when I left. When I was 19, I worked on a boat, and got left on the Île de Ré, off La Rochelle, France. All I had was paper and pens and I drew a lot on that island. What I loved is that the French have a completely different response to artists than the English. When I sat on pavements in Saint Martin or La Flotte, all these places around the island, they talked to me, gave me cups of tea and were very encouraging. And that attitude sounded deep into my psyche and soul. Now, fast forward to 2019, at the beginning, three years ago, it was just drawings I did for friends who were having a difficult time. Then, I put them on Instagram, and Instagram followers reacted in a very explosive way. As I respond well to encouragement – I don’t have much self-belief – I went on doing those drawings for a year and a half, and then exhibited them, and then there was a publisher who came to the exhibition, and encouraged me to make a book. I made it, and I was very surprised it had again such a response. Six months after that, I was approached by filmmakers, many of them, and notably Cara, and we chose her as the head of it all.

AV: How did you come to choose your characters to tell this story?

CM: I’ve always drawn people, I used to draw big scenes, some with mothers and children. So, the boy was already in my head. But I’ve already loved moles, too. One of my favorite books is The Story Of The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None Of His Business. As for horses, my sister is a horse trainer. And foxes used to come around in my garden. So, there’s all these creatures around my head. I began drawing them a bit and then, one day, I’m not sure why, they decided to speak to each other. I think, as an artist, I’ve always felt frustrated because fine art is without words, just image, and I like words too much to ignore them. So, I wanted to marry the two. This felt right. That’s how they began talking, and every time I woke up in the morning, I had another question the boy might ask. For the mole’s obsession with cakes, I’m not even sure where that came from. The horse felt very strong and gentle and wise. The thing is that all the creatures came out for no real reason. They were never meant to be a book; they certainly weren’t meant to be a film. It just sort of arrived.

AV: Cara, how did you discover the book, and how, as a cinematographer, did you get to want to make a film out of it?

Cara Speller: I discovered the book like many people, after it being published. That was about November 2019. I think I saw it on Amazon first. I bought it without knowing anything about it, because the illustration on the front cover was so peaceful, so lyrical and so poetic. I didn’t even know whether there were any more illustrations inside the book, or whether it was a written story, a more traditional story. Then, of course, I received the book and loved it, and really felt like there was so much material in there that could adapt into a more cinematic piece. So, I immediately tried to get in touch with Charlie and his partner Matthew Freud for it. I ended up having a very lovely meeting with them talking about the possibilities, and how I thought this could work. And it was always really important to me right from the start that Charlie be at the center of any team that we put together to make the film. You can tell immediately from the book that he has incredibly strong instincts about what works. To me, it didn’t make any sense to try and make that without having him so closely involved.

CM: I wouldn’t have let you! (laugh)

CS: True, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just felt that you needed to be at the core of it. Then, we put a team together, and created NoneMore Productions because we needed a production company in order to make the film in the first place. Of course, we hope that there will be many more projects after this one. We’re waiting to see whether people enjoy the film and want to see any more…

AV: How did you build your crew?

CS: It was a very international crew, coming from 20 different countries. We started the work on the film in the middle of the pandemic, so everyone was working remotely from their homes. We built the team in the same way you build any team on a production. You’re always looking for the most talented artists you can find; it doesn’t matter where they are in the world, as long as you think they’re the right fit for the project and for the team.

It’s been a phenomenal effort from so many people. We’ve had 120 artists working on it around the world. And each of them has gone above and beyond in every imaginable way. Hopefully you can actually feel that in the finished work – the love and commitment that has been poured into it.

AV: Peter, how did you manage to translate Charlie’s unique visual style into animation?

Peter Baynton: Well, Charlie’s drawing is underpinned by a great knowledge of anatomy. So, even though he draws extremely quickly and quite impressionistically, you can tell he knows horse or boy or fox anatomy so well. For the mole, it’s a little bit different.

And on top of it, he has this beautiful, lyrical, free-flowing line. So, the challenge was trying to find a way of drawing the characters that enabled us to nuance performances that could communicate the subtle emotions that we wanted to express. It was important not to lose that lovely loose quality and make things stiff. So, we came down to a system where we would animate quite tightly on detailed models, and then, on the ink stage, we encouraged the artists to find that looser way of inking. It was about finding that very fine line that sort of drifts around the characters. That came sort of through experiment, how they should behave. Sometimes we found that they felt too stiff and became worried it didn’t do justice to the way they are in Charlie’s drawings. Other times, they became too lively and like they were taking on lives on their own. So, we had to find a happy balance with how they behave.

AV: Speaking of performance, how did you manage the different designs of the characters?

PB: I think it’s one of the very remarkable and noticeable things in Charlie’s book, one of the first things I remember, where you have these very realistic and well-proportioned horse and fox and child, and then this strange, little, graphic mole with tubular circles on this black triangle nose. Like a little doorstop. It’s a very charming aspect of what Charlie created, that sort of contrast. In order to animate, we went back to the book, and developed that naturalistic, as non-cartoony as possible approach for the boy, the fox and the horse, and then a bolder animation for the mole.

AV: The score by award-winning composer Isobel Waller-Bridge echoes both the emotions of the characters and the sounds of nature in a particularly subtle way.

CS: Actually, sound design and music were made at the same time; this was all happening together. We started working on the soundtrack about six months before we finished the film. Every time we were updating cues or sequences in the film, both Isabel and our sound designer Adrian Rhodes were getting updated cuts of the film and understanding how the two things had to work together.

CM: To answer your question, I would start by saying that even though the film looks quite cute and cuddly, the messages are not. The point is it’s for adults, too, not just children. Had it been aimed just to children, the music would have been very different. We had to make a score that would address people of all ages and experiences, and fit with the landscapes and the messages and the content. So, the score can feel serious or profound in a way that it wouldn’t have been otherwise. If you saw a still from the film, you might imagine a music to be quite childlike. The point is – I don’t think it is. Isobel Waller-Bridge was a fan of the book way before the film, and helped us with the audio-book. She had a deep sense of what was needed for the messages to land for an adult as much as for a child. She was extremely intelligent, and very humble. And those two things make a very profound combination for making such a score, because she listened to us and made changes very rapidly. Because we’d been making the film a long time before she arrived, even though she knew the book, there were things we were trying to say that she had to sort of catch up with. In the end, I think she did an extraordinary job going from liberty to pathos to liberty to pathos, and balancing between them. That’s an essential part of the charm of the film, along with the visuals.

AV: How would you like people to feel after watching The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse?

CM: I hope they’ll feel better. Or more hopeful. Or lighter. I hope they’ll feel… comforted.

With our thanks to Fumi Kitahara, Charlie Mackesy, Cara Speller and Peter Baynton.

To accompany them musically, the creators of Strange World appealed to composer Henry Jackman, who seemed indeed to be the perfect candidate for the job. Jackman has established himself as one of today’s top composers by fusing his experience as a successful record producer and creator of electronic music – which did wonders on Wreck-It-Ralph, Ralph Breaks The Internet and Big Hero 6 – with his classical training.

Growing up in the southeast of England, he began composing his first symphony at the age of six. He studied classical music at Oxford and sang in the St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir while getting involved in the underground rave scene and producing popular electronica music and dance remixes, eventually working with artists such as Seal and The Art of Noise.

So, the composer is obviously used to stretching his creative muscle to explore the most diverse of universes, from Winnie The Pooh to X-Men: First Class, Kick Ass or Puss In Boots.
Strange World provided another territory for him to explore, and was a particularly exciting challenge.

Henry Jackman: Indeed, in the case of Ralph and Big Hero 6, big themes and the big orchestra were associated with strong electronic elements. In the case of Wreck-It-Ralph, it was very much 8-bit. With Ralph Breaks The Internet, it was more modern, and in Big Hero 6, the techno elements would reflect the science of the sets, almost like the Silicone Valley. Now Strange World is very much not like that, in the sense that it depicts a fantastical, but organic, not so technological world. It is very much a celebration of the symphony orchestra in all of its pomp and glory. That’s not to say that there’s not some extended colors. It’s orchestra plus real concert choir enhanced with a kind of otherworldly synth choir that blends with it. Also, sometimes string lines are combined with fantastical string sounds. But it’s just an augmentation, unlike Big Hero where you hear things that are very deliberately supposed to sound like they come from the fabric of the world of electronic music. In Strange World, electronic elements are used to enhance and extend the sound of the orchestra, a bit like augmented reality.

AV: Indeed, the strangeness of the musical world you created for the film doesn’t just lie in these augmentations. The truth is out there…

HJ: Rather than going through electronics, the most important device I’m using to evoke another world is unusual melody and harmony. There are some augmented colors in it, but I’d rather take my inspiration from great composers like Debussy and Scriabin, composers who have a wide range of use of harmony that’s intriguing and otherworldly. Don Hall, the director, with whom I’d already done Winnie The Pooh and Big Hero 6, has been nothing but encouraging. We also talked about other musical references, like Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Empire Strikes Back. I wouldn’t dare compare myself to John Williams, but these scores correspond to a certain type of action-adventure, a certain use of committed thematic orchestra. It’s a reference for everyone. People come and know what that feels and what that sounds like. Of course, you can’t hope to reach the grand style of the master himself, but at least you could give yourself an ambitious inspiration. So, I was very happy we were all on the same page with what this world should feel like.

AV: How did you make your score “strange”?

HJ: I was working on The Gray Man for Netflix and I’d been talking about Strange World, then I got this little idea. So, I took a couple days out of the production which was in very good shape, and I came out with these four harmonic positions, like a series of arpeggios that was a sort of a four-chords sequence. When I first came out with them, I didn’t analyze the harmony, I just wrote them as they came and felt happy with them. And because the four chords themselves were so unusual, when it came to writing a melody, there was only a certain amount of notes that were available to me, and it ended up pushing me into all sorts of unusual dissonances that were still melodic. It felt like beautiful-ish and melodic but also a bit dissonant. Because it was written almost away from picture, I wrote that as 3 minute and a half piece which I called “Strange World Passacaglia”. It was strange because it almost felt like the piece was in charge of writing itself and I was in charge of serving the piece. Some of the arpeggiation with the harp reminded me of Debussy-Ravel, like La Mer. Also, something about the string line feels a bit like an Austro-Germanic tone poem, something Wagnerian.

