On DreamWorks Animation’s new 3DCG film, giving the titular hero soft, octopus-like curves capable of flexible, fluid movement that still looked slightly alien required designs – and rigs - that were bendable in ways never done at the studio; the movie hits theaters today, June 30.
Before Pierre-Olivier Vincent (POV) spent 14 years of his life as an art director and production designer on DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon franchise, he served in the Army as a diver.
“I lost hearing in my left ear during a diving accident, and I don’t think I was thinking of that when I was working on Dragons, but movies surprise you that way,” he says. “I remember we received a lot of letters from veterans coming back from the war with disabilities who went to see the movie with their kids. And I'm not talking about one isolated letter. There were dozens of people telling us how they felt they could watch this movie and it would help their kids understand that just because their parents were missing a leg, life was not over. I would love to say we’re in control of what messages get put out there with these movies, but we’re not. You just hope that it will create a discussion and that it will help people.”
From dragons and ogres to yetis, sharks, and even aliens, DreamWorks Animation continues to connect with global audiences by turning monsters to heroes that viewers young, old, and even real-life heroes themselves can look up to. And while many studios are looking for ways to do things differently in animation, the team behind the new 3DCG DreamWorks feature Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, which releases in U.S. theaters today, June 30, continues to live by the age-old saying, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
“I love to think that when people think of Krakens, they'll think of Ruby,” says Ruby Gillman producer Kelly Cooney Cilella, also known for serving as a production supervisor on Shrek The Third, as well as a production manager on Puss in Boots and Trolls. “Finding Ruby’s design specifically as a giant Kraken was probably one of the biggest challenges of the movie because she's a sea monster and yet we wanted her to feel aspirational. We wanted her to feel feminine. We wanted her to be something that a little girl could look at, and go, ‘I want to be that.’ It took some iteration.”
The heartfelt action comedy follows sweet, shy, and awkward 16-year-old Ruby Gillman (Lana Condor, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) who is just trying to fit in at her high school and keep her crush on the school skater boy (Jaboukie Young-White, Ralph Breaks the Internet) a secret. Suddenly, she discovers that she’s part of a legendary royal lineage of mythical sea Krakens and that her destiny, in the depths of the oceans, is bigger than she ever dreamed.
While growing 300 feet tall with glowing in bioluminescence and laser eye powers goes entirely against Ruby’s mission of staying ordinary and out of the limelight, she realizes she’ll need her powers to stand up to the school’s beautiful, popular new girl, Chelsea (Annie Murphy, Schitt’s Creek) who also happens to be a mean-girl mermaid.
Dealing with scale and finishing production in two years were certainly challenges for the creative team, but it was nailing Ruby’s royal-yet-relatable Kraken look that posed the biggest threat.
“If you look up deep sea creatures, you will have a lot of weird stuff pop up, but it’s also beautiful in a way,” explains Vincent. “Those bioluminescent creatures are both absolutely terrifying and absolutely beautiful. But we knew also that we didn't want to do monster-like monsters. We are very much aware of the uncanny valley and the trickiness of having too much naturalism in animation. So, when your characters are stylized, it's really a judgment call to make sure that you don't lose the appeal of your character just because you want things to look convincing.”
Animation director Carlos Fernandez Puertolas, who has been on the team since a year before production on the film even started, confirms that there was an almost incalculable number of Ruby designs that he sorted through before narrowing down her look.
“We were looking through so many iterations of all the characters, but especially Ruby,” notes Puertolas. “We even modeled and rigged three different versions of Ruby. In the end, I think we made the best decisions to make Ruby such a likeable character. We knew that we didn't want to do a realistic approach to an octopus, but we did extrapolate the animal’s curviness, softness, and bulbousness and applied that to the characters.”
And, as it turns out, the soft curves were key to creating fun characters that were still fairly alien in mannerisms.
