The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Meet the man who oversaw character work on hit ‘Coco’
Character designer talks about making animation hit prior to release
Often, someone working in animation was once a kid filling a notebook with sketched images and maybe even creating very basic animation with a flipbook. ¶ Not Christian Hoffman. ¶ “When I was growing up, I loved cartoons,” says Hoffman, character supervisor on the recently released hit “Coco” from Disney-owned Pixar Animation Studios. “I loved animation, but I didn’t have the skills to actually be a (two-dimensional) animator or anything.”
While he was growing up in the Pittsburgh area, Christian regularly was taken by his father to an annual animation festival.
“So I’d seen all the Pixar films every year, the Pixar short films, when they’d come out, and I always loved those films,” he says. “(But) I did not really understand what Pixar was or that (those movies) were Pixar.”
His talents lay in working with computers — he taught himself to program at 11 or 12, he says — and he eventually attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he studied computer science and mathematics. He still wasn’t sure exactly he wanted to do for a career in 1995 when Pixar released its first feature-length film, the huge hit “Toy Story.”
It had an impact on him, to say the least.
“It was the perfect culmination of, ‘This is, practically, what I’m doing right now in my class,’ and I was blown away by ‘Toy Story,’” he says of the film that introduced the world to heroes Sheriff Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen). “And I had just put together that all those short films that I was watching as a kid that I loved were actually the same thing.”
That led to more computer graphics courses and, amazingly, a gig right out of school with the Californiabased animation house. His break came during his senior year, when he was taking higher-level computergraphics courses.
“Somebody who was recruiting for Pixar contacted my professor and asked for some names of some students who were doing well,” he says. “Fortunately, my name was one of them.”
He interviewed for a job and then had to try to stall other companies interested in him. He didn’t have to wait long.
“The Monday after I graduated, Pixar gave me a call, gave me an offer,” he says, “and two and a half weeks later I was in California.”
Following a 10-week training program that led to him starting out in the interactive department, which focused on creating computer games with an educational slant, he was loaned to animation to work on “A Bug’s Life,” which, in 1998, would become the company’s second feature. He first worked on Heimlich, a caterpillar, but ultimately had a hand in creating a bunch of the insect characters.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” he says. “I learned so much on ‘A Bug’s Life.’
“The people that were there were really great. I had really great mentors. These were the people who built Buzz and Woody.”
His reverence for those characters helps explain why he was so excited to later work on 2010’s “Toy Story 3.”
“It was really special for me, because I was getting to go back in and revisit the characters that are the characters I fell in love with the first time that made me want to work on them.
“That was a really fun experience — there wasn’t a whole lot of drama with it,” he recalls. “We ended up with what I feel like was the perfect end to that trilogy.”
That film was directed Chagrin Falls native Lee Unkrich, who also was at the helm for “Coco.”
As character supervisor for the latter, Hoffman oversaw the development of all the characters from the point the art department provided him and his teams with 2-D drawings or 3-D sculptures. From there, his crew created computer versions and controls to move them so the animation department could wield its magic.
He oversaw work done by the shading folks, who work on aspects such as skin texture and how light will react to characters’ clothing, and the grooming department — the employees responsible from everything from hair to beards to eyelashes.
As he was in charge of as many as 30 or so people at the project’s peak, he mostly focused on making sure everything was getting done and being done well.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t get as much hands-on time as I have in the past. I still tried to carve out little pieces and projects here and there.”
For instance, he said, he dove into making what he called the “guitar rig.”
“We had to figure out how animation could interact with the guitar and how the characters should play the guitar and get the strings to strum and vibrate and stop vibrating whenever the character was depressing the strings against the fretboard,” he says. “So that was a little fun project.”
“Coco,” released Nov. 22, is the story of Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), a Mexican boy who dreams of a career in music. There’s only one problem: Music long has been banned in his large family, for reasons that become clear over the course of the story.
The film is set around Día de Muertos, aka day of the dead, a holiday celebrated throughout Mexico in which deceased relatives are remembered and celebrated. Miguel has a large living family, but he also travels to the land of the dead, where he meets many more relatives he has known only from photographs.
“Our biggest challenge was the scope of this film,” Hoffman says. “We had to populate a small town in rural Mexico, and we had to populate this really giant land of the dead. I’m pretty sure this is the most characters we ever had to build for a movie — it’s definitely the most of any movie I’ve been on.”
A lot of work went into how a “Pixar skeleton” should look — Hoffman said they wanted more of a caricature than something anatomical — but a main priority was honoring the culture. While he didn’t go on one, multiple research trips to Mexico were made by folks working on the movie.
“We really want to make sure we’re authentic. We’re basing this stuff on the interactions that we had and not stereotypes that might exist out there,” he says. “You want to make sure when you’re dealing with an actual culture that you’re being respectful to it, and you want to make sure when they see it, they’re happy and they’re really connecting with it.”
Of course, for the movie to be a success, it has to appeal to more than just the people of Mexico.
“We think there’s a universal appeal here,” Hoffman says, in an interview a couple of weeks before the movie’s opening. “Everybody’s got a family. Everybody’s got some weird aunt.”
Hoffman was in Cleveland for a presentation at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He showed clips of the movie, he says, and talked about making the film, zeroing in on the work done with Dante, Miguel’s Xolo — a type of hairless Mexican dog.
“He’s a really fun character,” he says.
It sounds as if it was a bit of a long-range recruitment pitch.
“We know the students that are out there right now are going to be the future of Pixar, so we want to go out there, we want to let people know what it takes for us to make these (movies) happen. We want to get people excited about it and get them passionate about it,” he says. “Because if they’re passionate about it, they’re going to work even harder to impress, and it’s going to be better for them in the long run because they’re going to really go after it and put themselves in a better position to get a job.”
And, hey, it sounds like you can get a job with Pixar right out of school.
“It happened to me,” he said with a laugh. “It can happen to everyone.”