Because of that kind of unsettling character, I was prepared for some reactions. I remember thinking that the people of Disney would think maybe that would better fit to a concert hall than to an animated feature, but they loved it in the end! Even during the recording, the leader of the orchestra came to me to ask: “Are you sure of that note? Do you mean that?” “Yes, I mean that! I know it’s not what you could expect, but it’s correct. Trust me.” Having written this piece away from picture, it provided the DNA of the score with its contradictory tension, and it made something that felt lush at the same time. Not scary like the score of Predator, but very odd. Somehow like the trumpet theme in Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien score. That’s a good example of something melodic, almost like a romantic overture for that sort of a theme. It’s melodic, it’s beautiful, but it’s not safe…

AV: How did you use that material within the very score of the movie?

HJ: Even though I wrote it away from picture, and because the directors loved it, I used it as my secret weapon, my Leitmotiv. For any entity that appears in this strange world, I tried to keep going back to this original material. Then, I kind of deconstructed that material from the Suite to fit the story. Some way or another, everything coming into that strange world comes from that piece. It’s kind of the DNA of that world. My secret code…

With our thanks to Henry Jackman, Matt Justmann and Samantha Shea.

As such, he is well-known for his first book, From Snow White To Hercules, published by Dreamland in 1997, with a foreword written by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. The congratulations he received from Roy Disney and Michael Eisner opened even more doors for another project, The Disney Heroines, published in 2000, with a foreword by Glen Keane. He was also one of the main authors of the booklets for the Walt Disney – Figurines de collection series by Hachette, published in France, Belgium and Canada.

Now, thanks to in-depth research, hundreds of personal exclusive interviews of artists from several generations, the help of renowned experts, and several visits to the Walt Disney Archives, he’s working on a one-of-a-kind series of books analyzing the most memorable scenes from all the Disney Classics. The second part of this intriguing project has just been published.

We asked Christian to tell us more about this new volume.

Animated Views: Christian, now that volume 1 has enjoyed a great success, can you tell us about volume 2?

Christian Renaut: My Volume 1 of The Best Of Disney’s Animated Features (with foreword by Andreas Deja) had concentrated on 10 legendary sequences from Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. This time, the reader will be behind the scenes of 10 more: Dumbo (2 sequences), Bambi (4 sequences), Saludos Amigos, Make Mine Music, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland. Who has never cried when watching Dumbo being cradled by his jailed mother? Who has never laughed at Bambi sliding on ice but cried when his mother was nowhere to be found? Who has never been carried away by the magic of a Fairy Godmother turning a ragged outfit into a ball dress? The point of the book is to discover who did what and how they came to such achievements. Thanks to hundreds of interviews, the reader will be within the studio in the 1940s.

AV: Your book features plenty of quotes you collected from the Disney artists, but as many of them have passed away, how did you get such incredible information?

CR: Besides the many anecdotes by the artists themselves, I could get in touch with the sons and daughters of the wizards who made them: Testimonies by Bill Peet’s son will tell you more about how his dad seemed to easily identify with the God-forsaken Dumbo for instance. The 4 chapters on Bambi were supervised by Frank Thomas’s son himself, adding many unknown details and writing the foreword. The reader will see the lengthy process that led to that masterpiece, but the artist everyone was looking up to when it came to drawing stags and deer would soon face a harsh reality… Besides, no one had ever been able to get in touch with the son of Helene Stanley, who was the model for Cinderella.

AV: Among the features you cover, we find Saludos Amigos and Make Mine Music, which are not so often explored by historians.

CR: Saludos Amigos and Make Mine Music were made during troubled times and we will explain the demise of two animation giants, as Bill Tytla and Fred Moore collaborated for the last time. Fred Moore was struggling to be up to the task, but he found himself challenged by the very talents he had taught the trade to. The South American films or the so-called “package films” are being rediscovered and they have more than a gem to offer, like the upbeat “All The Cats Join In,” where Moore seems to hand the baton over to Milt Kahl. As to Alice In Wonderland, the British world specialist Brian Sibley brought his insight regarding that world-known story.

AV: What can we hope for in Volume 3?

CR: Volume 3 is already underway, focusing on films of the 1950s and the 1960s, with rare interviews once again and more never-before revealed information about Peter Pan, Lady And The Tramp or The Jungle Book… Your collection will be complete when all Disney’s animated features are studied, but it will come in time!

It’s a fresh start for a definitely new take on the franchise, including the musical point of view, as the creators of the series appealed to Crush Effect to compose and perform the series’ soundtrack.

Crush Effect, consisting of music duo Jesse Molloy and David Veith, makes genre-bending music that spans from nu-funk to nu-disco to electronic Motown. Their experience with production and live music runs deep, as David plays keys for Rolling Stone’s Karl Denson (Tiny Universe); and Jesse plays sax for Panic! At The Disco, among other myriad music credits.

Transformers: Earthspark marks Crush Effect’s first foray into composing, and the creative team gave them the freedom to compose a cinematic, synth-heavy score for the series pulling sounds from modern cyberpunk, EDM, and the dance world.

Considering such an intriguing proposition, we were anxious to talk with them to learn more about that artistic adventure that promises “more than meets the eye”.

Animated Views: How did you go from record and music production to animation?

David Veith: It was kind of a slow process. Jess and I started on this adventure to get into film and TV about four or five years ago and we got to it in a backwards way. Aside from our records, Jesse and I do a lot of producing, we produce other people and we met who is now our agent, Lee, on some other’s project. He really liked our work and he thought there was something cinematic about what we do sort of naturally and he asked us if we would like to pitch for TV or film. Of course, we agreed because it was like a childhood dream. So, Jesse and I built up our reel, pitching for some pilots and TV shows, that kind of thing, and Lee got us a few pitches for Nickelodeon for some of their projects. Then Transformers popped up. It seemed like it was gonna be a good fit. Luckily for us, the creative team over there really wanted to go onto a direction that Jesse and I did naturally. They were so great. You can imagine Tranformers as a big franchise, and it’s Nickelodeon, too, and they were gonna give it to these two guys who had never done animation before and who were not TV professionals at all. But they liked the music enough and gave us a shot, and it worked out! It was so exciting for Jesse and I when we got the job. We were ecstatic!

Jesse Molloy: It was so cool! This project had people like Ciro (Nieli), Ant (Ward) and Dale (Malinowski) who were willing to take a risk and go with us on this. They believed in what we could bring to the show in terms of sound. Man, it was just super exciting for us! We had a lot of fun working on that.

AV: From then on, what was your first move? The sound? The themes?

DV: It was kind of all of the above. When we got the job, they called us and we were hoping to start right away, but because it was the holidays last year, we didn’t really get started with our first creative meeting until February. Ciro, Ant and Dale gave us the overall arc of the characters in the entire season and they told us they wanted something thematic and to punch up musically because they didn’t want it to sound like a kids’ show. When things go dark, they wanted to really go dark, which was really cool. Then, they basically gave us six weeks from that meeting to when we delivered the music for the double pilot episode and they didn’t want to listen to any of our cues until then. They wanted to watch the whole thing. That was nerve-racking for Jesse and I because we didn’t know if we were going in the right direction, and we could get fired right after being hired! But it was a risk for them, too, because it could have been a disaster, and six weeks wasted. But they were super happy with what we came up with. And now, we’re with episodes 17 and 18, and we still use thematic material that was written during those first six weeks. So, it was kind of a trial by fire.

JM: The guys at Nickelodeon really wanted to see what we could deliver all at once. It was nerve-racking but also exciting to just dive into the world they laid out. We were like kids in a candy store, or like being on a mission for something. We had to use our intuition for make sure we were on the right track and then there was a bird-eye view to make sure we were in the world we were after.

AV: Animation is a very specific kind of art. How did you find your methodology to work within that realm?

DV: Their original approach was, they didn’t want it to be a normal cartoon with non-stop music and some mickey-mousing going on. They wanted it to feel a little bit more cinematic. So, when the music does come on in certain situations, they really wanted to feel it in a way. So, we would pick big moments, and those big moments felt like tracks almost. We were still scoring, but with that kind of feeling as opposed to traditional animation music in which music follows the action in such a way that it almost becomes sort of a background noise you immediately forget. They really wanted it to mean a little bit more.

And once we got on the dub stage, we gave them a lot of options musically, so they could edit things according to what they wanted. They really responded positively to that kind of dynamic from us, and it worked. Everybody was super happy. You learn by trial by doing this now every week. You learn pretty quickly little tricks to get into a scene, more elegant ways to get in and out of things, to shift emotionally on certain stuff. We kinda fell into that. And, you know, Jesse and I always loved movies and TV and soundtracks, too, so, we kinda have a sense of what we like, things added to pictures that we like, and we sort of followed those trajectories.

JM: Also, I think it was the right time for us running into Ciro, Ant and Dale, because our hybrid approach where we have been making records while spending some years on a mission to write to picture and to score. And it was also just a good match. We just got lucky to become part of such a great team.

AV: How did you find the sound of the series?

JM: I think for Dave and I, that nostalgia-meets-modernity approach and very synth-driven world come from when we watched the family interact on the picture. I wanted to go back to that feeling, all this excitement when we watched those movies in the 80s which you want to watch again. Because it gives you a nostalgia or an aesthetic that you remember. I felt that big undertow of sound coming from that period. So, we wanted to grab that, getting inspired by the way they used music at that time and adapt it to the idea that it’s about new Transformers.

DV: When we started, they had a pretty good world musically where they wanted to live, especially Ciro, based on Tangerine Dream and Wendy Carlos’ Tron soundtrack, also some of the stuff that Atticus Ross does with Trent Reznor, like in the Watchmen series. They had a really cool hybrid world that they wanted to go in. So, we kind of took a lot of cues from that and did our own thing. We didn’t want it to sound like an 80s retro soundtrack, but we wanted to pull from those technics and sounds from that time, and mix them in with a lot of sounds from today. Something ironic with a lot of those sounds is that modern pop now is a nice blend of those concepts, too.

AV: That blending does echo the storyline of the series itself, as it is about the meeting of the old generation of Transformers with a new one.

