57
Getting non-humans right When it comes to the task of anthropomorphizing our furry, feathered, slimy or scaly counterparts, animators again turn to acting, even filming each other playing scenes, so they can reference them later on. However, Santos and her colleagues stop short of using motion-capture technology. “It could offer literal movement,” she says, “but animation is life exaggerated, so the shapes and the motion in it are more appealing and richer than they are in the real world.” Risca’s key tip for making an animal character more relatable: give it “human” eyes. “Many animals don’t have visible eye whites, but a majority of cartoon animals are portrayed with them,” she says. “The same goes for expressive brows.” Before sititng down to draw, Mitchell suggests studying the animal’s real-life behavior. As the character begins to take form, “the focus should not be on balancing human and animal traits but rather harmonizing them,” he says. “The amount of human gestures [an animal character has] depends on the overall approach of the film,” Kupershmidt says, noting the difference between the Disney classics Robin Hood (1973), in which “animals dress and behave like humans,” and Bambi (1942), in which “very few” humanizing touches were added to the characters. “You don’t necessarily need human gestures to convey emotion. We all have seen animals act lazy, frightened, hungry or excited in their own manner.” “The less known an animal is to the public, the more important it is to humanize it to make it relatable,” Risca says. “We all know a dog wags its tail, but most people don’t know what a porcupine or ostrich does when it’s happy. So it’s important that those characters act more human, so we can relate to them and love them.”
Keep it real When the character finally emerges, is there a “magic ingredient” to making it believable? “Consistency,” Doolen says. “As long as the characters don’t break their established set of behaviors, the player or viewer will interpret them as real. Nothing will take an audience out of fantasy quicker than inconsistency.” Similarly, Mitchell keeps a close eye on the work of Sesame Street’s puppeteers, so that his work will reference theirs. “I am always in school, watching them,” he says, “because the performers are so close to their puppet characters.” “Sometimes, for whatever reason, a character just doesn’t ‘click,’” Doolen says. While developing CreaVures, a 2011 release, Doolen was working on the animation for “a small forest spirit,” he says. When the character was made to run, it looked “generic, but we couldn’t articulate why. Almost by accident, I shifted the character’s center of gravity, so it leaned backward as it ran. It instantly looked so labored and forced—as if this little, out-of-shape potato was reluctantly sprinting and hating every moment of it. . . . The smallest, most subtle alteration can change everything.” Even while at rest, a character’s appearance should communicate its personality. This is doubly true for shorter works, which have less time to establish character through
action or dialogue. Risca recently helped develop a character named Comet for Froot Loops Bloopers cereal. “There was a very clear direction from the client that Comet should be clumsy,” she says. This trait was communicated through not only its haphazard flight path but its facial features. The Nathan Love team rendered Comet with “big eyes and one big buck tooth on the side, giving it qualities similar to a big baby,” she says. As a character takes shape, keep records of its development, organizing these inspirations, research materials and acting notes into character sheets and reference boards with color and texture swatches. These resources tell other designers and animators everything they need to know about a character’s look, personality and movements, down to its waggling eyebrows and half-laced shoes. The Jim Henson Company, for example, keeps “immaculate records,” Mitchell says. “Each puppet has its own fur texture and/or color, and swatches of the actual fleece or fur are kept, along with the procedure on how to texturize them.”
Keep it simple Above all, character design must serve the story. Extraneous detail, no matter how appealing at first, “can make a character tiring or a distraction,” Mitchell says. Better instead to find a signature move or trait that defines a character, and stick with it. Mitchell cites Miss Piggy’s karate chop—which original performer Frank Oz created in a moment of improvisation—as a perfect distillation of her famously hot temper, and still “a key movement for the character to this day.” “When I taught character design at SVA,” Mitchell says, “I ended each year with the French movie The Red Balloon”—a 1956 short in which a boy and a balloon become friends. “It proved, beyond a doubt, that the way a character looks is not even close to how vital the development of the story is. That balloon didn’t have a face—or anything—on it. It didn’t even speak or have a name. But when it was happy or angry, you knew it!” Mitchell also liked to show his students Chuck Jones’ The Dot and the Line (1965), an animated short in which a dot and a line fall in love. “When you watch that film, you see living entities,” he says. “But it is just a red dot and a black line.” ∞
OPPOSITE: A rendering (top) and action sketches for the character of Comet, developed for Froot Loops Bloopers, 2015. Courtesy of Nathan Love.
SPRING 2015