CHARACTER DESIGN & ANIMATION
Character designer Federico Pirovano and animation supervisor Svend Rothmann Bonde joined forces to bring the cast to life…
Emerging from the global shadow cast by Pixar and Studio Ghibli is Cartoon Saloon, a Kilkennybased animation studio which has received Oscar nominations for each one of its three feature films, and is expected to do so again with Wolfwalkers. The animated family adventure, directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, had a world premiere during the 45th Toronto International Film Festival and streams on Apple TV+. Ordered by English invaders led by Oliver Cromwell, a hunter is accompanied by his daughter as he attempts to exterminate the native wolves of Ireland.
A trailer was released in 2017 as part of an effort to pitch the concept as a feature film. “That was a test to see if we could do everything that we wanted to do,” notes Stewart. “We tried a little bit of ‘wolfvision’, the forest and town style, and the clean-up style.” Whereas the animation style was established, the first act went through a major rewrite in 2018. “Getting the story right is the part where you’re terrified that it’s all wrong and you’re going to embarrass yourself,” admits Moore. “It’s hellish. After that, everything else is more blood, sweat and tears to get it up on the screen.” The town was inspired by linocut printmaking while the neighbouring forest has a watercolour and pencil sketch aesthetic. “Because we were willing to go down this German
Expressionism route with the town, we had big areas of black and crazy abstract shapes,” remarks Stewart. “The Lord Protector goes from being positive to negative depending on whether he’s walking through light or shadow. For the forest, we looked at the painted backgrounds of Disney’s Robin Hood and Winnie The Pooh.”
“The clean-up style of the animation of the villagers including Robyn and Bill Goodfellowe was also based on the woodcut printing of the 1600s,” explains Stewart. “The forest style was scratchy, loose and wild. It was much more energetic. The clean-up style for that was utilising the rough animation and putting sketchier lines on top.” The farmland situated between the forest and village allows for a gradual transition in the animation styles. “It was a whole process of, whereabouts are they on this journey from the forest to the town, and how much etching or sketchy pencil should there be?” The geometrical design of Robyn evolves into a sketchier look to reflect the arc of her character. “We had a few tricks to make Robyn feel out of place and at home in the forest. As Robyn gets more comfortable with Mebh Óg Mactíre, she gets the rougher clean-up style and the big angular hood is down. When the soldiers come in at the end, they’re all angles and are like an army of robots coming into this organic world. Robyn is the only one who can bridge the divide between the village and forest.”
The adventurism of the line drawings in Spider-man: Into The Spider-verse was an invitation to do something that Moore and Stewart had talked about ever since The Secret Of Kells. “The big thing for me,” states Moore, “was having the clean-up team be like comic book inkers where they could make an expressive line of character.” Stewart was happy with what they were able to accomplish. “What we did with Wolfwalkers doesn’t remove you from the story when it happens. When Mebh gets really angry and starts screaming her lines get intense and busy. Hopefully, it’s subtle enough that it works on a subconscious level.”
Sean Bean provides the voice of the hunter Bill Goodfellowe, who resembles his iconic Game Of Thrones character Ned Stark. “Sean was the person that we had in mind for Bill,” laughs Moore. “We were definitely doing our ‘winter is coming’ homage when we were drawing him.” Not all of the voice actors could be easily mistaken for their cartoon personas. “Tommy Tiernan isn’t a big guy like Seán Óg but he had the right intensity,” remarks Stewart. “Eva Whittaker is an energetic little girl, like Mebh, but doesn’t look much like her. The beauty of animation is that the character voices can be matched by a good animator.”
FOUR-LEGGED FRIENDS
Real references assisted the portrayal of the wolves. “There is this wolf conservation centre in Upper State New York that has loads of videos of them hanging around in groups, messing with each other and a lot of doggie behaviour, like sniffing each other’s butts,” remarks Stewart. “We wanted them to have that playfulness and be like a big bunch of puppies in the den. The villagers only see them when they’re attacking and fierce. We wanted to have this duality to them.” Wolfwalkers can speak to each other when they are in their wolf form. “Because we hadn’t done [speaking animals] before we were afraid that it might seem goofy,” reveals Moore. “We experimented. I love Princess Mononoke but it’s more like telepathy in the way that they talk to each other. Neither did we want to really enunciate like Charlie the dog in All Dogs Go To Heaven where he makes huge human shapes. We had some good animators who understood animal anatomy and were able to find a nice compromise.”
Master animators were consulted, in particular Aaron Blaise and James Baxter. “James came to visit us at the studio and animated a couple of scenes of the wolves,” states Moore. “Robyn had a little head shake that we had worked out, which was part of her personality. Then we had to keep that when she was a wolf. Robyn is more elegant and cautious than Mebh as a wolf. As a wolf, the paws of Mebh come down much heavier just like when she is a little girl.” The emotionally distorted watercolour and charcoal sketches found in The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya combined with VR were an inspiration for the sequences that showcase the perspective of the wolves. “We asked [animator] Eimhin Mcnamara to come in and help us to design the ‘wolfvision’. It had to be really different and exciting because we’re showing how Robyn was changing and seeing the world from another person’s point of view. We wanted people to think, ‘It would be great to see the world through the eyes of another creature and to understand the world in that way’.”
Maintaining colour and light continuity was not easy, as scenes were not animated sequentially. “When Moll Mactíre [Mebh’s mother] is trapped in the cage on the stage and the sun is setting, that was one of the trickier colour elements in the film, in that we have to start off in the scullery where everything is desaturated,” explains Stewart. “When Mebh comes in it ramps up a little bit. It ramps up fully to this pure red and black when the sun is setting and Mebh is threatening the town. That takes place over six or seven sequences, some of which were
“THE BIG THING FOR ME WAS HAVING THE CLEANUP TEAM BE LIKE COMIC BOOK INKERS” Tomm Moore, director, Wolfwalkers
50 pages of drawings of the Lord Protector were produced by Federico Pirovano. “The biggest problem was until late we weren’t sure what kind of personality he had. Sometimes he was mischievous and lanky, or bulky and stupid, or a mix of the two. It helped a lot when they finally decided on the voice for the character [Simon Mcburney], which in turn inspired the design.” It was difficult creating continuity between the human and animal forms of the Wolfwalkers. “I struggled with Robyn Goodfellowe and Mebh Óg Mactíre as wolves because they had to resemble their human characters, have a specific style, and look like naturalistic wolves. You have three things that give you little space to move. Designing Robyn was a nightmare at times because she could look like a dog or a fox in no time.”
The 2D animation had to feel volumetric. “The first thing that we started with was trying to figure out how three dimensional the fairly flat design was going to be once the characters would be animated,” states Svend Rothmann Bonde. “The town characters are more looking like woodcut printing and the forest characters resemble a rough sketch. We were trying to bring that out too. The sketch characters could be less tied down before going to clean-up, whereas town characters had to be tighter.”