DV: Definitely. We tried not to go to hard into one direction, but make a nice blend. The music of the original show now seems nostalgic and dated, but at the time it was the modern sound of the 80s cartoon with crazy riff guitar stuff. So, we did our own version of what modern is, plus pulling back into that world of Transformers.

AV: Did you use any vintage material to resume that 80s sound?

DV: I would say, for convenience, most stuff we do is in the computer. We’ve got some analog synths, but working remotely, Jesse would have to get the same ones, and so on, so it would not make sense regarding the constraints of animation scoring. Now, we have software that really feels like the original stuff, so we just had to make sure we were on the same software and share the same palette. It made things a lot easier for us, while making sure we have the very sound we wanted to have.

AV: Can you tell me about your thematic approach?

DV: For the first couple of weeks, Jesse and I just tried to come up with thematic ideas for either characters or places or family. It was a kind of a cross between melodic and sonic. Sometimes, it’s just a sound like when we get to a place where we can play sounds that fit the characters. Sometimes, it’s definitely a melodic thing and we try to break those down into very small bits that we can use in a lot of different ways. Most of our motives are maybe four notes, five notes, not like long-sweeping John Williams thematic stuff. For us, it made more sense to keep them much shorter because you can use them in a lot of different ways for this particular style of scoring.

JM: It’s funny because, sometimes, creating an atmosphere, you get a melody coming out of it, and you realize that it actually fits the character. I remember in the first pilot, there was this big action scene, and I would be just like “let’s get these very heavy drums! Something really driving!” And then some melody would come out of that, and you just want to add to it and work on it. It’s funny what comes out of melodicism and sound design altogether.

AV: Your music can be so magical at some times, like in the cave sequence of the pilot, and at the same time it can get so much darker than in any other animated series.

JM: Growing up, I had this backyard that, for me as a kid, was enormous. When I see it today, it’s the smallest backyard you’ve ever seen. But as a kid, it was huge. I just loved to go there and use my imagination to live adventures. When I saw that cave scene, I remembered that feeling in my backyard, thinking : this is my world. Anything can happen here. What’s fun about writing music to picture, is that I could re-live some of those of emotions, even in the smallest ways. So, there’s some magic in Earthspark in that way that you can really talk to families and kids and find things that can resonate for everyone.

DV: That cave scene was one of the first big scenes that we scored. Jesse did a lot on that one. He found the sound for it, and when we went back and listened to it, we felt we could use a lot of that for the Terrans and the kids, too. It felt right in that way. And then we knew we wanted to contrast that when things go dark. The creative team pushed us to go as dark as we possibly could, and as much as we could in that kind of series. There’s that kind of balance in that show which can be “feel good” and also like “high stakes” with either action or dark drama. It’s a nice contrast, I think.

AV: How do you share the work as a duo?

DV: Jesse and I have been working together remotely for a decade, writing ideas and sending them back and forth to each other. During the pandemic, we moved from San Diego to LA. When we got the show, we wondered how we would do it. But we just did like we always did. We have a meeting before every episode with the creative team, and then Jesse and I have our own meeting after that. We go through the cues. Usually there’s more than one storyline in one episode. So, we decide who takes storyline A and storyline B, and then when they interconnect, we make sure that we do that in a cohesive way. As we write, we send movie clips back and forth to each other and make comments. We have a good creative flow. Thank goodness we have high speed internet!

JM: It’s kind of a second nature for us in a way. You put us on a mission, be it a track for a rapper or a singer, or something for a commercial, or Transformers: Earthspark, and we’re on. It’s just like getting money from your parents and going to the candy bar!

AV: It seems you really had fun on Transformers: Earthspark. Would you like to continue that kind of cinematic adventure?

DV: 100%! Jesse and I have been doing music for decades in different formats, whether it’s playing live, touring, producing, writing, commercials… now it seems like a natural progression. It’s so much fun and so creative to do. We’d love to keep doing this. I’d love to score live action, because it’s so different from animation. We like edgy things. That doesn’t mean dark but something you wouldn’t expect, sonically.

JM: 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined to live something like that! I come from live music. I’m on tour right now. Then, we got this incredible creative progression together making so different things. And now, we use all those experiences in that new adventure. So, I agree. We got the bug! We got the bug!

With our thanks to David and Jesse, and to Andrew Kopp and Yefan Zhang at White Bear.

We had the pleasure to talk with the main creators of this series, Director Dice Tsutsumi, Production Designer Robert Kondo, and Producer Sara Sampson.

Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi, originally from Japan, is a filmmaker, painter, and philanthropist. A graduate from The School of Visual Arts in New York, Dice has worked as a visual development/color key artist at Blue Sky Studios on Ice Age, Robots and Horton Hears A Who! His credits at Pixar Animation include Lighting Art Director for Toy Story 3 and Monsters University.

Originally from Southern California, Robert Kondo graduated with a degree in illustration from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Robert landed his dream job as a sketch artist at Pixar on their 2006 release Ratatouille. While at Pixar, his film credits included Sets Art Director for Ratatouille, Toy Story 3, and Monsters University.

In early 2012, the two art directors found themselves searching for ways to expand upon their filmmaking experience in Pixar’s art department. They decided to write and direct an independent animated short film together. The film, The Dam Keeper, was an 18-minute short that garnered an Academy Award Nomination. The search then led the two away from the comfort of Pixar’s gates to challenge themselves with the unfamiliar, to continue on the path of learning. In July 2014, Dice and Robert founded Tonko House as a place to nurture growth while telling stories for the world.

For Oni, they teamed up with Sara Sampson, who also comes from the Emeryville studio. Born and raised in Kentucky, she moved to California in 2012 to launch her career at Pixar. While there, Sara contributed to several features, such as the Academy award-winning films Coco and Inside Out. After five years at Pixar, she left to oversee production on three films, which include the first narrative Unity real-time rendered short, Sonder, the Emmy award-winning Love, Death, And Robots episode “The Witness”, and Emmy award-winning Google Spotlight Stories film and VR experience, Age Of Sail. Sara recently produced the Emmy-nominated Glen Keane Productions and Netflix Original Series Trash Truck, as well as the Academy Award-nominated short Opera, and she’s now producer and co-executive producer of Oni.

With its playful humor and fantastical world settings, along with its cinematic storytelling and the compelling depth of the hero’s journey, no doubt Oni will please every generation around the world. While very specific on Japanese folklore, it speaks to each and every one of us through a story that is definitely universal.

Animated Views: The first thing I noticed in Oni is the animation, which seems a great homage to old fashioned stop-motion animation.

Dice Tsutsumi: It’s an interesting process, because we originally wanted to produce Oni with fully stop-motion animation, but we switched to CGI because the story got bigger and more epic, so we felt like we had to use the medium that we’re comfortable with. A lot of us like Sara, Robert and myself come from Pixar and we’re very familiar with CG production pipeline. That being said, we just love the stop motion feeling that we were able to achieve while we did the pilot test in the beginning. It really felt appropriate for this story, for the world and for the characters. So, we tried to use that as a guide – visual guide, animation style guide. Even if it’s done in CG, we still use the stop motion as a feeling and look guide.

What was also interesting, what we really tried to capture was, because it’s a Japanese story and we worked with a lot of Japanese animators, we tried to use 80s anime as illustration. If you remember when Miyazaki was doing television series in the 80s like Future Boy Conan, they had a limitation of not being able to do a full frame animation, so it was always on 2s and 3s… But because of that, they tried to make sure that the poses are very strong, even if it’s limited frames, and we tried to use that as a guide because we thought that would really capture the strength of our Japanese animators, and strength of our Japanese story.

AV: The skin textures of the characters are amazing. How did you approach them?

Robert Kondo: Like Dice said it, the initial foray into bringing Oni into reality was in stop motion, and we love the tactile quality of stop motion. You just feel like you can reach your finger into the screen and touch everything. Once we have seen that and fallen in love with those puppets… that very naturally became the target for us in CG. Then we took that idea and pushed it out to the whole world of the characters, so that there is a consistency of that world that you feel they can live in. “Tactile” became a very important word for us in terms of really creating a richness for that world that we loved from stop motion. Everything feels so crafted in stop motion and we wanted to maintain that feeling.

Sara Sampson: That brings an extra layer of depth. It makes things so inviting and it just really helps you connect with the characters on a deeper level.

AV: The light is also very unique. For the scenes taking place during the day, we can almost feel the warmth of the sun on the leaves, the grass, and the characters, which makes the colors so vibrant.

SS: This lighting is only possible because of Dice. He has such an understanding and knowledge of lighting that it was a masterclass to all of us – understanding the principles and empowering our team with that information to create these beautiful scenes.

DT: Robert and I learned to tell a story through light from our Pixar days. We really love that visual tool to help tell the story. Be it The Dam Keeper, Moom or definitely Oni, it’s always about the darkness and the light that go with humanity. So, it was really important for us to use the light to really help tell the story the way we were hoping. I’ve worked on color scripts at Pixar, but as a director I couldn’t do that job. So, we appealed to two young artists who did a fantastic job on the series.

AV: The sets are also beautiful and seem almost realistic.

RK: All of it is created CG or matte painted. The forest itself comes from the brilliance of the Megalis production team that we worked with, our CG partners. All of the forest was created procedurally. Rather than building every little tree of the forest, they basically used the computer and all that it’s great for to create these wonderfully sculptural trees, and layers upon layers of moss. Also, Dice took a trip down to Yakushima Forest located in the Southern part of Japan. It’s the oldest forest of Japan, that inspired Miyazaki’s Mononoke. So, he went there and felt that place a very similar way to how you talked about how you could feel the lighting. He sat in that forest and said this is where he wanted to make his series. He wanted to capture this feeling. So, that became the high mark for our team and the CG team to hit. That’s how we were able to achieve such great vistas and such immense amount of richness in the big shots.

AV: When watching Oni, I thought about films like Pom Poko or Summer Days with Coo, which speak about Japanese culture and the relationship between man and nature. What is your take on those topics in Oni?

