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.

Deanna’s impressive journey at Pixar started actually in 2012, contributing designs to Academy Award©-winning films such as Inside Out, Toy Story 4, and Soul, as well as The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Incredibles 2, and Onward.

Prior to Pixar, she studied Classical Animation at Sheridan College, as well as 3D Animation at Seneca College, both located in Toronto, Canada. She then freelanced as a 2D character animator and character designer on a wide variety of film, television and commercial projects. She has also served as the Professor of Classical Animation at Seneca College in Toronto for six years and continues to lead workshops worldwide.

On Luca, she acted as both Character Art Director and Animation Sketch Artist Lead, and her unique sensibility really shines throughout this immensely refreshing movie.

Here’s our conversation.

AV: And when you started as a Character Art Director on Luca, what was your first move?

DM: My first assignment, if you will, because our Production Designer Daniela Strijleva was the conductor of this orchestra, was to explore the sea monster characters. That was number one. Because for the Italian characters in Portorosso, we could find reference and historical photographs. But sea monsters, that’s a big unknown. There was a lot to explore. Being able to use your imagination like that is so wonderful, but it’s also a little overwhelming because where do you start? What do you use? What do you take?

AV: So, from where did you draw your inspiration?

DM: I started very obviously by looking at “carte marine,” which are antique maps. I looked at a lot of medieval depictions of sea monsters. I tried to do a lot of exploration around the historical art of sea monsters, sculpted fountains, mosaics, etc. A lot of this sea monster art you can actually find in Italy, and we did study some when we went there on our research trip in Cinque Terre. But very quickly, I moved away from historical depictions of sea monsters and I started to look at all things textural – Japanese blockprints, vintage scientific illustration… I pulled together boards of beautiful folk art from all over the world, anything hand-carved, anything textural and perfectly imperfect, as we like to say, where you feel and see the hand of the artist in the work.

AV: In matter of the sea monsters’ visual development, I saw in the book The Art Of Luca that you used collage. What led you to that approach?

DM: Sure. I was so inspired by the reference I was finding, particularly with the vintage scientific illustration, that I started collaging from it. Instead of trying to render myself, recreate all these textures, well, here they are, and they’re stunning. So, I could use this and start exploring shapes. Everything I was looking at, because they were so rich in texture – again, the scientific illustration, the Japanese block prints, the folk art – I realized the best way to celebrate these textures was to work boldly, shape-based: collage!

AV: These textures also seem a camouflage device for the sea monsters.

DM: That was one story point that we were considering. In the film, the sea monsters physically hide. There’s a scene where Luca swims into a cave and hides in shadow from a boat that he sees. Really, the idea of texture came from staying true to the sea monsters’ decorative origin. When I was looking at sea monsters throughout history, they were always used decoratively, again in the mosaics, the fountains, the frescos. So, when I was designing the sea monsters, I wanted to stay decorative and beautiful.

AV: Did you draw your inspiration from actual, real sea animals, too?

DM: We did do that kind of exploration early on. For some of it I was incorporating lobster parts, shrimp parts and dolphin parts, but what we ended up doing was finding our own way, our own language which was just based in fantasy, you know, with large crests and spines. For Daniela I did look at some dragon work. We tried to get something a little more aggressive in her design. She was always intended to be that way, even if you look at the earliest conceptual art for her. But for the most part, I think we found something unique for our film.

AV: Among all the sea monsters, Uncle Ugo is certainly the most original.

DM: Zio Ugo is Lorenzo’s twin brother, if you can believe it. But because he’s spent so much time in the deep, he’s been transformed, by the darkness, by the lack of oxygen, the lack of exercise… So, he really is just this blob with atrophied muscles. His organs don’t work very well anymore and he’s lost so much color and integrity in his skin that he’s now translucent. You see all of his organs, and he’s lost a lot of his sight. This character was conceptualized by an artist whose name is Dan Holland, and he’s just perfect for animation. We collaborated with two animators, Alli Sadegiani and Theresa Reyes, and what they brought to this character, I feel, is what makes him memorable: the eyes going in all different directions, the vibration you get on his facial fins, the way he moves his mouth shape… We put a lot of love and a lot of specificity into that character. And then, of course, he was voiced by Sacha Baron-Cohen, who did an incredible job. So, I feel he was just this magical combination of all the skills that created him.

AV: How did you approach the human version of Luca?

DM: Luca was such a challenge as main characters always are. Because you want them to be specific, but this is also a character that’s going to take you through the film and we wanted the audience to be able to project themselves onto this character and experience his growth along with him. I would say the most challenging part of Luca’s design was finding the balance of the features and the shapes. There’s a lot of nuance with him as both sea monster and human. They are all deceptively simple. If you strip them down to just shape, you would think, ‘Oh, that doesn’t look so difficult, really!’ Seems simple. But honestly there’s so much nuance in the balance, placement and proportion the way he came together. There are details in this design that you may not notice by looking at them, but you feel them. For example, we have no straight lines anywhere in the character, no sharp corners. All of the joints are round, there’s no pinching or sharpness to the mouth. Everything is round and soft. There’s a ton of detail. So, I would say that was the most challenging aspect of designing Luca: finding nuance.

AV: And you have those big eyes, wide-open to the world…

DM: Of course. Luca is pure curiosity. It’s really his eyes that guide him. It’s this need to see everything that pushes him through the film to make these very important and complex decisions – to leave his family and run away. This is all done through his eyes because he’s seen things that are so beautiful and spark so much curiosity. He can’t help himself. And that’s why his eyes are the largest thing on his face and he has the largest eyes of any character in the film.

AV: How are the two versions of Luca and his fellow creatures – sea monster and human – connected together?

DM: It wasn’t linear. I kind of went back and forth. You had to. It was important that both versions of the character were similar proportionally, even if we didn’t need to have the exact same proportion. We didn’t want any growth or shrinking. We wanted the proportions to be about one to one. So, that was a good foundation for me. But more important than the two versions of the character looking exactly alike, it was more important that they felt like the same character. So, really, I was just going back and forth taking cues. Sea monster Luca has large eyes? Well, human Luca will also have large eyes. As I worked on the human, it helped me understand the sea monster and vice versa.

AV: All the characters of Luca are adorable, but which character do you feel the most related to?

DM: I would say Giulia. Love her! And like everything else of this film, she was a massive collaboration. We had beautiful ideas coming out of Story. She’s such a spitfire, so full of energy. We created her, but above all I am inspired by her! I want to be Giulia. That’s like my goal, because she’s a beautiful mixture of standing up for herself and standing up for others. She takes care of herself but she’s very quick to think about the people around her.
She was actually a redhead before I started designing her, which was serendipity. It’s something that Enrico pulled towards, and from there I just continued in putting more of myself into her because I related to her so much, and to the energy she brings to things. One very important aspect of her design is her nose. It’s a nose that you don’t find commonly on female characters in animation. It’s just a fact. We wanted to do something a little different with her. And then of course her outfit really makes her different from the rest of the kids in town. She’s got a fisherman’s cap, and her pants come from Massimo’s childhood. That’s why they’re so worn. It’s sentimental for her, because she’s proud of where she comes from. All these things combine to meet her character. And of course, you can’t forget the hair. We had brilliant artists who worked on it. A little bit like Massimo but, you know… red! She’s really a presence!

AV: How did you transfer all that beautiful art into modeling?

DM: Character Art Director is about designing the characters on paper and having a lot of fun doing the concepts, all the beautiful, whimsical, lyrical art that the visual development will create. But that’s just a short period, you know. It’s a beautiful little flash. The meat and potatoes of my job is actually technical art, working with the modelers, doing the technical drawings, shaping, massaging the characters. All of that work is not as glamorous to look at, but that’s the art, that really is the art. Because my job is to shepherd the characters through the pipeline. I had a wonderful time. The Lead Modeler – her name is Nancy Tsang – understood these characters. She understood the design language as much as I did. And with each modeler, what I’m doing is providing drawings. They respond by making adjustments to the model and send images back to me. Then I make drawings on those and send them back to them. Really, it’s a back-and-forth collaboration and communication. And I did this on all the characters, for all the characters, with all the modelers. I must have done I wanna say hundreds of draw-overs, but I would venture to say at this point maybe a thousand, maybe more. It’s a lot of work! But really, it’s you and the modeler massaging the character, me with my drawings, then with the computer. And you’re building the character together. And then, the animators come in.

AV: Indeed, on Luca, you were both Character Art Director and Animation Sketch Artist Lead. Can you tell me about that part of your work?