“It's easy to do a lot of scary stuff,” says Vincent. “You can go pretty crazy with it, and I think everybody does. But making an appealing character is a very different kind of job. And it can deviate very quickly. These are jelly-like characters. So, they have a lot of curves and movement because they don’t have bones. I also took that and made the architecture of everything in the world rounded, avoiding square angles. There's a certain goofiness to it. We’re creating a playful world to support what is a little bit more dramatic story. I was actually really inspired by the 60s film, Yellow Submarine.”
But nailing down the movements of these flexible and fluid character models was trickier than just eliminating any joint anchor the animation team had set up in DreamWorks’ Prima software. Actually, more had to be added.
“For our character rigs, an arm generally has a certain number of bones that we put into it so the character can bend a certain way,” explains Puertolas. “But, in the case of Ruby and her family, we created a new system that has more bones internally so we can not only bend the elbow, but we can also bend the middle and the top and almost draw some shapes with the arms or legs. This was something we were not able to do in the past and hadn’t really attempted.”
In this case, the animation department needed a lot more bones to make it look like Ruby and her family were boneless. “We also wanted to highlight the contrast between Ruby and her family with the humans,” says Puertolas. “So, the humans do have elbows and you can feel the clear articulation. And they have a little more angular and rigid poses. It's a subtle thing that hopefully you feel when you watch the film.”
This was the same rigging system the team used for scenes where Ruby is underwater with her mom Agatha (Toni Collette) or Grandmamah (Jane Fonda).
“There’s a scene where Ruby’s in the water and she looks balletic swimming around,” says director Kirk DeMicco, known for directing The Croods and Vivo. “You could really see how all of her clumsy moments on land were her just literally being a fish out of water and I found that scene of her swimming very charming and endearing.”
Though Puertolas and Vincent both steered away from hyperrealism in their designs for Ruby Gillman, there were some aspects of Ruby’s character (and clothing) design that are hyper-detailed.
“We're trying to stay on top of the technology, but it's not just us, because the people who are going to go see the movie, they're seeing other movies, they're seeing the game industry that is always speeding ahead in technology as well,” notes Vincent. “So, it creates a community that is much more aware of the shortcomings and the reach of technology.”
He continues, “So Ruby’s sweater, which many years ago may have been painted with an added displacement of bumps, is actually woven, so that when she grows a little bit bigger, you see the texture stretching and the spaces between the woven fabric growing. I was introduced to that on this movie, and I couldn't have dreamed for this kind of detail to be possible.”
From making Ruby’s whole school and town look like they’d been freshly rained on, to designing the library to look like a shipping container so that Ruby’s transformation is literally her busting out of a cage, there was a lot of attention paid to the role every aspect of this film played in furthering the story.
“The priority is making sure the audience connects with the character, and making sure that connection is never broken,” says Puertolas. “You want it to look real, because there may be plenty of audience members who are fans of octopuses or Krakens, and you don’t want to do something that’s too off the mark. But, like everything else, it’s a balance. And I think there's something very appealing as well about having this giant, monster-looking creature that still is a teenager. It’s funny and it's appealing.”
And like with How to Train Your Dragon and many other DreamWorks features that have come before, Ruby Gillman had already proven to be an inspiration ahead of its official release.
“We had people on the team who connected to Ruby’s story as an immigrant coming to the U.S., and we had people talking to us about their identity, body issues, anything,” notes Faryn Pearl, co-director with DeMicco. “There were so many people that said at one point, ‘I am Ruby.’ We also had a lot of reactions about parents seeing themselves in Agatha or Grandmamah saying, ‘I learned something about how I should talk to my daughter’ or ‘I've learned something about how I hold on to things.’ The generational aspect has given us an outreach greater than we expected.”
Cooney Cilella adds, “I think the design that we've landed on makes Ruby like a superhero, especially in her Kraken form. There's something really impactful about being able to say big is beautiful, and to stand tall, and to be proud. I'm a very tall person myself, and I spent the majority of my life slouching. My husband is like, ‘Stand up tall. You're a tall woman. Own it.’ And I have a young daughter now, and I want her to be able to say, ‘No, I don't need to hide in my hoodie. I can take up space.’”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