DT: It’s one important thing we always love to talk about in our films. The origin of the concept of Oni is the existence of this evil villain character in Japanese folklore. There is an interesting historical theory; it’s not, like, widely known, but some historians pointed out that Oni might be foreigners for people who didn’t look like Japanese locals back in the days. Making people whom you don’t understand a villain or like a monster: I feel like we’re still living in the same world. Humanity hasn’t really progressed since that time. We still have this natural tendency to get scared about things or people or cultures you don’t know or don’t understand. The fear of the unknown still exists today, and that’s how I started to think about this whole story of Oni.

Also, because I myself live in the United States as a foreigner for almost 30 years. My son is 10 years old and he’s living as a Japanese American who is always struggling: is he Japanese or is he American? Onari, our main character, and her journey within the series touches upon this very struggle of being an outsider that many people, young and old, face today. Oni is my attempt to show audiences around the world, including my son, an authentic Japanese story that can inspire and help individuals find their own way to embrace their unique identities. So, I felt like, this story, while it’s personal to my story, I think is a personal story to everybody. Indeed, when I spoke with Sara, when we tried to get her to come to Tonko House and produce this project in the very beginning, she said she could relate deeply to the project, too.

SS: Yes, I mean absolutely everything Dice said. It’s amazing how specific Oni is to his journey, but I also found my own journey in it, from Kentucky to California. It’s really about finding your own path, making your own way, and understanding that you don’t have to conform to column A or column B. To me, the beauty of Oni is that it teaches you that nothing is just black or white. There are nuances in everything, like in the Oni themselves, and that’s what makes this story so powerful.

With our thanks to Dice, Robert and Sara, and to Fumi Kitahara and Michael Rizzo.

That’s the subject of Emily Zemler’s latest book, Disney Princess: Beyond The Tiara, that looks at the phenomenon from an original angle.

Emily is known for being the author of The Art And Making of Aladdin (2019). She’s a freelance writer and journalist based in London. She is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, among other prestigious outlets. Emily is also the co-author of A Sick Life, with TLC’s Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins.

Organized by themes of origins and inspirations, re-imaginings, toys and collectibles, fashion, music, parks, fandom, and more, the book features memorabilia and interviews with Disney historians, directors, voice talent, and fans. It invites the reader to explore the different eras, influences, and legacies of the Princesses with Disney Legends such as Jodi Benson (voice of Ariel in The Little Mermaid and author of the book’s foreword), Lea Salonga (the singing voice behind two Princesses, Jasmine and Mulan), and composer Alan Menken.

The book is scheduled for September 20, 2022, and we were lucky to be able to chat with Emily in advance about it.

Animated Views: There’s plenty of books on Disney Princesses, how would you explain the concept of yours, and what makes it original?

Emily Zemler: I was actually approached by the publisher to write this book, and at that stage, it was just an idea that they had had, a very small idea: they just wanted to do a book about Disney Princesses from a new angle. So, they gave me this tiny little idea and that was my responsibility to figure out what would that book be. Like you’ve said, there’s a lot of books that have been written on the subject. You have making-ofs on the animated films and on the live-action re-imaginings, but you don’t have books about the cultural legacy of the Disney Princess. What was happening in culture that impacted how they were created? And then how did they impact the culture in which we live? That’s the difference. Other books were maybe looking at the actual animation or how the films were created. This one is looking at why they were created and what they have generated in our culture in terms of fashion and music, etc. In other words, what they have given back to us.

AV: Indeed, your book covers so many different topics, from animated classics to theme parks, to music and lifestyle. How did you organize your research?

EZ: As you can imagine, it was a lot of work! I started it Spring 2021, and the first thing I did was to watch all the films and all the tv series, the sequels and any other version, like in Disney Channel’s Descendants. I watched all of Once Upon A Time. Thank God, there’s Disney+ now! And then I started reading all of the making-of books, I got pdfs from Disney of many books on the subject. The Disney Archives gave me a list of Disney books that they recommended, that I looked for and looked at. For instance, there’s a book about the history of the costumes in Disney films that was very useful. There’s another book about the Disney Princess by Charles Solomon, which is more historical, that looks at, say, what period they have fictionally lived in.

I live in London, so I spent a lot of time at the BFI research library. That was during the pandemic, so that was a little challenging. You couldn’t browse the shelves. You had to stay in your seat and then they would bring you the books. They have quite a lot of the older books, the ones that are harder to find now like The Art Of Pocahontas, which is very expensive if you try to buy it online. I looked at interviews that people had given, and then I started to interview people. That was a very long process. We had about three months of interviews. Some of those were set up by Disney, some were people I already knew.

AV: How did you research about the theme parks?

EZ: The theme parks were tricky, but they had just released a new series on Disney+ called Behind The Attraction. Also, if you google on YouTube, there are tons of making-ofs, little clips that came from different DVDs. So, you can find different things online. Then I did speak with an Imagineer, Charita Carter, who is one of the people responsible for re-imagining Splash Mountain, which is becoming Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. She was really interesting. And then, there was another interesting person I interviewed, Todd Martens, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, which I also write for, and he writes namely about Disneyland, and his contribution was invaluable. He knows how the attractions changed over the years, why have they changed, and how the Princesses are involved in the parks.

AV: Can you tell me a little bit more about one of your memorable encounters?

EZ: Sure. I did more than 50 interviews, which is quite a lot for a book. They were all great, but I would say that there are two that really stand out to me. One is Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel, the Little Mermaid, who wrote the foreword of the book. I was born in 1983, so I grew up with the Disney Renaissance films, and The Little Mermaid was my favorite. So, having Ariel call my cell phone was a really surreal moment for me. That was very cool. She is very passionate about her responsibility of being Ariel, what that means. And another one that was really great was Alan Menken, who has also been so important in the Disney Princess stories and films. He’s just a very candid guy. He just tells you things like they are. He’s very open. I found his to be a really great conservation, he gives you sort of that backdoor look at how the songs and the music were made.

AV: There’s plenty of never seen before pictures of the original, animated Princesses. How did you make your research and your choices, in that regard?

EZ: Actually, we hired a photo researcher, so it was not just me. Her name is Julie Alissi and she’s lovely. I don’t know how she does it, because we had probably thousands of images. The Disney Archives has some images but they don’t have everything photographed. But if you know that something exists, they can have it photographed, like this Mattel toy from 1955. There’s also the Animation Research Library, who have all the stills, the concept art, sketches, original art made by the different animators. And then there’s stuff they don’t have but which we found. In the book, my favorite image is in chapter 3, about the merchandising. When Snow White came out, they made Snow White bleach and Snow White ammonia to clean the home. I found a picture of that on an old blog and our photo researcher was able to track down a usable image. It was months of work. They were still approving up until this year, right before going to the printer.

But the most exciting one is the USPS Princesses stamps collection. That artwork had never been seen before. I found that out because I interviewed a man named Dave Pacheco, who has been really instrumental in the art of the Disney Princess. He’s a creative guy behind the scenes at Disney, and he told me about them, but they were never printed. So, we were able to get copies of the art from archives.

AV: One original chapter is about fashion. It’s rarely treated in matter of Princesses. Can you tell me more specifically about that one?

EZ: That’s my favorite chapter, that’s probably why it’s so original. I was so excited to write it. The original animators, in the early years of Disney, were not fashion designers. It was male designers who needed a beautiful ball gown. They were probably – and this is just a supposition – looking at their wives’ fashion magazines at home and seeing images of Dior’s “New Look”, they would think that would make a beautiful gown for Cinderella. So, Cinderella’s gown looks like Dior’s “New Look” gown from the same time.
So, you could look at the things that were happening in culture at that time and see how they affected what appears on the screen.

Then, as we talk about in the book, there’s a real aspirational quality to a Disney Princess. You want to be her. Whatever she’s wearing, however she appears, you want to be like her. Then, Disney Princess fashion has become part of our culture and whether they say it or not, designers are probably taking some inspiration from what they’ve seen in film. That’s been really true with Cinderella, and you can see it a lot with Belle’s yellow gown, you can see it with Ariel, you can see it with Sleeping Beauty’s pink gown with the points that drew a lot from the costumes of the film Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn.

It was really exciting to get Zac Posen speak to me for that chapter, because he designed several Cinderella-inspired gowns. And the idea is that putting on a gown like that allows you to have a royal moment, allows you to be entering into a really special moment the way a Disney Princess would. And I think that’s just a very cool thing to be able to feel, and as you will see in the chapter, it’s not just about women’s fashion. It’s men’s fashion as well, which is even more significant.

AV: In your introduction, you write that “what we see on screen is always a reflection of the time”. Can you tell me more about that?

EZ: The idea is that what has been made artistically in a particular era is a reflection of our current values and our current ideas. So, in a particular time, like when Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs was made, most women, whether they wanted it to be or not, were housewives. That was the reality of the time. It’s not a judgement of the time; it’s the truth of the time. And it’s why we see Snow White cleaning the house so beautifully and being very kind and gentle. Today, we don’t share the same values. Our values are much more inclusive and you sort of see that play out in the more recent films. Take for instance Moana, that embraces different values and different aspects of how we want to express that through art.

So, when we look back at films like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, we have to take into consideration what was happening in culture. Instead of judging it from our lands, we think about it from the lands of that time. And I think that is what makes these films so interesting, because you can see the evolution of the way we understand female characters on screen.

AV: And now, it’s not only about reflection, but also about inspiration. You quote Linda Woolverton saying “We’re changing the culture through storytelling”. Can you tell me about the present-day, influential side of the Disney Princess?

EZ: I think that’s a very important evolution that we’ve been able to see. The early Disney Princesses reflected their time, but as we’ve gone along, starting with Little Mermaid, they’ve changed. She was a very rebellious teenager. The creation of Belle was a very key moment because they made a brunette princess who was very intelligent, who wanted adventure and loved books. That was so popular with people. People felt that they could see themselves and because of how popular Belle was, Disney changed Jasmine. She became feistier and more adventurous, and that moved on to characters like Pocahontas and Mulan, who are very dynamic and adventurous. And more recently, we’ve gotten much more empowered female characters.