DM: It’s really a party at that point. Because the animators take the model and begin to move the character around and experiment. One animator says ‘well, in order to hit Deanna’s drawing, I need this control’. So, the modeler makes sure that they have that control. It’s really a three-department collaboration, and it’s really, really fun. That was the most fun I had, honestly, watching these characters come together three dimensionally – not just in the computer but because there were three departments working on that. They were coming together from three different directions. Then, I switched departments and moved into animation. Our animators are brilliant – I don’t need to say that, but they really are! And they’re doing a lot of experimentation to find the animation style of the film that is going to complement our characters, because these things have to be cohesive. So, at the beginning, I went to Animation and I said, ‘Look, Art has discovered these things about the characters. This is where the characters come from, this is why they look the way they do.’ Because Art makes a lot of deliberate choices and Animation needs to know these choices in order to do the best work. And that’s where animators come in. They just do this amazing work and I’m there to draw over the shots, if needed, to bring the characters on model, to make sure that they look their best and that they are the most appealing. I strengthen poses. Sometimes, I also collaborate with the animators on acting choices and physicality, but again, it’s just a really a big collaboration.

AV: What character was the most challenging or rewarding to work on?

DM:I think they were all rewarding. What’s interesting about our characters is, even though the design language is very cohesive and they all share the same language, we did have characters that were a little different, like Ercole for example. Ercole has a lot of large features, and because of that we had to work very hard at finding his best angles. He’s kind of like a Picasso painting. We would have to push and move things around, pull his nose out in silhouette, his lips out in silhouette when he would talk. We found a much more dynamic way for him to move because he’s so energetic and he is so in your face. So, Ercole was a different kind of challenge from the rest of the human characters. And with the sea monsters, we’d have the fins and the tails and there was a lyricism to the way that they had to move and flow. That required its own language.

AV: What is your favorite medium as a Character Designer?

DM: I’m a pen/paper kind of person. Very simple. I like a nice black pen, black ink, and I love animation paper because it has that translucency and I can easily see the drawing underneath if I wanna make a new one. And really just marker. Pretty simple. And if I’m not doing drawings like that, I’m collaging, sculpting or trying something completely different.

AV: Luca is a film about transformation. After working on it, do you feel yourself transformed?

DM: Yes! I think so! I could say that career-wise, academically, and as a person. Coming into the role, I thought I knew what it entailed. But it entailed so much more than what I thought. And I learned tremendously from everyone around me, just because I got to collaborate so much. So, in that regard, very transformed. And then, as a person, I think working on this film, with Enrico, again collaborating with so many people, I actually developed a lot more empathy, understanding. You have to be very flexible when you work with a lot of folks because everyone has their own way of working, their own way of approaching things. So, it’s important that I become very flexible to make sure that I meet them where they need me to be, and that I give them what they need so that they can do the best work. You’re in service to people.

With our thanks to Deanna Marsigliese and Chris Wiggum at Pixar.

Born in Manila, Philippines, Paul moved to California at the age of seven, and was raised in Milpitas and San Jose, CA. He studied Animation/Illustration at San Jose State University. Prior to joining Pixar, he was a visual development intern at Walt Disney Animation Studios.
He began his career at Pixar Animation Studios as an art intern in June 2008, and has contributed to the making of several Pixar feature films, including Monsters University, Finding Dory, Cars 3 and Incredibles 2. He has also worked on Academy Award©-winning films Brave and Inside Out. Additionally, he has worked on Pixar short films The Blue Umbrella, LAVA, Sanjay’s Super Team, and Pixar’s first television special, Toy Story Of Terror!. He was also the production designer for Pixar’s SparkShorts film Loop.

We were privileged to meet the artist and to chat with him about his own journey on Soul.

Paul Abadilla: A little bit of both. Initially, when I had first heard of the project, I really wanted to be a part of it. At that time, I was still working on Incredibles 2. I heard of different projects here at Pixar I’d like to be a part of, and Soul was definitely on the top of the list. I think the music aspect really attracted me. And New York City and the soul world would be fun to design. So, on that level, that’s what really piqued my interest. Then, I went on to other projects and wasn’t able to hop on to Soul at that time. It wasn’t until later that they were looking for some help in set design, so there was an opportunity that opened up, and right away, I dropped everything to join in. That’s how I got involved in the film in the beginning, as an individual contributor. I wasn’t a lead yet on the film. Then I became Sets Art Director.

AV: How did you contribute to Soul?

PA: The one thing I always say is that I’m one of the connective tissues between the art department and the sets department. As Sets Art Director, one of my main responsibilities is making sure that the ideas and the vision of our Production Designer and our Director are translated into our sets, supporting the characters. With that, as we try to find a visual language with our set designers, another huge part of my job is to make sure that those ideas are consistently translated into 3D, working with our technical team. And then another layer of the work is once we get shots approved and all the sets are built and shaded, I go through each shot, making sure that the sets are compositionally looking really good and not taking any focus away from the characters. It’s a very layered role, and very much centered around collaboration. For me, one thing that I learned immediately was I’m not drawing at my desk as much as I want to; I’m always in other people’s offices, in meetings and making sure that the team is inspired and motivated, that everyone is at their best so that we can create the best things on screen. So, a huge part of it, too, is the relationships between my colleagues and I.

AV: How’s that?

PA: This was my first role as an Art Director on a feature at Pixar and it was very intimidating at first because of all the sets involved in the movie. But then I quickly realized that I was surrounded by all these experts, and I felt really lucky to be working with these people because I knew how good they were at what they do. So, a lot of that pressure was taken off. I was like, “Hey, we’re working together. I’m gonna to rely on you. What strengths can you bring to this problem, to this design?” I really encouraged that collaboration from the beginning. I didn’t look at it like “Hey, I’m an Art Director, you do as I say!” It’s more like, “Let’s work together!” because my personal goal is making sure that the film that we’re making is the best that it can look, supporting the story. So, I kind of looked at it from that perspective, but at the same time I wanted to honor and carry through on the vision that the Director and the Production Designer had. Because they are the ones that are leading the visual language of the film. So, I worked with them as well, making sure that I really extracted all the ideas that they had in their head and then help visually translate that into our film.

AV: How would you present the visual concept of the film?

PA: The one thing that was very clear to me is that we really wanted to tell a story about a person who is reflecting on the meaning of life, on how we can make the most of that time that have to build on. So, with that in mind, we had these two worlds that we had to explore, the human world and the soul world, and it was a huge challenge to figure out what the soul world would look like. So, we started with what we know, which is what the human world was. It was very important for me to latch onto a point of view and it was very clear to me that we had to see this film through the eyes of Joe Gardner, our main character. When I got onto the film, there was already some exploration in terms of character design and influences that were present in helping design his character. So, I started from the images that were already generated there. And also, since jazz has a huge part in the design of this film, we all felt like the art form of jazz and the kind of visuals that came with it – especially jazz album covers from like the 50s and 60s – could be used as a visual cue to give us a unique perspective on how we could see this human world.

And as the film is really about what it means to be alive and appreciating the little things, we wanted to amplify the tactility of the human world. We wanted it to be as specific as we can. I really wanted to celebrate the specificity of the things that are overlooked in the human world and infuse that into the design so that, in contrast, when we go to the soul world, everything just feels more fantastic and otherworldly.

AV: Speaking of the human word, how did you approach the city of New York?

PA: New York was a great city where to tell our story because it’s a diverse city. There’s a lot of history to it, too. Also, one of the big topics about this film is that it really centers on time. So, time has always been this next central core. It is very abstract, but for me it was very informative because you have on one side a finite world where things are ephemeral, don’t last forever, and then you have the opposite with that timeless aspect of the soul world where things are infinite. So, we go from an architectural base with rectangular shapes to rounder, softer forms, on a very abstract level. For the human world, there is that tactility of things, and the way time affects things, with wear and tear on the surfaces. From the shading standpoint, things don’t look perfect. You have layers of paint on the walls, with graffiti, worn-out paintings, or peeled stickers. There’s that cat that we follow through the film and we had these really low shots, so we needed some sort of visual interest from that point of view, for the sidewalks for example, that have plenty of details.

For New York, we needed three distinct neighborhoods. One, we had the jazz club, which is inspired by a lot of the jazz clubs that can be seen around Greenwich Village, in the West Village area. And then we had Queens, which is more suburban, and has certain visual elements that are separated from the jazz club area, and then we have the area around the hospital, which is Downtown, more South and Manhattan. Around there we have a lot of those tall buildings, which make you feel like the characters are in a canyon. There’s a lot of business. We wanted to visually overwhelm not just the audience emotionally, but also Joe and 22, because it’s 22’s first time in the city. We thought it was a good thing to lean on.

