Talking about animation: BAFTA sessions 2019

Using animation techniques, from drawing to stop-motion and CGI, filmmakers can create fantastical stories and characters that take audiences on emotive journeys.

Here the creatives behind two animated superhero films open up about the process that goes on behind the screens. Hear from Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Phil Lord, Chris Miller and Rodney Rotham, the producers and directors of Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. Plus Brad Bird and Nicole Grindle, the minds behind Incredibles 2, as they discuss using creative solutions to show scale, and tell stories that evoke emotion in a wide range of audiences.

For Bird, a challenge he faces when creating an animated film is how to tell a story that makes the audience feel strong emotions. He feels sometimes, the audience’s emotions can be blocked by the perception that animated characters are infallible: “There’s an added thing in animation where people are conditioned to think that people are always going to be fine. You know that Coyote falls off the cliff and just dusts himself off and he’s ready to go again, so jeopardy becomes very hard to do in animation.” His solution is to add mistakes for the characters, especially in fast-paced action scenes, to foster a sense of high-stake danger. He said: “I tried to engineer in flaws and things that hurt and mistakes so [Mrs Incredible] isn’t doing everything perfect all the time… Because you can control everything in animation, people like to make it perfect… I always think that’s a mistake because it makes it not connect with what you know to be real, even if what you’re doing is fanatical and impossible, if you add in flaws and you add in mistakes it makes it more visceral.”

The team behind Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse also embraced imperfections. However, this was more in the style, rather than the substance of the film, to reference the original, hand-drawn Spider-Man comics. After creating a scene with CGI, it would then be hand drawn to make it feel authentic and imperfect. Drawing on his early experience working on Disney’s Tarzan, Persichetti pushed for traditional hand drawn scenes instead of realistic CGI animation. He explained: “We were trying to strip all that [realistic] stuff out and get to something that felt like a really strong, graphic way of telling the story like a comic book but animation. We were trying to bring the computer almost backwards a little bit into that, make it feel as individual and expressive as a person drawing it would.”

Persichetti explained that they adopted an unorthodox approach to creating a set with the vast scale needed for the film’s train scene: “You often draw large sets in CGI where you go okay, this is our city, then you drop down and start to find angles. One of the pipeline breaking things that we were trying to do – as much as we could on this movie – was in the same spirit of a comic book where you’re trying to find the strongest composition and strongest storytelling. So ,you’re moving things around and you’re kind of disregarding continuity, we did that with our sets as well… the elevated train is something like 17 Manhattans long.” Although the animation distorts reality, the fast-paced action sequence means “you don’t question it.” He describes this sequence as “a testament to what you can get away with when you cheat. And I mean that’s the thing about filmmaking, it’s at its best when you’re cheating and you’re finding solutions that are creative.”

Were Grindle and Bird nervous about releasing Incredibles 2 in a film landscape saturated by superhero franchises? Bird explains he was reassured by the universal subject at the film’s core: “What made me excited about the idea was that it was really a film about family through the lens of superheroes rather than about superheroes.” This central thread drove him to choose the character’s superpower based on their position in the family: “That kinds of grounds it, it’s using the powers as a way to comment on the roles and times of your life. And I think that’s one of the things that worked about the movie, is that somebody can relate to at least two of the family characters.”

Not only is the Incredibles franchise about family, it also has relatable human moments, such as the “argument between Bob and Helen” in the first film, that make it appeal to the whole family. It shares this quality with Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, which Grindle praises for its universal appeal: “I love the Spider-Verse film because there’s a lot more going on than just action. There’s really complex characters that have conflicts that are relatable and not for kids, for all audiences.”

Bird echoes this, explaining that animated films can be enjoyed by audiences of all ages and interests just as much as any film: “For me, when anyone tries to put a barrier between what we do and other film, I want to knock it down… how we get on film is different, but we still have camera angles and characters that hopefully connect with you… It’s not a genre, it’s a medium that can do any genre.”