That’s something Disney has done very purposely, especially with Jennifer Lee at the helm. I think they want to make sure that what women are seeing is something that they want to become. There’s a very nice quote from Jessica Julius, Vice President of Creative Development at the Walt Disney Animation Studios, saying, “If you can see it, you can be it”. That’s the idea that if you see someone take charge of their destiny and go after their dream in a film, then you feel that you can also do that. It empowers you to do the same. It doesn’t have to be a big, grandiose statement. It can literally be someone being curious and wanting to go out into the world and find themselves, and then you go do that. That’s really important to them. The way they’re presenting the Disney Princess now is that she is adventurous, and she’s kind, and she’s the leader of her own story. She is in charge of her own story. Which is something that has been true of all of them: they all do embrace their own narrative. Moana or Tiana are really putting themselves out there and taking charge of their destiny. They’re not afraid to be who they are. You can also see that in films, more recent films like Encanto or Raya And The Last Dragon. They’re bringing in new cultures. They’re allowing female characters to be leaders and warriors and I think that will probably continue and there will continue to be such an evolution.

AV: That evolution touches not only the people but culture in general.

EZ: Yes. I think that’s a huge responsibility to know that you have that sort of wide-reaching impact on people of all generations and of all backgrounds. That’s a lot to think about. Which I think is why, in more recent animated films, they have taken on board a lot of consultants, a whole trust that was there for the making of Moana, for instance, to help them reflect the reality of their culture.

AV: Just like a Disney Princess, did you learn more about yourself during the process of writing this book?

EZ: I did learn quite a lot! On a more surface level, I learned how to be a better book author and researcher, where to find information, how to distill it all down into a story that makes sense for the readers. It’s really challenging as a writer to get tons of information and have to bring it onto this really narrow path. There are things that have to be left out, and this has to go through many, many approval processes. There are certain things that were cut during those processes. But it was a really enjoyable process for me, and I feel that I’m a much stronger writer and storyteller now.

And on a more personal level, it was just really nice to spend time with these characters. Like we were just saying, it’s very inspiring and empowering to hear about these stories and to see these stories, and so, to spend almost a year living with these characters. I mean, the algorithms of my social media changed – I used to open Instagram and only get memes of Disney Princesses. I was totally immersed in it, thinking about it all the time, and that’s really inspiring. That encourages you to follow in their footsteps and feel empowered in your own life.

With our thanks to Emily Zemler and Mandy Rodgers.

That’s when The Sea Beast was born.

Chris pitched the idea of The Sea Beast to Production Designer Matthias Lechner in 2019, and he quickly began work on finding the right design to bring Chris’s epic vision to life.

Matthias was born in 1970 in Mannheim, Germany. He spent his youth in an idyllic south-German setting. In 1990, he moved to Hamburg to find his place in the awakening German animation industry. Later, he studied classical animation in Dublin, Ireland and moved as an “animation nomad” to Hamburg, Seoul, Copenhagen, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Los Angeles. For 30 years, he has worked as an Art Director and Production Designer on a number of European and American animated features like Disney’s Zootopia and Ralph Breaks The Internet.

As the Production Designer of The Sea Beast, he talks with us about this new adventure in light of past experiences.

Animated Views: How did you get to work on The Sea Beast?

Matthias Lechner: I was at Disney, I had just finished with Ralph Breaks The Internet and started to work on Encanto, and I knew it would be something special. So, it was actually hard to go from Disney to The Sea Beast. It’s not that I wanted to, but Chris made it so appealing to come to The Sea Beast. Partly, for me, it was a career step up, from Art Director Environments to Production Designer; so, that was tempting. The other thing was that it was so uncharted, to speak with sailing terms. Netflix was just opening up; and we all felt like a start-up. We didn’t know what style we were gonna choose. It would have been a little scary if it wasn’t for Chris, so I wanted to take on that challenge.

AV: Indeed, how did you choose the style of the film?

ML: First, it was a little bit daunting to come up with something different, because I love the Disney style, and so does Chris. We both come from that tradition, and we wanted to keep some of that. That’s the reason why we’re in that business: to make movies like that! But then we tried to find another angle to this movie. The first thing Chris told me was that it was gonna be epic, complex, big, and most of all, immersive. So, I thought: if the style is too visible, too extreme, it would act like a filter between the movie and the audience, who will be always reminded that they’re watching a movie. I wanted to really keep the people into the film.

I grew up in Germany, and I remembered some paintings in the museums by Caspar David Friedrich. Some of them are so big, like a wall, or a cinema screen. They’re very into composition, very subtle in the lighting and just epic. So, that was one inspiration. The other one was Remington. The trick is, when you do a movie like The Sea Beast, which is a period piece, because of sunlight or candle light, it can turn very brownish, with muted colors. In that regard, I really like what Remington did with natural environments. The nights can be of strong green, or something like that. That was very inspiring. I wanted to make this movie very colorful.

AV: I was very impressed by the treatment of the natural elements: water, air, fire.

ML: One of the reasons why we wanted to make the water very realistic is that it gives the audience a sense of scale of things. It’s sort of like a measuring tape. You know how big a wave can be, you know what water looks like, and if something giant comes out of it, we have a good relationship to how big it actually is compared to the water. As 80% of the movie takes place on the water, it was very important to make it right. With Sony Pictures Imageworks, we had a great partner for that. Our Tech supervisor actually grew up on a ship for several years. So, he really, really knew what he was doing. And Sony works on live action films, too. So, they already had the right systems to create it. We worked a lot on the color of the water. In some scenes, it’s very green, and in other ones, it can reflect the sky and get darker. You can do a lot of coloring. It’s usually a matter of detail. It’s kind of a “how many” question. How many levels of detail can you put on the water? It can become very hard to render. So, we had to always find the right balance.

As for the sky, when I started, Chris had that painting on the wall by N.C. Wyeth, who did these great adventure ship paintings with giant clouds in the background. So, we did try in the beginning to stylize his style somehow but we didn’t get anywhere with this because it always looked like somebody painted the sky, like in The Truman Show. So, in order to have our world look as believable as possible, we ended up having a realistic-ish sky. I mean, you still can see it’s a little painted, you can see the clouds are a little bit over the top, but it allows the audience to look into infinity. That’s why it had to look that realistic. And it fits to the water.

And regarding fire, for that movie, I wanted to establish an opposition between green and red, and I wanted to hit that right at the beginning. So, when the boy is in the water, we have the green moonlit water versus the red, burning ship. And, as I told you, we worked a lot on the lighting.

AV: How did you approach the ship, the Inevitable?

ML: We wanted the ship to feel real. We looked a lot at Master And Commander, the Peter Weir film, because it felt like you’re actually on a ship. And it’s just the amount of ropes on screen! It’s something that you don’t see in animation a lot. So, we really spent a lot of effort on making the ship correct, so to speak, and we had several experts help us with that, sitting right next to the modeler, making sure that proportions are right and that everything makes sense. We asked them about the kind of ship we would need for our movie. For example, when you think about pirate ships, you think of portals opening and cannons coming out. But if you wanted to catch something that’s moving in the water, you have to realize that little guns work better. There’s plenty of details you don’t really see in the movie, but that we put into our design to have the most accurate ship possible. We also have that figurehead that’s really big. It’s iconic for a hunting ship but it also protects the front, with spikes coming out. So, in essence, it’s a ship that can really work, that gets all the ropes and all the correct rigging. One thing that I came up with is the sails. I wanted that this ship had an identity and could be recognized from far away. So, I found this technique of tinting the sails to protect them from sun damage, and I turned them red. And that works really well. That’s lots of research, which is something I learned from Disney. They’re very keen on research, and out of research come ideas.

AV: And how did you create the design of the beasts themselves?

ML: We had Shiyoon Kim as Designer of the beasts. All the beasts coming out of one person’s imagination gives them a certain DNA to begin with. I approached them more as adversaries versus species we can relate to. So, the adversaries like the one we see at the beginning of the movie is insect-like and has an exoskeleton, whereas the main sea beast has a very smooth skin. The difference is also that the ones that we relate to more have primary colors whereas the other ones have secondary colors: you have the green beast at the beginning, and then the more “let’s be friends” beast are blue and red, and then the yellow ones on the island are also recognizable in opposition to the purple one.

I already talked about the opposition “green vs. red”, but more generally, the theory behind the colors was that we’re in a world based on dualism, whereas Maisie starts to sort of collect all the colors. All of them can actually get together. Some of these colors are already on her costume and in the end, she has blue and red, and Jacob has some yellow on him. She actually creates a family of colors.

AV: What about the human characters, that go from realistic with Maisie and Jacob to caricature with the royal couple?

ML: Tony Fucile was the guy who designed most of them. The deal with the characters in general was not to get to the “uncanny valley”. We wanted this movie to feel more real, more immersive, but at the same time, when you go too far, it loses its charm. So, Tony found a really nice way of keeping in both worlds, the Disney world and a little extra on top. The royals are side characters, so you tend to go more extreme with characters that have a short time on screen and are a little more extreme in their personalities, not as subtle. So, we just pushed them. A lot about the royals in their costumes, too. We spent a lot of time on costumes in general.

AV: You mentioned Tony Fucile. Can you tell me more about his contribution as a character designer?

ML:First, I have to give credit to Chris. He animated before and he really knew what he wanted to do. So, basically, we came up with concepts and photographs. For example, for Maisie, one thing that was important to me was to make her not doll-like and find some real angle in her. So, I looked at some kids that had a hard life, for example during the Great Depression. I think in particular of one photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs that kind of stuck in my mind. She had, like, these little creases under her eyes. And then I noticed that you actually see that with kids a lot. It’s not tired, it’s not old, it’s just that they happen to have these little creases here. Another thing is that animation usually has a very distinct way of how the eyelid works and I just wanted the space over the eye to be a little bulgier than usual just to give her character, and I saw that on kids, too. Then I shared these ideas with Tony, and he came back with so many sketches, and they were all great. But we had to make choices. And then, when we narrowed it down, we had a costume designer, Michele Clapton, who did the costumes for Game Of Thrones, who gave us a lot of ideas. And then, when Tony’s done finding the character, he goes to somebody else like our art director who makes paintings, so, defines the skin and the hair and all that stuff, and then he goes to modeling which is a very collaborative thing.

AV: From the island to the kingdom, your role as a Production Designer is about creating a whole, big world, and that was also true on your previous films, Zootopia and Ralph Breaks The Internet, that also had such a really huge scope.