AV: What kind of references did you use for that part of the movie?

PA: There have been teams that went out, including the Director, the Production Designer and the Producers, but that was before my time. They had already taken photos and documented a lot of information from that trip. I’ve been to New York a number of times before myself, and I went back there late January, early February last year. It was clear to me that what we were doing in the film was very consistent with how New York looked and felt. So, for me, during production, it was a lot of watching films that were set in New York, a lot of internet searching with Google maps and drive- throughs. It was super useful because we were able to get a lot of the details and make it feel authentic.

AV: Jazz is about time, and also about rhythm. Did you integrate that parameter into the sets of New York, too?

PA: Definitely. And I’m glad you mention that aspect that is strongly connected to time. The idea of rhythm is definitely something that I wanted to translate visually to the set design, especially with the different buildings you see throughout the film. There’s also something about jazz that is very improvisational. You know, CG is very good at doing things perfect, right out of the machine. So, us being able to design and make things imperfect gave that human element similar to what jazz music is. It’s instantaneous, it’s not perfect. You might play the wrong note but the other persons playing with you will support it and make it sound right. Similarly, the way we worked is that we constantly tried to fight this perfect nature of the computer. For example, if you look at one of the buildings in New York, and focus on a façade, you might expect a row of windows that are perfectly lined up, but it was our intention to take one of those windows and just take it down a little, then take another one and change it a little bit. And that’s because of those granular, hand-crafted touches that we did that we conveyed this idea that the human world is not perfect. It’s affected by the human hand. And that’s what make the human world in Soul more believable, too. It also supports the designs of the characters as well. The one thing that we were very intentional about was that we wanted to make sure that the sets didn’t upstage the characters. Just because we wanted to carry up this idea of jazz and how playful music is, we didn’t want to caricature the world so much that it became distracting. So, the huge challenge, I would say, was modulating and finding that perfect balance between believability and caricature.

I should also add I’m a huge fan of not only jazz, but also the kind of music that kinda burst from jazz, hip hop being one of them. So, when it came to designing New York, I knew instantly there needed to be some graffiti. That’s just part of the character of the city. I’ve done graffiti for years now, and I still paint to this day. So, it was taking that personal experience as well, and infusing that into the film was a blessing. I’m glad Pete and the team was open to the idea of adding some murals out there, some tags, street art and things like that. So, to be able to weave my own personal experience into the film that way, even though it’s just like a minor kind of detail thing on the side, was really a blessing.

AV: How did you approach Joe’s apartment?

PA: That was one of my first assignments on the film. The overall apartment just had a first pass on the design so, my assignment at the time was to answer the question of how to make this music corner more specific to Joe as a musician. One thing I instantly focused on was his record collection. You know, on my own time I’ve been a DJ since 1999. I’ve been collecting records and I know that painstaking attention to details, making sure they’re in mint condition and don’t break. And there’s something about that which I experienced myself: if you want to put your records on a shelf, records weigh a ton, so there may be a bend on that shelf. You have to think about how to organize your records on the shelf without risking to have everything fall apart. So, I started from my own experience having gear around and records and things like that and infused that into the set design. And when I presented these ideas to Pete and the team, they really felt it sounded authentic.

AV: There’s an upright bass in that apartment. Is it because Pete Docter can play that instrument?

PA:He told us about that, but at that time in the writing process, Joe’s dad had played it. So, that instrument is actually a keepsake from his father. And so, with all the instruments present in the apartment, that communicates about Joe’s history, about his family’s history, and the other instruments he can play. Another thing that we wanted to tap into was all these binders and folders and boxes which show that he’s also a teacher. He’s a teacher and an aspiring musician, and through his level of life and the kind of furniture that he has, we also wanted to make sure that he didn’t feel, like, too successful – that things were kind of like, again, improvised. That added another level to his personality.

AV: In The Art Of Soul, we can see that you also took part in the design of the “Personality Pavilions” of the soul world. Can you tell us about them?

PA: The Personality Pavilions were very challenging, because they were so abstract. At the beginning, we were like, we should just be very literal about each personality and make them work like what you would expect them to be. But then the trouble with that was: 1 – they became visually distracting with all these details put together, and 2 – there were versions where we tried architectural-type designs, but they didn’t feel too soul world-like. It was too specific to a human world experience; it didn’t feel right. So, we really leaned on the abstract side of things to interpret the pavilions themselves, because our personalities are abstract by nature… with the exception of a few of them, like the Aloof Pavilion. We made it feel like a nose pointing up in the air, because that shape language kind of also reflected the way that the souls, when they exit, have their nose up in the air. So, just for clarity sake, there were certain ones that we wanted to be very intentional. But for all the other ones in the background, we wanted to approach them in a more abstract way, because they gave us a lot of freedom. You don’t have to identify each one as a certain thing. We could just rely on a couple of key things that we are going to find in the story, and let the rest be in the background.

AV: Soul is about the journey of life, be it Joe’s or 22’s or ours. What was your journey like?

PA: Oh, man, good question! On one level, it has been definitely a career highlight. I’ve always wanted to work with Pete. I respect him so much as a filmmaker. I worked with him very briefly on Inside Out, but I would consider this is my first real experience working with him full time over two years. It’s been so great!
At the same time, being a lead as an Art Director on this film, I was able to work with people I knew from the Studio, but with whom I hadn’t worked before. That was a such great experience, collaborating and building and creating with them.
And also, there’s been a lot of growth, a lot of conversations about existential questions, that have been great not only for the film, but also for ourselves. What do we do of this time that we have here on Earth? Whatever Joe is going through, and even 22, it made me think about my own things while working on this film. It’s been such a journey!

All artwork and Paul’s headshot courtesy of Pixar Animation Studios. With all our thanks to Paul Abadilla and Chris Wiggum!

Through extensive research through the Disney Archives, and personal connections he made with animators and their families, Ghez uncovered a trove of previously unpublished artwork, history, and anecdotes which give an unprecedented view into how the films, characters, storylines, and unique Disney look and feel came to be.

The sixth and final entry is now being published, titled They Drew As They Pleased: The Hidden Art Of Disney’s New Golden Age. It focuses on the 1990s through 2010, when Walt Disney Animation Studios experienced a dramatic creative shift as advancements in digital technology gave rise to computer-generated animation and produced blockbuster hits like The Little Mermaid, Beauty And The Beast, The Lion King, Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen. This volume highlights artists Joe Grant, Hans Bacher, Mike Gabriel, and Michael Giaimo, whose collective talents exemplify Disney’s storied past and visionary leap forward into the New Golden Age.

Didier Ghez tells us more about his adventure and the last chapter of this extraordinary project.

AnimatedViews:

Didier Ghez: I have to admit that my feelings are mixed: I am delighted to know that I was actually able to complete the series and grateful to the publisher, Chronicle Books, for supporting this endeavor until the end. At the same time, having lived day in, day out with this project for six full years, it feels weird not to be working on it anymore. I will miss the ongoing discoveries, awesome surprises and moments of elation when questions I had asked myself for years were finally answered or when a piece of concept art that I had thought lost forever would suddenly be rediscovered. I have so many other projects that I am eager to tackle, though, that the feeling that wins out is sheer happiness to have been able to tell this story, in depth and the way I wanted to tell it from the start: through the testimonies of the artists themselves and of the people who knew them.

AV: It’s been six years now since you initiated that incredible award-winning project. What a journey!

DG: As I mentioned in a previous interview with you, I realized many years ago that what really fascinates me when it comes to Disney are the artists and the whole creative process. The creative process is at its most intense when the story is being invented, and when the characters and locales are being designed. So, the closer you get to the designers and the story artists – in other words, the further you are from the finished shorts and features – the closer you are to the crazy ideas that are being invented to give birth to the animated cartoons we love.

It was therefore critically important for me to focus on the concept artists to understand this chaotic and fascinating creative process.

One last reason why this series of books is so important for me, is that, since this is an official Disney project, I was able to share not only brand-new information in the text but also hundreds of never-seen-before visual documents. Eighty per cent of the more than 400 visual documents displayed in each of the volumes in this series are presented here for the first time. The same is true with most of the information in the text. There is barely any duplication with any books about Disney released in the past. I was clearly trying to break new ground and to move beyond John Canemaker’s spectacular book on the same subject, Before the Animation Begins.

I knew from day one, when I pitched the concept of the series to Chronicle Books, that I would need at least five volumes to tell the story in the amount of detail that I had in mind. While I was writing Volume 1 (the 1930s), I realized that I would never be able to discuss the 1940s in a single volume (too many great artists, too many fascinating ideas) and I therefore convinced Chronicle Books to allow me to add one more volume to the series. Thankfully they were supportive (but made clear that they would not go beyond 6 volumes).

