CREATURE FEATURE

APPA In this series, Appa, Aang’s beloved flying fuzzball of a friend, is a marvel of CG hair and soulful eyes. Executive producer Jabbar Raisani and VFX supervisor Marion Spates tell SFX they knew they had to land this critter or they’d be toast.

Jabbar Raisani: Ultimately, we’re starting with the animated series in trying to find this cross section of, what does Appa feel like? If you really study a lot of the [animated] images, Appa is drawn differently in different frames across the series, so you can’t take one 3D model and have it represent Appa from every angle that’s been represented in the show. Thus, you’re trying to get the feeling, and that’s the most important thing.

For better or worse, that’s a lot of technical exploration. Finding reference was our start. What does Appa feel like in the series? We did facial stuff and full body stuff. Then we tried to get into the technical execution of, what does it actually mean to create something like this? Because you have to create every tooth, the tongue, and the relationship of those various things. It has a real difference in the emotion and how the performance is conveyed. We really went into every single part of Appa and tried to find real-world reference, to bring Appa to life in a way that felt like the animated series but fitted into the live action world.

Marion Spates: We studied real-life animals. Most importantly, we wanted to pay homage to the anime. We studied how he flew in the anime. But then we cherry-picked creatures that could mimic what we’re looking for. Because of his weight, we went to a manatee for the tail – and even for his little leg swims, because of how the manatees swim. As far as the look of his mouth and teeth, we looked at cows. We looked at the length of the tongues of cows. We looked at the Scottish cow with the long hair. And bison are a big inspiration. There’s a lot of little nuances of different animals in him to help create such a large creature.

MOMO Another entirely CG character that becomes part of Aang’s pack is Momo, the flying lemur. An ally who provides a lot of comic relief, the character needed to be convincing and have a large personality in a compact body.

Jabbar Raisani: Momo is more heightened and stylised. We could only lean so much into the cartoon, and we had to pick up the rest in reality. We went back to the animated series asking, why is Momo cute, and why do we identify Momo as Momo? It was through a lot of analysis of real animals, and continuing to go back to the animated series for feeling, that we were able to find our version of Momo.