ML: That’s what I live for! Because that comes natural to me. That’s partly why I’m in animation. That goes back to childhood. There are two types of kids. There are the ones that like to set all the little stuff – that’s me. And there’s other ones that like to play with the dolls, and that becomes the animators. So, I’ve always had a great time setting up big worlds since childhood. And part of that is just thinking for a long time, it’s sort of like an exercise, an empathy, putting ourselves into the shoes of the people that we would have in that world, with their experiences and their needs.

For Zootopia, there was a long search, because you don’t know what would animals feel. Are these animals, anyway? And so on. We designed a lot of things that didn’t really end up in the movie, like a big palm hotel. And something I liked in that film is that we don’t explain it. I like things in the movie that are just there because we made up this choice for reasons but they’re not explained. It’s like when you go to New York, you don’t have to explain every building. So, it’s great to have these things in the movie. In The Sea Beast, we don’t explain why the city is the shape that it is. I do know, and then the audience assumes that the people that built it know and it kinda of makes sense in the logic of the film. Finding that logic is lots of fun for me.

AV: And in Ralph Breaks The Internet, that world is virtual. So, how did you give shape to that virtuality?

ML: Coming from Ralph 2 to The Sea Beast, it was such a pleasure to work back to something that you could grasp so easily. Because it’s a period movie. Ralph was a real head-stretcher. What is the internet? Obviously, it’s not a real place, but you know that’s a place the characters go to, so you have to give it a physical form. Again, we did a lot of research, we visited a big internet hub. We were allowed inside and I have to say the most memorable thing about that is the chaos. The internet has been growing there since the 80s, so there were several feet of cables that nobody knew what they connected.

Then, basically, from that, we took a couple of concepts like “the internet is infinite”, and made it grow from the bottom up. So, if you go down you have the “oldernet”, where the start of the internet is, and then, the higher you go, the newer it gets. Bigger websites have bigger buildings, so to speak. And then you combine these ideas and hopefully they work. You don’t know really, until you’re in the movie.

AV: How do you translate your European background into your art?

ML: I grew up with a lot of Belgian comic books and I really loved the world that Franquin built, for example. I grew up in Germany in 1970 but I have this sentimentality from France and Belgium of the 60s, and from these comic books, and that might be seen a little bit in Zootopia. The film also was very personal because I was living in British Columbia, where my wife is from, so that’s why I was there. I spent two years there, and I felt a little like Judy Hopps coming into the big city when Disney asked me if I would come here and art direct the film. Our journey was a little like hers, coming from a small village to a station that looked a little bit like the one that I had close to my house in Germany, and then we go through the big forest similar to the ones of British Columbia, and then we end up in the big city. We had a very similar journey.

You know, you always put certain things from your childhood in there. In The Sea Beast, it’s the cities, of course, the towns, because I grew up in a medieval town. The grassy hill the beast comes over reminds me of the hill that I knew when I was a kid, which I liked to slide down, that sort of thing. So, you always sort of come back to your childhood. Whether you’re aware of it or not, it appears under some hollowed form in your designs.

AV: Compared to 2D, computer animation allows infinite environments. How do you find the balance between finite and infinite in order to unleash your creativity without losing yourself?

ML: It’s funny you say it this way. I started making 2D movies. The first half of my career was in 2D. And one thing I really enjoyed is that, if you want to have an expansive city for one shot, no problem, you draw it, it’s there. In 3D you have to build everything. So, you have to have a good plan of how you can get the most out of the buildings possible, which is not a problem in 2D. You just draw whatever you want. So, in a way, I’d say I’d have more freedom in 2D. In 3D, I use a lot of Sketch-up, as sort of a planning tool. In The Sea Beast, I built the city in Sketch-up first and this way, if I build 20 buildings for the city, I build them the right way so that they look a little different from each side, which I also did for Ralph Breaks The Internet, for the websites. You build them in a way so that they have different elements and different angles so that you can combine them the best way. And then I can try them out in 3D already. You have to actually plan a lot more because everything costs so much in 3D.

AV: You brought so much of yourself in your movies. But what did the movies bring to you?

ML: Let’s start with Zootopia. I had never made a movie for a large studio before, so it was simply about learning how Disney works, how Hollywood animation works; and thankfully, I had those two years at home, coming up with concepts, and I tell you, every day I was like asking myself, desperate, what do these people want from me that they don’t have already? I was very anxious in the beginning. And then I met the Production Designer, Dave Goetz, who’s been a friend of mine. He showed me the ropes, but at the same time, he let me have all the freedom as he saw that I had a vision for the city. So, he let me do it. But he really guided me through the system of how Disney works. So, that was great, and I still try to emulate that as a Production Designer.

For Ralph, the challenge there was that it was probably the most complex Disney movie ever done, with the biggest sets and the most pieces. So, the challenge was to get it done while keeping control of this giant cruise ship. I couldn’t feel more confident after I finished that one. I knew what I was doing, whereas on Zootopia – well, I hoped for the best.

And then The Sea Beast was different again because it was a different vendor model. We had a team at Netflix designing it, and then I had to talk to another studio. At Disney, you could talk directly with the artists and you didn’t have to prepare everything. You could just communicate. Whereas with the vendor model, you speak to the effects supervisor and he relays your notes to someone else. Which wasn’t a problem in the end.
The other thing is, on the first two movies, Zootopia and Ralph Breaks The Internet, I was just in charge of the environments, whereas on this one I overlooked the whole thing. And that was really new. A learning experience to me was actually the lighting. Because that’s not part of art direction, that’s the Production Designer’s stuff usually. So, I learned a lot. Thankfully, my art director, Woonyoung Jung, is just a genius with color and helped a lot. I think it was a little bit annoying for the people at Sony at first, with me not knowing all the terms perfectly, but that went well in the end. At the very end of the movie, we did color timing, which I had never done before either, but for me it was just great. It’s just a toybox with all sorts of possibilities and you can really bring out the things that you hoped for.

At the beginning of a movie, you come with a vision, but that’s not necessarily the movie in the end. Other designers are artists with a specific style, and they bring that style to the movie. I’m more collaborative and I’m happy with whatever other voices bring to the movie. As long as it’s good idea, it’s great and it helps. So, it’s more like raising up a child or teaching a class or something like that where you just push in the right direction and then hope in the end the world will love it!

With our thanks to Matthias Lechner, Samantha Kwan, Lamarco McClendon and Olivier Mouroux

Buzz Lightyear is such a hero. That’s what filmmakers pictured when creating the character for Toy Story (1995). And it’s in the same spirit that director Angus McLane envisioned – 21 years later – Lightyear, the movie that inspired Andy to beg for the space ranger toy that would change the lives of Woody and the other toys of the boy’s bedroom forever!

Both a sci-fi action-adventure and the definitive origin story of Buzz Lightyear, Lightyear follows the legendary Space Ranger on an intergalactic adventure through both the hostile planet of T’Kani Prime and through time.

To imagine such an extraordinary voyage visually, McLane appealed to production designer Tim Evatt, who is no alien at all to Pixar style and lore. A 14-year art design veteran, he served as a set and character artist on many of Pixar’s more recent releases: Toy Story 3, Cars 2, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Coco, The Incredibles 2 and Soul. He has also been involved in the production of a handful of animated Pixar shorts including: Toy Story Toons: Small Fry and Toy Story That Time Forgot, and he was the production designer for the 2020 Oscar-nominated animated short Kitbull.

Here’s our conversation.
Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for the film.

Animated Views: From set designer to production designer for the first time on a feature film, can you tell me about your own journey through time at Pixar?

Tim Evatt: At Pixar, I’ve learned a lot. The first movie I did was Toy Story 3. During my studies at the San Francisco Academy of Art, and then in video games, with Activision, Sanzaru and EA, I did a lot of different things; and then Pixar called me and told me they wanted me as a set designer on Toy Story 3. It was a good starting point to learn how to draw for a film. And I was doing it the Pixar style ways. I mean, they go to a location and research with photos, and then they put all these details into drawings that they give to 3D modelers later on. Pixar has a big tradition in reference. So, for example, on Toy Story 3, I went to the dump. It wasn’t glamorous! It was just doing the research and seeing the color and what looked like everything, and then put it in the final film. I’ve been on a lot of movies since then.

On Finding Dory and The Good Dinosaur, learning 3D and Maya helped me compose camera shots. I had mentors like Matt Aspbury and Andy Grisdale from Layout. So, I started learning from them. I was in a unique case because I started learning more 3D building and that complemented my drawings in 3D. Because sometimes I love drawing, but I do love building Maya 3D models, too, like building a set, building an environment, seeing the space and then putting a camera. It’s like Lego building. Like toys. Angus McLane was the co-director on Dory, and he saw my contributions of building a lot of sets alongside Don Shank. I was doing complex scenes and showing Andrew a moving camera underneath the ocean, and I think it kind of had them see I was an artist that can do multiple things.

Growing into Soul, I became sets art director, and then I had people encourage me to apply to Lightyear for production designer. I was already production designer on a smaller short named Kitbull. It was a little cartoon short that Rosie Sullivan wanted me to help out with. It was a good learning experience for me. For Lightyear, I applied and I already had art pieces and rough models, and I told Angus : “the most important thing for this movie, is that you need great 3D modelers to come on early so they can start replenishing the assets.” There’s a thing at Pixar where we reuse models constantly, and it’s okay, it helps. But what happens over the years, the models are not cohesive, they tend to start looking from different movies. I mentioned that to Angus and I said “the most important thing is that we have to replenish our models through 3D.” I was able to get Greg Peltz. He’s an amazing 3D modeler and he became our art director, with Garett Taylor. For this movie I got two sets art directors because I was, like, this movie is so massive, there’s a lot of things that we have to engineer for this film. So, I gathered Greg’s teammates that could engineer the movie.

As far as I’m concerned, I was more on the emotional aspect of the film. I’ve done some set design for Lightyear, but I think it was more important for me to organize the shape language and the idea of mood and color and encourage my team to encourage the other departments to be creative. Angus is a very particular director. So, I felt my role was to cultivate all his influences. We looked at a lot of references from films to toy design. We kind of just gathered this imagery and later on we would distribute that to the team and say, “those are really the things that Angus really enjoys”. And we did little test models. We got an ILM modeler that would build actual practical models. Because Angus wanted the models to feel like they’re from the 80s. We all grew up with all these great sci-fi movies of the 80s, and I think our team wanted to feel that when we watch the movie. It feels like something I watched when I was a kid. Anything sci-fi from the 80s, we studied it, we looked at it, we got inspired by it, from artefacts to lenses, from compositing to matte painting, it has this dreamlike quality. When I watch an 80s movie, I miss those times when they made things practical and real!