When Chronicle Books approached Disney about the project, both the Walt Disney Archives and The Animation Research Library were immediately enthusiastic. The series would not be half of what it is without their support. They understood my vision from day one and went way beyond the call of duty to help me in any way they could.

Many historians also shared research documents with me, including Michael Barrier, John Canemaker, J.B. Kaufman and many others. And, of course, the series would not exist if it weren’t for my good friend and fellow Disney historian, Joe Campana, who hosted me during my research trips and tracked down for me the families of many of the artists who are discussed in the books.

AV: Why is this period called “The New Golden Age?”

DG: After Walt’s death in 1966, Disney’s animation studio lost a little of its mojo in the 1970s and early 1980s, the low point being the disappointment of The Black Cauldron. When a new management team came on board in 1984, led by Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Roy E. Disney, it was not clear that the Animation Department would even be kept alive. Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988 and The Little Mermaid in 1989 changed all this. It felt like the Disney Studio was back at the top of its game; and Beauty And The Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King confirmed that impression. It was really the start of a New Golden Age for Disney, half a century after the Golden Age of the 1930s.

AV: How did you come to focus on these four artists? Would you please characterize briefly each one’s style and personality?

DG: This sixth volume of the series covers three full decades, a period of time when dozens of talented concept artists worked for Disney. It was therefore extremely difficult to focus on just four of them and to decide who to include in the book.

The first chapter focuses on this outstanding Disney Legend, whose Disney career began in the 1930s and came to an end in the 1990s. At the start of his career, Grant worked with Disney artist Albert Hurter, who is the subject of the first chapter in the first volume of They Drew As They Pleased, taking our story full circle. The chapter about Joe Grant features countless treasures, including rare documents about Joe’s work on Disney’s World War II projects, and outstanding pieces of artwork from both his careers in the 1930s (Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo, etc.) and 1990s (Beauty And The Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King). I knew from day one that Joe Grant would have to be included in this volume. It was a perfect way to come full circle, to tie things back to the first volume in the series.

The question became: who would be the other three artists? Joe had worked closely with both Mike Gabriel and Michael Giaimo, so both of them seemed to be an obvious choice. When I focused on their career and achievements, I realized that they had both been very influenced by some of Disney’s old timers: artists like Eric Larson and Mary Blair. Both of them were also great character designers and had worked on several projects that fascinated me, like the first (abandoned) version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the Sweating Bullets version of Home On The Range, and The Snow Queen, which became Frozen. They were in.
That left only one spot. Since I had two “character designers,” I now needed a spectacular art director or someone who had established the mood of some Disney features the way Tyrus Wong had done for Bambi. Hans Bacher and his work on Mulan immediately came to mind.
Of course, this also meant that I could not include some artists that I loved like Paul Felix, Lorelay Bové, and many others. This really saddened me.

AV: The interviews gathered in your book bring something really fresh and dynamic. Can you tell us how you collected all these testimonies?

DG: In contrast to the previous volumes, three of the artists discussed in this sixth volume are alive. This gave me the opportunity to interview all three of them, extensively. The interview sessions would usually last for about 90 minutes, and I conducted between six and seven of them with each of the artists.
As to Joe Grant, his daughter was kind enough to give me access to her father’s archives, which contained some fascinating written documents and photographs, as well as countless reproductions of his drawings from the 1930s and 1990s.
Finally, in this sixth volume, one of the highlights was the fact that I had the opportunity to select artwork to illustrate the chapter about Mike Gabriel in the presence of Mike Gabriel himself. He was generous enough to (allow for) my taste, but I was privileged to get his guidance while making my selections.

AV: That period is also known for the arrival of digital technology in animation. What kind of impact did that have on concept art?

DG: In all honesty, not much. Most of the concept art I looked at for this volume had been created manually with a small amount created digitally. I would challenge you to find out which is which, though! The real impact of CG is found further down the line in the production process. It seems to me that pre-production remains true to its origins, even in the digital world.

AV: During your research on that period for the book, is there something you found that surprised even the expert that you are?

DG: The most exciting find must have been all the early character designs for Who Framed Roger Rabbit developed in the early 1980s by artist Michael Giaimo, which you will discover in the book for the very first time.
I also loved discovering the shelved short project I Am, which Hans Bacher had worked on for a short while and which meant so much to him. I am just fascinated by that artwork.
Another key discovery was the amount of work that Joe Grant and his colleague Dick Huemer had done on the projects that the Disney Studio was developing during World War II. I had no idea that there were so many and that their production history had been so complex. In fact, if you read the chapter about Joe Grant first, and then the endnotes from that chapter, you will realize that those are practically two full chapters about Joe in one volume.

AV: During that period, the personality of Don Hahn was essential. And he seems to have been also instrumental in your research. Can you tell me about your collaboration with him?

DG: As a producer, Don Hahn was at the very heart of Disney’s Renaissance, a.k.a. Disney’s New Golden Age. He is also passionate about Disney history and kind enough to like my work. While working on this sixth volume, I got the chance to get access to his archives that provided a wealth of background material which you see quoted throughout this last volume.

AV: You’re known for both TDATP and the Walt’s People series (which is often quoted in the book). Can you tell me how the two series complement each other?

DG: I would not have been able to write TDATP if it had not been for Walt’s People. While editing the hundreds of interviews that are included in the 24 first volumes of Walt’s People, I started learning more and more about Disney history and noticing the questions that I asked myself without finding answers. All of my books are attempts at answering those questions. Walt’s People provides part of the raw material. My art books are an attempt to put this wealth of material in context and to connect the dots.

AV: What will be your projects in the near future?

DG: Aside from the next volumes of Walt’s People (I am completing Volume 25 at the moment), I am also working on four heavily-illustrated, hard-cover monographs, which will be released by the non-profit Hyperion Historical Alliance Press.
The first one is titled The Origins Of Walt Disney’s True-Life Adventures and is already at the layout phase. I consider that volume as groundbreaking and I admit that I am very, very proud of its content. It sheds light on Disney artist Jake Day’s trip to Maine in 1938 to provide reference material for the artists who were working on Bambi; it tells the story of all the educational shorts that the Disney Studio was working on from 1943 until 1946; it focuses on the 1946 trip of cinematographers Albert and Elma Milotte to Alaska to film The Alaskan Eskimo and Seal Island; and it tells the story of all the abandoned True-Life Adventures that were also in development at the time. I have located the diaries of Lester Hall, Jake Day’s friend who went with him on the trip to Maine, as well as the lost diaries and autobiography of Al and Elma Milotte, plus countless letters, memos, photographs, etc. which help me tell those stories in great detail. Those are stories that have never been told before. I was blown away by what I discovered.
I am also now starting to focus on three other monographs: Walt Disney’s Adventures In Music, History And Nature (the second volume of the True-Life Adventures series); Meet Mickey Mouse! – Mickey Mouse On Stage And On Radio In The 1930s, in collaboration with my friend and fellow Disney historian Libby Spatz; and The Making Of Walt Disney’s Darby O’Gill And The Little People in collaboration with my friend and fellow Disney historian Jim Hollifield.
Although things are slowed down by the coronavirus crisis, this is fun!

With very special thanks to Didier Ghez and April Whitney (Chronicle Books).

Animation legend Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman spearheaded this age of renewal with two key goals: training the next generation of artist and animators, while also developing enduring characters and stories. He placed this latter responsibility in the hands of two chief “concept artists”, Ken Anderson and Mel Shaw, who together became two of Disney’s most influential visual development artists.

Every book by Didier Ghez is an event in itself. But this one is certainly his most personal one. Filled with dozens of never-seen-before concepts for such classics as The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Robin Hood and The Rescuers, the book is not only one of the most beautiful ones of the series, but also – through Didier’s in-depth research, vivid descriptions and illuminating interviews – one of the most touching ones.

It offers a rare view of the Disney Legends who helped shape the nature of character and story development in the 1970s and 1980s, and prepare for the Disney animation renaissance of the 1990s.

AnimatedViews: Your books wouldn’t be that magical if you hadn’t a special connection with Disney history, art, and artists. But this one seems even more special, and even more personal. You evoke that in your introduction, but can you tell us more about your personal link to the features of that time, the ‘70s and early ‘80s?

