For two decades, animations followed more or less a similar visual model. While their character designs aren’t necessarily hyper-realistic, everything else usually is, from the characters’ expressions and movements to the textures and effects, and especially the sets and backdrops. The bar for a good animated movie used to be how “real” it felt.
But the new DreamWorks animation, the bad guys , takes on a more stylized look, especially when it comes to the spaces the characters exist in and the way they move. when asked why the bad guys away from the usual CG brands, director Pierre Perifel struggles to put his opinion on the agenda in a diplomatic way. In an interview with the international website Polygon, the director explains:
“Because I think [esse estilo] … ‘boring’ is probably excessive, but I want to see something different. Frankly, I’m not the only one. I’m not the first to make a movie that’s a little different [estilisticamente] . But I think there have been quite a few now, at least in the Hollywood industry, like the big Hollywood studio movies. You can see the trend is changing a little bit.”
After working on several DreamWorks animations such as Kung-Fu Panda 2 e The Guardians Origin Perifel makes his directorial debut with the bad guys, based on a graphic novel series by Aaron Babley. The film follows a group of animal criminals, all stereotypically dangerous animals, led by the charming Mister Wolf (Sam Rockwell). After an ambitious heist, they are finally arrested. To avoid arrest, Lobo convinces his gang to rehab – or at least pretend, so they can plan their biggest heist yet.
animations like Mitchell family against the Machine Revoltfrom Sony, and Spider-Man in the Spider-Verse or Turning Red e Lucaby Pixar, are highlighting a new trend towards more stylized animations, rather than the detailed textures and CG settings that have defined the industry for the past two decades.
the bad guys balance continues, as one of the most aesthetically different films from DreamWorks since the 2D sequels in Kung Fu Panda. The film’s backgrounds are more pictorial, the character movements more exaggerated, and the specific effects and action sequences lean more into the look of a classic hand-drawn film than a computer-rendered one.
“I think computer graphics has recently proven itself with Monkey’s Planet e [2019] The Lion King and Marvel movies that we can do hyper-realism really, really, really well,” explains Perifel. “And I don’t think that’s the goal anymore. The goal is not just to be hyper-realistic. So now it kind of leaves the door open… How can we style this movie? What kind of style can we try? What kind of looks can we try out and try to educate the audience a little bit for these new looks that we haven’t really seen before? So I think it’s a little bit of that desire to explore and show that we can do different things in animation than just realistic Disney-style renderings.”
But rendering a more exaggerated, cartoonish look is actually more difficult than the once coveted photorealism. Like other animators who found they had to fight existing computer algorithms to get the specific visual aesthetic they wanted, Perifel and his team had to try something new. According to him:
“When you want to do something stylized, you’re basically fighting the computer. Because the computer will want to give you something perfect. Any edge of a cube would be a straight line. And it’s rare that you see any really real straight lines [no mundo]. Even in architecture, it wouldn’t always be completely perfect, lived long enough for you to have those imperfections. To capture that and make it visible, we just had to make it a caricature. We had to break all the edges.”
On the modeling, lighting, texture and animation teams, everyone who worked on the bad guys they had to basically unlearn what they were trained to do. For the effects team, this meant moving away from the simulation renders of dust and smoke particles and instead going back to the hand-drawn effects of 20 years ago. For the animation and movement of the characters, Perifel says he specifically didn’t want animation that was heavily referenced in videos.
“I wanted a more stylized, forced, pose-by-pose animation, influenced by Miyazaki and Lupin e Ernest & Celestine ”, he explains. Animes are a big inspiration for Perifel. “In the US this wave of anime is getting big now, but we had it 30 years ago in Italy, Spain and France. We all grew up with it. That stuck with me, and I always wanted to see a little bit of how Dragon Ball It would be not American style. [Minhas influências são] a bit of Lupin a bit of Miyazaki definitely, Cowboy Bebop , Dragon Ball Z. ”
Much of Perifel’s influence goes back to his childhood obsessions with the media. He decided to become an animator after watching a documentary about the French animation university Gobelins, l’école de l’image and its partnership with DreamWorks while he was in his final year of high school. At the same time, Tarzan Disney hit theaters, and one of its promotions included a pencil test by legendary animator Glen Keane. Seeing Tarzan come to life in the role sparked a passion in Perifel. Growing up, he read many French graphic novels and comic books, which he says contributed to the visual style of the bad guys.
Today, Perifel still looks everywhere for inspiration. Many of her tastes are shaped by French and European animated films – films like I Lost My Body e Marona’s Fantastic Tale tend to be more graphically diverse than big-budget American films. But he also points to a more compact form of inspiration: short films. He explains:
“Whether it’s student short films or regular short films, people try things. Even if it’s something very forced, and something I wouldn’t do, at least it’s refreshing.”
This article is a translation of the writing by Petrana Radulovic to the website Polygon.
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