AV: Indeed, in order to prepare the movie, you researched 80s movies, but also you went to NASA. How did you balance imaginary and realistic references in the film?

TE: It was important for us to check-off our list. So, we went to NASA and hung out with astronauts and looked at how things are practically made for real space flights. But we didn’t want to lose the fantastic-ness of design. We didn’t want to go so real that it looks not fantastic. So, we did balance that. Part of it is the casting of the team. I’m a big sci-fi nerd, but the people that I chose to be on the project, we just had to use the same language. They were able to build things and get influenced by sci-fi and implement it. I’ll give you an example: Greg Peltz could look at a practical thing from NASA and he could look at a sci-fi thing, and he could merge them together and make something that is fantastic but practical. As filmmakers, we’re teammates. We’re all in it together. Not one person has all the solutions, but some people have an ability to solve problems. I really leaned on my art directors to help solve a lot of these problems. We definitely wanted to go to NASA and then, we also did a trip to Skywalker Ranch to actually see their practical models like the Millennium Falcon. Oh my gosh! We were there for four hours and it was unbelievable to see how all these models are perfect. The Falcon is huge and you look at the actual one. Those model builders were so phenomenal in what they did. That was very inspiring!

AV: How did you manage to take all these references and inspirations, and make a genuine, present-day Pixar movie?

TE: There were so many rules from the original Buzz we had to stick with. If we’d moved away too far from what Buzz actually looks like, people would have questioned him. So, we had to stick to those rules to actually update the new Buzz. In the research that we did and the detail that we did from research at NASA, it’s typical of a traditional Pixar film. For Bug’s Life, they would go low into the grass using little cameras. They would put those little cameras on a Lego dolly and see what it would look like. Bill Cone used to say that when you’re lower from the grass, the grass has light coming through and you have this kind of stained-glass window effect. On Lightyear, it was like – how do we get practicality from NASA and fantasy into the film?

Also, we used weather to show Buzz’s mood through the whole film. So, weather was a way to incorporate that. When I looked at the whole film, I was like – what are the main stakes of his life changes? What is cool about Lightyear is, it teaches kids and people in general how to live with a mistake. When Alicia dies, everything becomes like he has to make a decision and make things right. One of the other important things was to have everything turn white when Buzz goes lightspeed. With Ian Megibben, who was the head of lighting, we would talk about what are the stakes in the ground of the visual of the film, and how do you tie together some of these moments. I used blue with relation with Alicia, lightspeed is life, and when there’s like a storm coming with Zurg, the environment turns all green, twisters actually happen and the weather turns green for some reason. So, I think very deep research is what Pixar films are famous for. And story-wise, characters and personality are of utmost importance. So, we thought how to make Buzz a likeable character. Because he could be very “police officer”. But that makes him so fun, too!

AV: Speaking of Buzz and Zurg, how did you design these realistic characters out of toys – whereas in the industry it’s generally the contrary, with toys inspired by live characters.

TE: We added a lot of realistic details to the original toy designs. For instance, the surfaces of stuff look more practical through metal and mechanisms. The original Zurg didn’t have the chest opening up. On the other side, Greg would look at some of the original hand shapes and keep them similar to what the toy was. There is a moment when Zurg laughs and his head bounces just like the original toy. It’s a nod. What we were going for was like, for example, seeing Tim Burton’s Batman and then seeing the TV show from the 1960s. There’s a totally different mood to it. We were going for more of a seriousness. And through that seriousness you feel the stakes. We also wanted you to feel that if Buzz’s helmet came off, he could die. The same, when you see Buzz get hit, you have to realize that he could possibly get harmed. So, the suit and all that have to have that kind of believability. That’s pretty much the direction we wanted.

AV: Can you tell me about the creation of Sox?

TE: We had early designs from Dean Heezen. He was very much like a cat, very realistic, but still with mechanics to it. Angus really loved the design. And at the same time, Nicolle Castro, who’s a great storyboard artist and loves drawing anime and stuff, did another drawing as a joke. Seeing that, Angus mentioned that that was the direction that there were working on. It became kind of a proof of concept, Sox being cuter. And after that, Matt Nolte and Dean went back in and made Sox more of a cute character. They used to see it like Teddy Ruxpin in a way.

AV: Was it hard to integrate that character within the serious universe of Lightyear?

TE: Angus was going for that one, like a little dog, and at the same time, he wanted to embrace the restriction of a robot. He’s very good at analyzing physical animation and he loves the restriction of things. Robots may not move very smoothly but he uses that as an inspiration for the character.

AV: Time is an essential parameter of the film, its story and stakes. From your point of view, how did you approach the passing of time in the film.

TE: The way I felt it, Buzz is coming, in a way, from an egg – a simple egg, a pure egg, the clothes should be all white. There’s a pureness of things. They’re sterilized astronauts in the beginning. Since they crashed, I really wanted – along with my art directors – to bring ancient elements together from the first flight ship that goes into space, that they’re kind of using elements that they found and kind of repurposed. When he leaves for a few minutes and comes back in the future, we wanted to use the silo to give a measure of the time that had passed. Since he’s been gone for 4 years, we made the silo being fully built. There was a restriction of how we could age the characters. So, we had to rely on color of hair or positions of the bodies. The growth of the population of the base was a way to measure that progress, and then the sets team had this great solution of adding farms and green to show that they’re cultivating the planet to get food and stuff. So, time goes on with that. And then, weather was a way to show that time was moving on.

The character of Alicia is very important in that regard because she actually gets very old, and you realize through her that time has actually gone. Buzz is so focused to get his mission done that he doesn’t realize life has moved on; and I think when Alicia passes away, that really hits him. Izzy being older, along with Burnside, he also realizes that time has moved on. Some of the sets were a way to show that time has aged. Even the shading. The shader art director made sure everything was clean in the beginning and gets more and more dirty and dilapidated. I had one of my sets art directors take a simple hallway, and the hallways really show Buzz’s progression, because the Zurg walls show more advanced technology than the one they had when they landed on the planet. That was important to show that through the ship language.

AV: What was the funniest aspect of your assignment on Lightyear?

TE: I feel like Angus and Ian let me run with how to progress the film, how to track everything. Angus has just a love of toys and he loves old colors. How do I make film transitions with Angus’ choice of old colors of suits and stuff, because they might stick out really bad in a certain color and lighting. Angus really wanted this red suit when Buzz came back from lightspeed, so I did this really bold, arbitrary mix of color. Ian though it was a very good way of organizing things. So, we had to track every suit Buzz was gonna wear and get the Lightyear suit back on. In an action movie, it’s really hard to do a progression of colors when you have explosions and very dynamic things happen. So, it was a challenge for me. But I had a really great time watching all these movies that I enjoyed, and working with Ian and the writers, we were able to make a film with all of these influences. That was the fun part for me, to really set the mood with Ian and Angus. I’d done set design and character design, but this was a great first as a production designer. I did a little bit of that with Kitbull, but this was my first time really getting to look at the whole film and getting to adjust the way it’s presented. That was really fun!

With our thanks to Tim Evatt, Andrea Lirio and Chris Wiggum at Pixar, and April Whitney at Chronicle Books.

But this phase of growing up is marked in an unexpected, can’t-hide-from-it, larger-than-life way: When Mei’s emotions get the better of her, she “poofs” into a giant red panda. “It’s kind of like ‘The Incredible Hulk,’ but cuter,” says director Domee Shi.

To imagine with her the look of that one-of-kind world, Shi appealed to the same Production Designer as for her Academy Award winning short Bao (2018), the talented Rona Liu.
Born in China, Liu moved to the Bay Area at the age of 10. Ever since she was a young girl, she has always been a fan of Disney films and art, and remembers fondly pausing her copy of The Little Mermaid to draw her favorite character, Ariel. Pursuing her passions, after graduating from Los Gatos High School, she attended the Art Center College of Design and first got a job in Disney Consumer Products as a character intern before joining Pixar in June of 2011 as a sketch and shading artist in the Art department, responsible for designing the colors and textures that go on characters, environments and props in a film. Since joining the studio, Liu has worked on The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Bao , and now Turning Red.

She tells us more about her experience on the latter, which was intense artistically as well as personally.

Animated Views: Turning Red is so original that it’s been often commented as a fresh start for Pixar, be it story-wise or visually. Do you agree?

Rona Liu: It’s definitely fresh but, maybe because I’ve been working at Pixar for so long, I feel like the start has been a long time coming. Pixar has started to invest in new, young, fresh voices for a long time with the Sparkshorts project and films like Burrow, Purl or Kitbull.

And then, in terms of a fresh look, because you have a fresh voice with Domee, she’s encouraged to tell a story about herself, this 13-year-old coming of age story, and since it’s a very personal story, I think the look has to fit the story she’s telling. We weren’t so much trying to go, ‘Oh, we have to come up with a new look!’, but it was more like a fluid, natural thing, as we were trying to tell a very personal story. In terms of the color palette and the ‘chunky cute’ style, it’s really the kind of thing that we grew up with like Sanrio, anime, cute video games, Pokémon… Those had a certain type of aesthetics that we were trying to marry with the Pixar style. We didn’t want to impress people with something new; we wanted to propose the thing that really fits, that can tell a really authentic story to us. The outcome is this fresh look that I’m really glad people are picking up and responding to.

AV: In the documentary Embrace The Panda, which is also a very fresh way to promote an animated movie, you talk about the way you discovered Domee’s work. Can you tell us more about how you got along with her?