Didier Ghez: I was born in 1973, the year Robin Hood was released. When I was a kid (before VHS and way before DVDs), my father bought 16mm reels which featured scenes from The Jungle Book, The Aristocats and Robin Hood. My brother and I grew up watching those. At Christmas, we would also watch the special Disney programs, including the one focused on the upcoming feature The Rescuers. Needless to say, I have always had a soft spot for the animated features of the 1970s. This might also explain why, thirty years ago, the first two Disney concept artists who caught my attention were Ken Anderson and Mel Shaw, men who largely defined the style of Disney’s animated features in the 1970s and early 1980s. As a young teenager, when I discovered Ken Anderson’s character designs for Robin Hood in the first edition of the book The Art Of Walt Disney by Christopher Finch (Harry N. Abrams, 1973), I sensed that one of my life goals would be to see all the art that Ken had created for that movie. And when I first saw Mel Shaw’s concept sketches for The Black Cauldron in the various articles that had been written at the time, my interest in the film, not yet released, immediately doubled. In the mid-1990s, I started collecting artwork by Ken Anderson, who, along with Mel Shaw, has remained my favorite concept artist to this day.

Which explains why writing this specific volume of They Drew As They Pleased – The Hidden Art Of Disney’s Early Renaissance, has been my life-long goal. There is no volume in the series I am prouder of.

AV: How do you explain that the features of that time are considered less successful than the others, that being fair or not?

DG: One of my most enduring frustrations over the years, while reading books about Disney history, is that most of them discuss the Disney features until The Jungle Book (released in 1967 — the last feature that Walt personally supervised) then jump to The Little Mermaid (1989), with nothing in-between. The authors seem to think that the Disney features from the 1970s and early 1980s are not even worth mentioning.

When Walt passed away in December 1966, close to a year before the release of The Jungle Book, the Disney Studio had to find a new leader. Director Woolie Reitherman, a former pilot during WWII, was a born leader, and he was the one who took the helm. He had some tough decisions to make, however. The costs of producing animated features kept going up, master story artist Bill Peet had left the Studio during the making of The Jungle Book, and the team Woolie had at his disposal was mostly a team of very strong animators. All those elements pushed him to simplify the stories and to start relying chiefly on endearing characters. After all, within the team that remained at the Studio in the 1970s, he had Ken Anderson, a jack-of-all-trades, who was the best character designer the Studio had ever seen since the time of Jack Miller, and, in Animation, veteran animators John Lounsbery, Eric Larson, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Milt Kahl. So, in the absence of Walt, focusing on very strong characters and on their interactions, instead of trying to develop very strong stories (Walt’s forte), made sense.

The result was that the movies are weaker narratively that those of Walt’s era, but delightful when watched sequence by sequence. The characters are unforgettable and many scenes are etched forever in our minds. The reason I love them so much is because I absolutely adore the characters that they feature and because I find many of the sequences that they contain to be absolutely timeless, like “Everybody Wants to be a Cat”.

AV: Your book focuses on the lives and art of two major Disney artists, Ken Anderson and Mel Shaw. How would you characterize their art?

DG: In the 1960s and 1970s, Ken Anderson was first and foremost a master at character design. From The Jungle Book to The Rescuers, he drew hundreds and hundreds of characters, most of whom did not make it into the final movie. The incidental characters that he designed for Robin Hood, and whom you will discover in this book for the first time, are particularly memorable and I would have loved to see more of them included in the movie. By the way, the boxes at Disney’s Animation Research Library that contained those drawings had not been opened since 1973. I had dreamt of seeing what they contained since I was a teenager. When the first one was opened and when I saw all the masterpieces it contained, I started crying. I had been waiting for this moment for over 30 years.

As to Mel Shaw, his artwork can conjure up a whole scene in just one drawing. In many ways, it has the same power as the drawings Marc Davis created while at WED (now known as Walt Disney Imagineering): the composition is so strong and the characters so expressive that they seem to be alive on the page. And Mel’s use of pastels makes those drawings even more special, of course.

AV: What’s interesting about them is that they didn’t have just one job at Disney. They took on so many different roles, with the same talent. Can you tell us about their versatility?

DG: You are correct. Both Ken and Mel started as animators in the 1930s but soon moved into other directions for which they were more suited.

Mel started as an animator at Harman-Ising; but when he joined the Disney Studio, he was already a story artist. At Disney, in the 1930s, he also drew a proposed adaptation of Song Of The South in comic book form, which was eventually shelved. He left the Studio in the 1940s and came back in the 1970s, by which time he became a visual development artist.

Ken’s career was even more varied. There is a reason why Walt called him a “jack-of-all-trades”. He was an animator, then a layout artist and a character designer. He also worked on the theme parks (from Disneyland to EPCOT!), and even on the first animated cartoons produced for the Disney Channel in the early 1980s. When you look at all the Disney artists, his career is probably the richest and the most fascinating.

JN: You revealed not only magnificent art used for Disney classics, but other pieces made for projects that didn’t make it to the screen. Can you tell us about some of those?

DG: The more I conduct research about Disney history, the more I realize that you really cannot understand how the movies that made it to the screen were developed if you do not have an in-depth knowledge of the projects that were eventually shelved. All those projects are closely interconnected.

Catfish Bend is a good example: throughout the 1970s, Ken Anderson was trying to adapt this series of books by Ben Lucien Burman to the screen. In order to do so he developed dozens of beautiful characters who lived in a Southern bayou. When the project was shelved, many of those characters became protagonists in The Rescuers!

Another of my favorite projects, among the ones that were shelved, is Chanticleer And Reynard The Fox, which both Ken Anderson and Mel Shaw tackled at some point or another. The character designs by Ken, once again, jump out of the page, and the musical sequences featuring insects that Mel dreamt up are among the most memorable in the book.

Finally, you will not be surprised to hear that I am fascinated by Musicana, the proposed “Fantasia sequel” that Mel Shaw and Woolie Reitherman were championing in the early 1980s. I love the pieces of music that they had selected and couldn’t stop staring at the art pieces that Mel created to pitch the project. I really wish that one had made it to the screen. By the way, one of the most stunning discoveries I made while researching the book (in terms of written documents) was that of a story conference between Mel Shaw and Woolie Reitherman about Musicana. This is the only known story conference on the subject and I had the pleasure of unearthing it in the collection of one of Woolie Reitherman’s sons.

AV: How helpful were their families in your research?

DG: The families of both Ken Anderson and Mel Shaw were immensely helpful. Ken’s three daughters allowed me to scan all the documents their father had kept and so did the family of Mel Shaw. And it was not just Ken’s or Mel’s artwork. Among Ken Anderson’s collection was a series of early character designs by Tom Oreb for Sleeping Beauty, many of which are reproduced in the 4th volume of They Drew As They Pleased, as well as several concept drawings by Tyrus Wong for Bambi.

The massive Mel Shaw collection contained hundreds of pieces of artwork, but also a three-page written document from the 1930s which listed a series of abandoned Disney shorts, along with the story artists who had suggested the ideas for those shorts. Pure gold from a historical standpoint.

And then there was Bruce Reitherman, one of Woolie’s sons. Bruce had prepared some beautiful drawings by Ken Anderson and Mel Shaw for me and my friend Joe Campana to scan. At the end of the session, I asked him if his father had preserved any written documents by any chance. “You are interested in written documents?” he asked. “I have four boxes full of them.” When we started opening these boxes, I could not believe my eyes. They were full of documents from the 1970s and early 1980s that did not exist anywhere else, including this story conference between Mel Shaw and Woolie about Musicana, early treatments for a proposed Mickey Mouse feature and much more. But the highlight was a document from the 1930s: a 66-page document from Disney’s Story Department which listed proposed story ideas for Disney shorts, complete with the dates when they were submitted and the names of the artists who had submitted them. I almost fainted when I realized what I was holding in my hands: I knew that this document did not exist anywhere else and that it was bridging hundreds of important gaps in our understanding of Disney history.

AV: I couldn’t help noticing that many of the projects Ken and Mel worked on were based on music, like Fantasia and Musicana. Also, Mel Shaw was driven by music when drawing the opening of The Rescuers, and played Carmina Burana during a story presentation of The Black Cauldron. Can you tell us more about their link to music?

DG: More than Ken, it was Mel whose career was especially linked to music. His very first project at the Disney Studio was “Flight Of The Bumblebee” a proposed sequence for the project that would later one become Fantasia. And you are correct, one of his last projects was the 1980s proposed Fantasia sequel, Musicana.

What I found particularly interesting, while researching Mel’s career, was that I realized that we knew almost nothing of the Disney Studio’s early work on Fantasia. We knew that Walt and his artists were developing “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” at the end of 1937; and that by the end of 1938, Dick Huemer and Joe Grant were helping Walt select pieces of music for Fantasia; but what I had not realized is that, as early as February / March 1938, the Studio was already very actively researching and developing sequences for Fantasia (which was not yet known as Fantasia at the time), starting with “Flight Of The Bumblebee.” In fact, I am still making discoveries in that respect. I just learned, for example, that in early 1938, Disney’s Story Research Department was pitching the possibility of using Wagner’s “Rite of Nibelungen” to tell the story of The Hobbit!

