ANIMATION
ONWARD: CREATING MYTHICAL CREATURES – WITH A SUBURBAN TWIST By IAN FAILES
The latest Pixar animated feature, Onward, directed by Dan Scanlon, portrays a fairytale world full of magic creatures – elves, trolls, mermaids, gnomes, sprites, goblins and dragons. But there’s a twist; those creatures live in what appears to be a normal suburban existence, one where magic is perhaps not as special as it once used to be. Things change when two elf brothers – Ian and Barley Lightfoot – seem to bring their deceased father back to life, at least partially, and end up on a quest to bring him back completely. From an animation and effects point of view, Onward posed several challenges for Pixar, including designing and executing a large range of mythical creatures and characters and generating magical effects. The more stylized nature of the film also enabled the team to approach this work slightly differently, sometimes with old-school animation techniques.
“Our characters had such an art-directed look to them that even in simulation we had animators come in and do hand-drawn sketches on top of our shots. We would then go in and use sculpting tools on top instead of doing re-sims. It saved us a lot of time and we could just straighten off the shoulders, give a specific curve a look, and that would get the shot finalized instead of doing iterations of sims over and over.” —Max Rodriguez, Simulation Technical Director
A STYLIZED APPROACH
All images copyright © 2019 Disney/Pixar. TOP: Brothers Ian and Barley Lightfoot find a way to partially re-animate their deceased father in Onward. OPPOSITE TOP: Animating the father character involved some unique character simulation for just the legs, and later when his body is covered in other clothing. OPPOSITE BOTTOM: Pixar approached Onward with somewhat more of a stylized feel than some of its other films.
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The nature of the film’s story was one reason that a more stylized and old-school approach worked, according to animator Michael Bidinger. “The fantasy world in Onward was so rich that it got a lot of people excited to suggest a lot of ideas early. It got a lot of people working rougher; that’s where the organic things just came up. “So,” says Bidinger, “there were a number of animators who started first with 2D sketch-blocking. It helped them start the conversation or continue the conversation about how effects might look in relation to a character’s performance.” “That helped us figure out,” outlines Character Technical Director Seth Freeman, “what is this particular character like, what kind of physicality are we going to need to have on this other character? It let us know what kind of work we had to do.” This continued all the way through production, including in simulation. “Our characters had such an art-directed look to them
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