RL: Embrace The Panda was definitely unexpected. Usually, we do DVD specials, with behind-the-scenes. I think none of us expected something so personal as Embrace The Panda. So much of that credit goes to the director, Erica Milsom. She’s always wanted to dive deeper, and I think all credit goes to her for making this behind-the-scenes something so relatable. This is really inspiring, you know – there was that segment when I talk about my divorced parents and how that had an influence on me, and people were chiming in and telling me they had a similar story and felt the same. That was something very special that Erica did because it connects with our viewers on a different level. We have our movie, and it connects with kids in a fun storytelling level. But this is on a more human level. In terms of marketing and promotion, I was telling my husband this is a really smart way to put everything together, and I think that Disney+ was the perfect platform for it all to come up at once. The perfect way to share everything with the world.

In terms of Domee and her personality and what drew me to her, there’s a really funny story. I was actually in college, and my friends and I were pulling all-nighters. It was 2am or something and my friend showed me this Sheridan College film, a 24-hour, animated, student-made gif. It was only like a few seconds long, and it was kind of a funny hamster dancing to a K-pop song, and we were like ‘whoever animated this is going to be a really successful, funny director someday, because this is just gold!’
Skip to like 5 years later. It was like my first day at Pixar. I was hired with a group of people and a bunch of us were just walking around and someone goes ‘Hey, are you one of the new hires? We should grab one sometime!’ and I said ‘Yeah, sure. What’s your name?’ and she said ‘I’m Domee,’ and I was like, ‘Domee Shi???? The girl who animated the dancing hamster???’ I was just in awe. Then, she became a friend and we would hang out on weekends. When she was pitching Bao and getting this project greenlit, she approached me to be part of it. All this started out as just friends playing around with ideas and sharing mutual interest like Studio Ghibli films, seeing how we could put some of that look into a potential project, and going to Chinatown on the weekends studying, like, dumplings, and getting ideas for how maybe dumplings could be animated and made realistic in the 3D world. So, our collaboration started with Bao. And then for Turning Red, I was telling her, like, ‘I would follow you off a cliff. Anything you do, I’m in,’ because she’s brilliant. I just love her style, I love her directness, her decisiveness. She’s special. And here I am now!

AV: How do you explain how your two artistic personalities match so well?

RL: There are a lot of similarities between us. All of the essential things, we pretty much see eye-to-eye. We love round shapes, we both love animals, cats, we both love the silliness. We’re really interested in the humorous side of things, and try to capture that in our art. We have a similar interest in Studio Ghibli films. We both grew up with Pokémon, anime, Sailor Moon… It’s something that really bonds us. But we also differ a little bit. I feel at home when the show tends to be a little more mellow and a little more quiet (for instance, one of my favorite scenes is when you have all the girls sitting on the rooftop, with that giant moon, as they’re thinking that tomorrow, they’re gonna become women), whereas Domee’s art is very funny, very outgoing, very punchy, and I feel like that came into play in kind of different moments in the film.

So, I think the baseline of our interest is very much in line, and then kind of more superficially, we have slightly different personalities and ways to express ourselves. That really came together when we were making that film together. We ‘plus’ each other out because we kind of fill in each other. She can really excite me and push me to the punchy, edgy kind of side, and then I can really support her on the more quiet and graceful side. We really balance each other.

AV: You mention the culture you have in common. How did you kind of re-activate that culture of your youth?

RL: Definitely growing up, I was, like, Sunday nights just watching anime. I forgot what channel, but at 10pm, they would show, like, two episodes of Evangelion or Dragon Ball Z, and I was asking my mom if I could stay up just a little bit so that I could watch everything. When Domee pitched her ideas, she asked, ‘Who were we when we were 13?’ Then, it just all kind of flooded back. And then, there was a lot more to dive into. I went and looked at Sailor Moon, and we started watching them as a team and sharing our favorite mangas and stuff. That kind of inspiration was always there because it was who we were at 13, doodling and watching anime. And now in our 30s, we’re kind of reliving ourselves when we were that age, also inviting people on the team who don’t have that background, like, ‘hey this is an art form. Let’s screen it as a team!’

AV: How would you explain the ‘chunky cute’ concept?

RL: For us, the ‘Chunky Cute’ means really embracing curvatures, really embracing round angles, having no sharp angles, no completely straight lines. Even if you look at our buildings and everything, even if something is straight, if you kind of zoom in a little bit, it has a little bit of wobble. There’s no thin tapering. If you look at the characters, the ankles are thick and round. With panda, she’s very thick and very round. In this environment, if the real buildings have 5 stories, ours have 3. So, it’s about minimizing a lot of details and just distilling details down to the essentials. If this building has 6 windows, can we still make it feel like a building by getting it down to 3 windows? If this place has 7 staircases, can we do 5 and make it still feel like Toronto? This kind of idea started with Bao, and that’s kind of something that Domee and I gravitated toward.

We were at the Asian art museum and we were looking at these ancient clay sculptures. It was clay houses, like ancient miniatures. They looked like houses and they had all the essential elements that make them look like an ancient home, but just not so detailed. And yet, it was so realistic. Early on, we were talking about the photo-real look of past Pixar films. One thing we were always saying to ourselves on Turning Red was, ‘Let’s not go for photorealism, but let’s go for believability.’ It needs to feel like Toronto, it needs to feel like a human character, it needs to feel like four friends. We need to make the world feel diverse without getting so specific on race. Like all the friends need to feel like they’re from different ethnicities but we don’t need to pinpoint exactly what Mei’s Chinese group is. So, it was really believability versus realism, and we favored believability.

AV: The pastel colors and the overall palette of the movie seem rather girly, but at the same time, the appeal of film is universal. How did you succeed that balance?

RL: We never thought our colors as girlish or boyish ; it was never driven by gender. A lot of the references we used was pastel photography. If you search pastel photography on Instagram, you’re gonna get all these hits, and I think that aesthetics is characteristic of that generation. It’s kind of an homage to the 90s. It’s just what people were into at that time, and this is something that we still are into. We really love this aesthetic, and it also makes us feel like this is what we would have been into at 13 as well, and it’s the perfect way to depict an innocent young girl’s world.

We also needed emotionally to go somewhere color-wise. So, we started out in this innocent mode. Meilin’s very confident, she knows who she is, and we start out very peaceful, very pastel, very low-contrast. I though it supported who she was as a character. But then as she evolves, we can start punching up the contrast, the saturation, and when you get to third act, you have some very high contrast, with very dark colors. The pastels are no longer pastels, they’re extremely saturated and in your face. For us, it was also a storytelling tool, to make sure that the audience subconsciously gets that the colors are supporting this excitement and tension.

AV: Scale is also essential to the film. As you said it, ‘Chucky Cute’ is about keeping things small, but when Meilin turns into a panda, she really looks big and out of place in her house, and the same with her mother when she gets into the stadium as a giant panda herself. How did you make it both intimate, small and cute, and big at the same time?

RL: When Mei turns into a panda, she needed to not fit into the house. To be honest, it was definitely a lot of planning with our sets department and layout department. We did a lot of testing. Early on, we couldn’t have made the house without the characters and we couldn’t have made the characters without the environment. Constantly, we had to move them at the same pace so that we could keep comparing them in terms of scale. The house itself went through a lot of scale changes as the panda was being developed. I remember at one point it was a lot smaller, and the school was a lot smaller, too because, before we had the characters, we were just eyeballing our environments. We were, like, ‘Oh, we’re going to the chunky cute. So, we’ll make it smaller and smaller.’ And the moment our layout DP Mahyar came on, he was like, ‘Guys, we need to do some tests. I think we need to make things a lot bigger. Because for us to shoot in there, we need some space for the camera and we need to have the panda fit.’ So, once we started doing the tests, we were still ‘chunky cute’ in terms of the design, but the scale of things had to grow to fit our panda.

And when we got into the stadium, the same thing happened. There was a lot of preliminary testing with a rough, giant panda – Mingzilla! – and the stadium in order to see how big we could make her before things started to either break out of the chunky cute world or started to feel like she’s like a miniature. We had to make sure everything was still believable, and didn’t look like a toy and a miniature stadium making the audience start to question the look, and taking them out of the emotion of the film. So, it was a lot of back and forth and a lot of collaboration between all of the departments to make sure that Third Act looks as menacing as it possibly could, but still cute.

AV: How did you get so accurate in terms of reconstructing the 2000s?

RL: A lot of our research happened as we invited everybody to go back and bring up their yearbook photos. So, we had these boards of everybody’s 13-year-old pictures. People brought in their yearbooks and we were just looking at yearbook photos, what clubs they were part of, what musical instruments they played. And if you were a mom or a dad, you could bring in pictures of your kids. Our graphic director Laura Meyer’s daughter actually made a music video to, I think, NSYNC or something, and she brought that in. People tried to connect to the film any way they could, because we either have all been there before or we have people that were there right now. That’s kind of where our references initially went from. Then we searched on Google and Getty images to make sure that we’re not getting references of kids from now but of kids of the time. For instance, none was using smartphones then, everybody was using cellphones and maybe even pagers. There’s also the type of backpacks people had, the types of pencils and pens kids would use back then… All kind of things that were specific to that time.

AV: What was your most intense moment during the production of the film?

RL: I would say one of my most poignant moments on the show is just Mei in her room singing to herself before she rolls on her bed and draws her sketches, as this room is bathed in this fluorescent, bluish green light. To me, it was so special, because we’d been doing so much work in arts and with the technical team, and it was a moment, like, ‘Will this amount of work pay, can it look good?’ The pastel colors, the low contrast, and ‘chunky cute’ style – is it gonna look good on the big screen? This was one of the first sequences that actually got through production and I just remember seeing it on the big screen as a test. It was like 80% done and it looked so good! I think a lot of us got then so much encouragement from that, because it felt like the film was really in the making and it looked really, really good. We were just awe. That was a very special moment!

AV: You brought so much of yourself into the movie. What will you take away from it?

RL: The thing that I think I would most take away with me is just the friends and the colleagues that I’ve met on this show. Because it’s a pandemic, because everybody worked from home, away from each other, it was such a new territory for everybody. So, I would say the collaboration was just so tight. If it hadn’t been that way, this movie would not have been made. All of us walked away just so much closer and I honestly just cannot wait to work on our next movie with the people I worked with. We can think alike; we can finish each other’s sentences. We’ve been through hell together, and now we’re ready to get into a new project.

With our thanks to Rona Liu and Chris Wiggum at Pixar, and April Whitney at Chronicle Books.