JN: How is Volume 6 coming along at the moment?

DG: The final volume in the series, They Drew As They Pleased – Volume 6 (The 1990s to the 2010s), will focus on the art and careers of artists Joe Grant, Hans Bacher, Mike Gabriel and Michael Giaimo. The chapters are written, and the artwork has been selected. If all goes well, the layout will be created before the end of the year and the book will be released in August 2020. As always, more than ninety percent of the artwork has never been seen before in book form. And the chapters about Hans Bacher, Mike Gabriel and Michael Giaimo are particularly lively since I was able to speak with all three of them. As to the Joe Grant chapter, it will reveal a lot about some of the most obscure projects he worked on, and since Joe started working at the Studio in the 1930s in the same office as Albert Hurter, we will have come full circle.

With very special thanks to Didier Ghez and April Whitney.

Indeed, he joined Pixar Animation Studios in July 2004 as a graphic designer on The Incredibles. He has worked on nearly every feature film since, including the Academy Award®-winning Ratatouille, WALL•E, Up, Toy Story 3, Inside Out and Coco.

He has also created graphics for multiple short film projects, including Mater And The Ghostlight, Your Friend The Rat, CarsToons, Riley’s First Date, Lava, and Sanjay’s Super Team, as well as several Pixar Co-Op short films including The Dam Keeper and Borrowed Time.

He also served as art director, graphic design for the Pixar features Toy Story 3, Monsters University, Inside Out, Finding Dory and Cars 3.

Craig Foster: Basically, I go in anything that needs graphics – textiles, T-Shirts, billboards, labels, boxes – with my team. Everything’s done from scratch, because we want it to be unique to our world. I do a lot of research to make sure it’s real, but also supports our story, characters and environments. I just love doing the research, developing that style that matches different eras, different looks, locations, making sure that graphics fit in the world and are believable.

AV: You have participated in so many Pixar masterpieces. What are your best memories from working on those films?

CF: I really enjoyed Wall•E, working on the Axiom, all the interfaces and advertising at the different levels of the ship. I think we’ve been pretty successful at making that futuristic sci-fi style.

AV: Toy Story 4 presents so many different visual styles. It must have been fun, too.

CF: Oh, yes! We had quite a few unique locations. They go on a road trip, they go to a carnival, they go into an antiques store, to preschool… I just wanted to celebrate all those locations and treat them differently. I wanted them to fit together, like they all exist in the same world, but making them unique. That was really fun!

AV: What’s really interesting about your work is the way you rely on memories in order to create an emotional connection with the audience.

CF: Exactly! For instance, for the Tri-County school, I did a lot of research on classrooms, preschools and elementary schools, and then I just went in and tried to have that emotional feeling of what we all think of any particular school, so that everyone could look at it and feel like ‘oh, I do remember being in a classroom like that!’ I tried to create an emotional attachment, to show how we care for the kids in that environment. I did that through hand-created labels like the ones teachers could make, and other things that they could buy, like educational posters, but that are unique to our world.

AV: And it seems even more personal during the road-trip.

CF: That was fun for me, because being from the Midwest and going on road trips, I just started drawing memories and then looked at reference to make sure things also look like other people would see them, like road signs and rest stops, and tried to re-create that feeling.

The same with Second Chance Antiques. I’ve seen a lot of them during my own road-trips and I used my memories of things I’ve seen growing up. So, I knew about painted signs, and the kind of artwork we can find in that kind of store. And then, people would also say, ‘oh, that’s something my grandmother had,’ or, ‘that’s the train station I had when I was a kid’. I’m very proud of that one because that’s a place that exists to itself without drawing the attention to it, so that the audience can focus on the characters. The pinball machine is very emblematic of our work in that regard.

AV: The Carnival is an iconic part of the film. How did you work on that one?

CF: It’s really big. We really wanted to set it apart from the antiques store, because they both have so many graphic elements; but I wanted them to be unique to themselves, so we really feel the difference from one to the other. Out of research, I went to various carnivals, looked at the way they manufactured their signage, then tried to simulate that. That was like drawing a picture with moving graphics around because carnivals want to draw attention to themselves, to have you get to the booths and play the games. That was very dynamic.

AV: You also did the toys’ packaging.

CF: I’ve always enjoyed doing that, because that’s something we don’t really see a lot of the time. We did that on Toy Story 2 with Woody’s Roundup and the gang, and it’s also important in Toy Story 4 as the toys come from different eras. The packaging just adds that level of history. I’ve done a lot of research on the different types of print and designs according to the different periods, to give a feeling of the time. I went to museums, antiques, and collectors. I took tons of photos for reference. You know, I have a habit of, when I see something cool, I want to keep it for reference in my research file. eBay was also instrumental, because you can find so many toys with their original packaging. So, I was able to study the different print processes – half-tone, offset… – in order to be true to the different manufacturing styles. That was very exciting.

AV: Were you involved in the creation of certain toys?

CF: By the time I started making graphics, most of them were fully realized as characters. So, with everything I created, I just tried to reinforce their role as toys. I was pretty involved in Duke Caboom. I wanted to brand him a certain way so I did a lot of research on the toys of his era, 70s action figures type of toys, like he was derived from a tv show or from a real-life character that had been translated into a toy.

For Gabby, I did her instructions book and her packaging. We put the « let’s be friends » phrase on it, which was kind of ironic!

AV: How do you integrate into the overall production?

CF: Generally, I would get together with Dan Holland, the Sets Art Director, and Bob Pauley, the Production Designer, and we talk about what they had in mind when they were designing the various elements. Then, I would be with my team and they would do the assignments that they would want to do because you always had someone whose talent lent itself toward a certain thing, like they’re particularly good at a certain time period, so I assign that to that person. Then, we generally would get together and brainstorm, come up with sketches and ideas, present them to Bob Pauley, then develop them a little more, flesh them out and show them to the Director. We’re really a team, we’re all part of the film.

AV: How do you balance the believability of the elements you create and the fictional and artistic dimension of an animated film like Toy Story 4?

CF: Generally, I go in and design and make it what I would expect to see in a real-world environment. Then I make it evolve to fit the world. For instance, in the Toy Story world, when you have a half-tone label, for instance, it’s not a real half-tone, it’s a stylized version of it. So, when you see it, you feel like, ‘oh, that’s a print process I’m familiar with.’ But if you were a print expert, you’d see that’s completely wrong, that’s not the way they would do it. If it doesn’t look real, then you don’t believe it. It has to have some level of realism to be believable. In other words, I try to make a stylized, cartoonish version of what’s in the real world, while still looking believable. That’s an interesting line to walk!

With very special thanks to Craig Foster, Chris Wiggum and April Whitney.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as the United States was bolstered by postwar optimism, the Walt Disney Studios embarked on a creative revolution brought on by the mid-century modern and graphic sensibilities of a new wave of artists. Disney fans will be familiar with two key developments during this time: Disney’s entry into the world of television, and the 1955 opening of Disneyland – an entirely new and exciting venture for the company. The story that is lesser known is the challenge for Walt Disney and his studio’s young artists to delight traditional Disney audiences while creatively embracing modernity.

This volume explores the contributions of the unsung heroes who made that possible, with special emphasis on the art of Lee Blair, Mary Blair, Tom Oreb, John Dunn and Walt Peregoy, along with never-seen-before art, and unheard-of elements based on interviews with some of the artists themselves and correspondence from Mary Blair, to shed light on how the inspirations and limitations of these legendary artists helped shape the future of animation.

DG: Before the 1950s, the stylistic approach favored by Walt Disney tended towards realism or at least a style that reminded one of some of the most famous European illustrators of the end of the XIXth century and early XXth century, like Arthur Rackham and Gustave Doré. Starting in the 1950s, the Disney studio and its artists started experimenting with a much more stylized approach.
The 1950s were dominated by the stylistic sensitivities of layout and background artists Eyvind Earle, Vic Haboush, Ray Aragon, Jacques Rupp, and Walt Peregoy, who were the new blood at the studio. Along with story artists Tom Oreb and John Dunn, they helped reshape the Disney style for a 1950s audience.
Earle had studied the works of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Rockwell Kent and Georgia O’Keefe before finding his own style at the age of twenty-one. Peregoy admired the Mexican muralists David Siquieros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco. Fernand Léger, the French painter and sculptor, had been his teacher. Tom Oreb was influenced by Saul Steinberg, George Grosz, David Stone Martin, Ronald Searle and Pablo Picasso. Visions of “Modernism” coursed through their veins. The Disney studio at that time becomes much more adventurous in its artistic approach.

