ANIMATION
‘FEELING THE CHARACTERS’ ELEVATES HEART-FILLED OVER THE MOON By TREVOR HOGG
All images courtesy of Netflix. TOP: The backstory of Chang’e was animated in 2D by Glen Keane and then projected onto a moving scarf. OPPOSITE TOP: The Water Town in which Fei Fei lives was modeled on Wuzhen, China.
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Being the son of famous cartoonist Bil Keane (The Family Circus) did not discourage Glen Keane from pursuing a career as an animator; he subsequently went on to become a Disney Legend known for designing characters in The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas and Tarzan. After producing the Oscarwinning animated short Dear Basketball with Kobe Bryant, Glen Keane was drawn to the Netflix animated feature Over the Moon, which entwines Chinese folklore with the present day. The Moon Goddess Chang’e (Phillipa Soo) is separated from her husband Houyi (Conrad Ricamora) upon drinking the elixir of immortality, while 12-year-old Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) is mourning the death of her Mother (Ruthie Ann Miles) and has to deal with the prospect of her Father (John Cho) remarrying. Their stories collide when the ‘tweenager’ decides to build a rocket to the Moon to prove that the deity actually exists. Screenwriter Audrey Wells (The Hate U Give) saw the project as a departing love letter to her husband and daughter as she was waging a battle with cancer while writing the script, and subsequently died. “Audrey said that all of her stories are about healing in some way,” states Keane. “The breakup of families, whether through divorce or death, is something that so many people in the world are going through. The theme of our story is to learn to love somebody new. There has to be depth for me to want to do it.” Production on the animated musical began in 2017, and with five months to go the COVID-19 lockdown caused artists to finish their work remotely. “120 animators were working at the same time and barely able to keep up,” remarks Keane, who partnered with Netflix and Pearl Studio. “Then on a Thursday at 11 a.m. word comes down, ‘We’ve got to shut down the studio at Netflix.’ Everybody left within an hour, leaving behind coffee cups and coats hanging on chairs. It was like The Day the Earth Stood Still. In some miraculous
“CG mouths always have this weird pinch at the corners. But if you open your mouth, the top lip curves and rolls, and there is this beautiful rolling curve at the corners. We worked hard at putting that into all of our human characters.” —Glen Keane, Producer/Director way, we all went to our homes, used Zoom and continued on.” What proved to be indispensable was a review system devised by Sony Pictures Imageworks that allows individuals around the world to see the same image. “Part of that toolset includes our animation tool that allows us to draw on the image,” remarks Sony Pictures Imageworks Visual Effects Supervisor David Smith. “I showed Glen that tool and the first thing he did was to sit down in the chair and started drawing with it. He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if this could feel like a pencil and we could have a better brush here?’ We took those notes right away, made an overlay like a traditional animation transparency overlay, and fixed up the brushes so that they responded more like a pencil.” Animation review sessions got quite lively with Keane and co-director John Kahrs (Paperman). “I’m left-handed and Glen is right-handed, so we would be sitting on opposite sides of the Cintiq grabbing the stylus from each other,” laughs Kahrs. “I worked with the editor on some of these action sequences to calm things down and to tell the audience where to direct their eye. I removed a lot of Dutch angle shots when I got on the show because [the Moon city of] Lunaria is such a wild, psychedelic color fest that tilting the camera arbitrarily felt like too much craziness.” Kahrs also wanted to make sure that the characters looked like they were actually singing. “You have to animate the lungs inhaling and pushing that air out through the larynx singing and projecting,” he says. “If you’re just moving the mouth and the
character is blinking and looking around, that’s not enough for me.” A particular aspect of CG facial animation was addressed. “CG mouths always have this weird pinch at the corners,” observes Keane. “But if you open your mouth, the top lip curves and rolls, and there is this beautiful rolling curve at the corners. We worked hard at putting that into all of our human characters.” “More days were spent in rigging than what we typically do on a picture at Sony because anatomy was important to Glen,” states Sony Pictures Imageworks Animation Supervisor Sacha Kapijimpanga. “Getting all of the responses across the face that you would expect to see, we pushed hard on that. Also, we made sure that all of the body parts moved correctly and looked good, so when the cloth simulation happened on top of the forms underneath the cloth, it felt that you could see an arm or leg under there.” Research was conducted to ensure that Chinese characters felt authentic. “We went to Shanghai and did a lot of drawing of people on the street,” explains Keane. “I did a lot of studying of Asian eyes. There is this double fold on an eyelid that I never noticed before. The higher cheek bones. How does that fit into a simplified design of that face? There is this triangle between the eyes and eyebrows. We worked hard at being able to create enough of the muscle tension in there so you can feel that.” Character Designer Brittany Myers (Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse) kept in mind how the various characters might present themselves if they were real people. “Fei Fei has a quirk of pulling
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