AV: You mention the importance of TV in the transformation of the Disney style, and also UPA. Can you tell me about the position of Disney in the entertainment industry at that time? From our present perspective, we tend to consider them as an all-time leader. But in the 1950s, because of the change of mentalities, they seem to be threatened by modernism and to have been forced to adapt if they didn’t want to look old-fashioned.

DG: As I write in the book:

By the early 1950s, the Disney studio needed this creative shot in the arm. In the 1930s, Disney had won every single Academy Award for best animated short film. In the 1940s, Disney won only two, with MGM dominating the category. And in 1950, a new-comer got the Oscar for animated short: United Productions of America (UPA), with its visually inventive mini-masterpiece, Gerald McBoing-Boing.

Even outsiders were starting to notice. In the Time magazine issue dated February 5, 1951, one could read:

Walt Disney did not father the animated cartoon, but he has been its outstanding foster parent. Disney’s child, however, seemed no brighter or more grown-up in 1950’s Cinderella than in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Last week a different kind of movie cartoon was being turned out by a one-time Disney hand named Stephen Bosustow and his bustling United Productions of America…
Gerald McBoing-Boing tells a funny story about a small boy whose efforts to talk produce only such sound effects as “Boing! Boing!” Everything about the film is simple but highly stylized: bold line drawings, understated motion, striking color and airy design in the spirit of modern poster art, caricatured movements and backgrounds as well as figures.

Vic Haboush was convinced that this specific article led to his being hired.

The reason I got hired [at Disney in 1952] was that there was a big article in Time magazine. It had Steve Bosustow’s picture… Steve Bosustow was the head of UPA. The title under the picture in Time was “The New Walt Disney.” He had a mustache like Walt’s. He even had Walt’s little smile on his face. When Walt saw that, he went crazy. He said, “We have got to get some new blood in here. We can’t allow these people to come in and try to take us out of the business.”

Along with the “new blood” and the UPA factor, the Disney style was pushed in new directions by Walt Disney’s decision to enter the new field of television. TV shows and TV commercials had to be produced at a lower cost. To meet those shrinking budgets, simplified animation was the obvious solution. It was less a question of switching to limited animation—the type that had been used by the Disney artists in the training shorts that they had produced for the Army and the Navy during World War II—and more a question of simplifying the characters and the backgrounds to make them quicker to animate without sacrificing quality.

AV: How would you introduce and describe the style of each of the five artists you treat in your book?

DG: First of all, I have to admit that I cheated a little bit in this volume. The whole book is supposed to be about artists who were active at the studio in the 1950s and 1960s. However, I decided to include Lee Blair, who was only working at Disney in the 1930s and 1940s. His approach (watercolor) and his style is much more classical than the style of the other artists in the book, and provides a good contrast for everything that follows. There was also no way to discuss Mary Blair’s stylistic evolution without first presenting artwork from her husband, Lee, since his style influenced her so much at the beginning of her career. And I just loved Lee Blair’s work too much not to feature him in the series. The storyboard drawings he created for “Aquarela do Brasil” (to name just one project) are simply to die for.

Then you have Mary Blair, who does not need to be introduced and whose naïve style and use of colors is always a pure delight. I tried to make sure to locate artwork that none of us had seen before in book form. I especially fell in love with some pieces showing Alice in the Tulgey Wood and meeting the Jabberwocky. And, of course, being married to a Brazilian, I can’t resist her work on the “Bahia” sequence in The Three Caballeros.

John Dunn was a much more complex artist to research. I knew practically nothing about his style before starting this project and there was extremely little information about him floating around. Little by little, I managed to piece together what his stylistic approach had been (both whimsical and modern) and I also realized that the best way to tell his story was through the science projects he had handled for Ward Kimball (Man In Space, Man And The Moon, Mars And Beyond, etc.). In the end, I was able to kill two birds with the same stone in that chapter: discussing John Dunn but also piecing together a detailed and precise account of the scientific projects from the 1950s which had always intrigued me.

The chapter about Tom Oreb was even more exciting, from my standpoint, than the preceding three. First of all, while researching the career of Ken Anderson for the 5th volume of this series, I had stumbled upon a large amount of early Sleeping Beauty character designs by Oreb, which I was eager to share with the wider world. I also realized that if there was one artist whose stylized approach represented the 1950s more than anyone’s it was Oreb. Finally, it also gave me the chance to tell the story of the Disney commercials from the 1950s, a story that had seldom if ever been discussed and which would deserve a full book in itself.

As to Walt Peregoy: this was probably the biggest revelation for me, while researching this book. Before working on this volume, I had been familiar with the personal drawings and paintings of Peregoy from the later part of his career, and I have to admit that I did not find them appealing. While researching his work for Disney, I was blown away by what I discovered: his mastery of style and colors in many ways goes even beyond that of Mary Blair’s. And his story, which was incredibly difficult to piece together (Walt was a notoriously difficult interviewee) is extremely rich and was very much worth telling.

AV: Can you tell us about the different sources you appealed to? What’s the difference and the complementarity between the ARL and the Walt Disney Archives?

DG: I always try to tap into five sources of information and illustrations without which none of the books would be complete: the Walt Disney Archives, which preserve written documentation; the Animation Research Library, which preserves artwork; Disney’s Photo Library, which contains the photographic material; the family of the artists, who often have documents (and not just photographs) which are not preserved anywhere else; and private collections and archives. If you read the next answer, you will see that in quite a few cases, you have to link all of those dots to get the full story.

AV: A research work like yours must have its share of emotions. Could you evoke one or two exciting moments in the making of that book?

DG: Let me mention three of the most moving moments in the research process. When I was researching the work of John Dunn, I decided to interview producer Joe Hale, who had worked with Dunn in the 1950s. I was trying to get a sense of who John was as an artist and as a human being. What I did not expect was that Joe would mention that he had worked with John Dunn on an abandoned project for TV called Abdul Abulbul Amir. I knew that a file about that project existed at the Animation Research Library, but I had no idea that Dunn had been the artist who had created the artwork for it. Joe’s clue was critical and allowed me to include artwork from that project in the book.

While researching the work of Tom Oreb at the Animation Research Library, Jackie Vazquez (my key point of contact at the ARL) and myself had the pleasure of stumbling upon some artwork created by Oreb for the clubhouse of the Mickey Mouse Club while looking for something totally unrelated. I still remember our delight and out excitement that day.

Finally, again while researching Tom Oreb, I stumbled upon a document at the Disney Archives which made clear that the last project that Oreb had worked on at the studio was a planned adaptation of The Baron Von Munchausen for television. Sadly, I also knew that no artwork from that project had survived at the Animation Research Library. I knew that the only option that might exist to find an example for Tom’s work would be if the storyboards he had created at the time had been photographed. I decided to find out. For this, I went to the Photo Library and started checking the negative lists one by one, week by week. I was about to give up, when I jumped on my chair: I had just found a negative description labelled “Baron Von Munchausen boards.” Thanks to this discovery you can get a sense in the book of what Oreb was trying to achieve.

AV: This book is dedicated to Disney historian Joe Campana. Can you tell me how instrumental he was in your work?

DG: Joe was the (until now) unsung hero of this series. He is a dedicated Disney historian, who has spent most of his life studying Disney history but also tracking down the family of the Disney artists. Without him, I would not have been able to locate the diaries of Ferdinand Horvath for Volume 1, the families of Sylvia Holland and Retta Scott for Volume 2, the families of James Bodrero, Campbell Grant and Martin Provensen for Volume 3, or the family of John Dunn for Volume 4. Joe also spent months scanning various collections for these books, like the collections of Sylvia Holland, Campbell Grant, James Bodrero, John Dunn, Walt Peregoy, etc. I owe him more than to anyone else when it comes to this series. Without him, I would not have made half of my discoveries.

AV: About the June Foray Award you received. It certainly is some acknowledgement for all the work you’ve already done, but what does this represent for your upcoming work?

DG: There was no honor that could have delighted me more that to receive the June Foray Award. I was stunned when I learned that I would be its recipient. If I needed more motivation to carry on researching and preserving Disney history in the future this would be the best motivator by far. Of course, even without having gotten the award, I would still be working hard on preserving more and more interviews for future volumes of Walt’s People, on writing the next volumes of They Drew As They Pleased and on trying to locate more lost autobiographies, like those of animator Frenchy de Tremaudan and story artist Leo Salkin. In other words: there are more treasures yet to come.

AV: What about the future installments of the series?

DG: There are two more volumes of the They Drew As They Pleased series in the works before completing this ambitious venture. I am currently working on the layout of the 5th volume, which will discuss the 1970s and 1980s (The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Rescuers, The Black Cauldron, etc.) and especially the careers of Ken Anderson and Mel Shaw, my two favorite Disney artists. And I am starting to write Volume 6 (the 1990s to the present) which will discuss the careers of Joe Grant, Mike Gabriel, Mike Giaimo and Hans Bacher. Exciting, to say the least!

With very special thanks to Didier Ghez and April Whitney (Chronicle Books).

Part of the crew who worked on this spectacular and hilarious film was visual development artist Lizzie Nichols.
After working for British television, she came to Sony Pictures Animation where she worked on Smurfs: The Lost Village, The Emoji Movie and Hotel Transylvania 2.

So, though a mortal, she was no stranger to that macabre and funny universe when getting on the third episode of the franchise that was just released, a franchise that has had great success so far!

We were pleased to meet the talented artist to talk about her brilliant contribution to the film.

Lizzie Nichols: As a Visual Development artist, I was in the Art Department along with about twenty-five or so other artists. I designed sets, painted characters, and helped with various other art tasks as needed. I started working on Hotel Transylvania 3 in early 2017. I also worked on Hotel Transylvania 2, so that background knowledge of the franchise helped me keep the art style consistent. The visual approach had been determined long before I started work on the franchise, so in my job of painting characters and designing environments and props, I worked to help keep the visual style consistent.

AV: How would you describe the visual style of HT3?

LN: The Hotel Transylvania franchise has always looked a lot like our world but with a monster-y twist, which is always really fun to design. The film’s shape language tends to be long, pointy and spiky. The hotel itself is very tall, and that is reflected in the very tall design of the ship.

For this movie, we had to deal with the challenge of the time of day. Since vampires can’t go outside in sunlight, almost all of the movie takes place at night. However, we had to keep the lighting and color palette appealing to kids. This gave us a lot of opportunity to create areas of warm local light for our characters to act in, and it gave the movie a pleasant warm versus cool contrast lighting effect.

AV: The film has less dialog than the two previous ones. Does it mean that the visual aspect is more instrumental to the storytelling?

LN: I don’t know if there’s a direct correlation, but as an environment designer I like that there seems to be a lot of space in this movie for the environments to shine. The underwater volcano scene, for example, has very little dialogue, so it makes for a very dreamlike, fun sequence. Also, there are similar low levels of dialogue in some sequences on the ship and in Atlantis, so we get to watch our characters interact with each other and with the environment in new and interesting ways.

AV: On what particular scenes of the film did you work?

LN: I worked on the underwater volcano, the Mexican-themed bar within the ship, and the deserted island, mainly. I also did the paint for some characters, where I do the color and texture but not the design, specifically Ericka and Van Helsing. I also did one of the illustrations of Atlantis within the book that Van Helsing opens early on in the movie, and designed the wall in Van Helsing’s lair where he is trying to work out the secrets of Atlantis.

AV: So, you did some illustration, environment design and character paint. Is it difficult to go all over the plate like that?

LN: The biggest mental leap I usually have to make is between environment design and character paint. Making characters look real and alive is always a challenge, especially if I am just coming off of an environment design where I had to make a space look cool and believable. Plus, I am always painting someone else’s design when I am painting a character, as opposed to painting my own environment design, which comes up occasionally. But I am usually only ever working on one assignment at a time, so once I get my head around a new assignment I find I can pretty easily get in the zone and work on the assignment without any mental interference from other assignments that have come before.

AV: What kind of techniques did you appeal to in your concepts?

LN: I had to stick to the established visual style of the franchise, so I looked through a lot of old concept art for the first two movies, as well as any reference and inspiration given to me by my bosses. The techniques I use are pretty straightforward — I sketch a piece out in black and white in Photoshop, and once that is approved I work on a final design. When the final design is approved, I either paint it in color or pass it on to another artist to paint, depending on the needs of the production.

I use the computer for about 99% of my work, although often I sketch rough concepts in pencil and paper and scan them in. Sometimes I go back to pencil and paper; for the underwater volcano, I found myself sort of stuck at one point with the design, and I took out some pencils and paper and started sketching just to see what I could come up with. This kind of cleared my head and allowed me to see clearly what I wanted to do in the design. Occasionally just switching mediums and contexts can really help you solve a problem.

AV: For the ship’s bar, can you tell me about your approach, notably regarding the colors?

LN: This was actually a redesign of a set that had been in there originally, so I knew we wanted the colors to feel warm and romantic since it’s one of the first moments that Ericka and Drac spend time alone. I usually try to find as much real-world reference as I can, which in this case was tropical Tiki-themed bars and Mexican restaurants, and then I pay attention to what the director and production designer want in terms of color. Since most of the ambient light in the movie is a cool blue, having bright warm reds, yellows, and purples helped make the scene feel inviting and romantic.

AV: How did you approach the colors of Van Helsing ?

LN: Our lead character designer did the amazing design. For the paint, since Drac wears all black, our director thought it would be cool to give him a white coat and blond hair to provide greater contrast with Drac. I did a few versions of him with various coat and sweater colors, and in the end the light blue and white sweater seemed to work the best.

AV: I was very impressed by your art for Atlantis. It’s really beautiful and inspiring. It reminded me of the prints in Jules Verne’s original books.

LN: Thank you! You’re close! That piece comes from a book on the sinking of Atlantis that Van Helsing looks through early in the film. Another artist did the other illustration in the book, and when our director launched us he told us to look at Gustave Doré for visual inspiration. We spent a lot of time pouring over Doré’s amazing wood-engraved illustrations. I think Jules Verne’s illustrations were also done as wood engravings, so that’s probably why you’re seeing a resemblance. I came up with a Photoshop brush that would help mimic the look of engravings, although eventually I had to go back in with another very skinny Photoshop brush to make it look less like a digital piece. That piece probably took me a month or so, beginning to end. It was my last project on the movie though and I really enjoyed creating it.

AV: Your approach to light is also very impressive. How do you see the role of light in visual storytelling?

LN: Thank you! Light is crucial; it’s how we see what’s happening! You can use light to set the emotional mood, to conceal some parts of the scene and reveal others, to let the audience know what we’re supposed to be feeling or expecting in the scene. I just try to make the light as appealing as possible, while keeping in mind where the action is going to take place and what kind of mood we’re trying to set.

AV: What was the most challenging piece you had to do?

LN: I think my Atlantis illustration was the most challenging, largely because it was going directly on screen – it wasn’t a set design, it was an illustration, so every pixel had to look right. But wood engravings are super challenging to mimic in Photoshop, and Doré was an absolute master so I was just trying to get something close to what he could do in terms of his lighting and value structure.

On our end in the Visual Development department, there isn’t really a lighting designer per se. But we had some amazing Visual Development artists doing lighting and color keys, as well as the artists at Imageworks whose job it is to translate our Visual Development work into what you see on the screen. I always go into a piece trusting that, if I do my job right, it will end up looking how I intended. Plus, our production designer and director stay with the project through to the end to make sure the lighting and color end up the way they want it. My job is to make the director and production designer happy with the light, to give Imageworks a target to aim for when they are building the scene.

AV: Before creating your piece, what material do you get to guide you?

LN: It depends on the piece, but for an environment design I usually have a meeting with the director and the production designer, in which they go over the script and/or storyboards for the scene, as well as any general notes and reference they would like me to use. I usually go into those meetings having done some research on my own, so I bring in reference images and occasionally some rough sketches if I had some early thoughts.

AV: You are also an artist of your own. What kind of relation do you see between your personal work and your film work? Are they connected or clearly separated?

LN: I find that my personal work and film work are always kind of influencing each other, but often in ways that I’m not totally conscious of. Sometimes I only see a resemblance between my film work and a personal piece I’ve done months later. And it tends to be more that my film work leaks into my personal work, since I am often spending all day on a film but only a few hours or so on my personal work on the evenings and weekends. But I love how working on film teaches me so much about design and storytelling, so I try to absorb as much knowledge as I can from a film and apply that knowledge to my personal work. But I also try to keep my personal work separate from my film work; I tend to do personal pieces that are radically different, at least thematically, from what I’ve been working on in a film, just to keep my brain fresh and to express other parts of my artistic personality that I don’t get to use on a film.

With very special thanks to Lizzie Nichols, Paige Borsos and Olivier Mouroux at SPA.