National Post (National Edition)
Animal instinct
POPULAR CHILDREN'S BOOK SERIES THE BAD GUYS MOVES TO THE BIG SCREEN
Through the mid-'90s and into the early 2000s, Aaron Blabey was a film and television actor in his native Australia. But when I sit down to talk with him over Zoom, he's the author of the best-selling series of children's books The Bad Guys, which have recently been turned into an animated movie. How does one make that leap?
“It was an easy transition,” Blabey says jovially. “Because I was a terrible actor (and) I needed to find another job.”
He continues: “I had tried many, many jobs over the years. And they all felt like ill-fitting suits.” A childhood love of film had first pushed him into acting, but it was when he had kids of his own — one of whom hated reading — that he decided he'd found his true calling.
“He'd been sent home from school with innumerable books that were just unforgivably boring,” Blabey recalls.
“And it just ruined any possibility of him ever wanting to read. And I thought, I've got to do something about this.”
He'd been pondering the idea of prejudice, and characters being judged on their appearances. And he also recalled his love of the films of Quentin Tarantino.
“And I thought, is there any way you could kind of take all that and stir it up and hot-wire it somehow for a kid? And those two things clicked together. And The Bad Guys were there.”
French director and animator Pierre Perifel leaned into that Tarantino vibe in a big way. The movie's opening sequence, for instance, features a familiar looking diner ...
“It's right out of Pulp Fiction,” he confirms.
“I didn't know Aaron, but that's exactly what I saw when I saw that first book. You know, it was screaming Tarantino, it was screaming (Martin) Scorsese, it was screaming The Blues Brothers, it was screaming all the heist genre movies — with animals!”
He continues: “I've not seen a heist movie for families, you know, especially not in animation and not to that scale. So what Aaron was trying to do totally conveyed.”
The animation style is computer-generated, but it's not the standard CGI, which tends to be very clean with lots of sharp edges and sharp focus. The Bad Guys looks rough, a little gritty, a touch painterly, with elements that seem to be lifted from traditional, hand-drawn styles. Perifel chalks it up to his being influenced by a variety of styles growing up, including French and Belgian animation as well as imports from America and Japan. “France is really interesting because it's kind of a crossroads,” he says. “Kind of a melting pot.”
Perifel honed his craft as an animator on such films as the Kung Fu Panda franchise, Monsters vs. Aliens and Rise of the Guardians.
“In animated films, especially big productions like ours or Disney/Pixar they always tend to look a little bit like the same thing, rendering wise and character design wise,” he says.
“So how could we break this? The overall look was about breaking down the perfection of the computer-generated images, which tend to be too perfect. I wanted a world that was a bit more rough, a bit more lived-in, yet very poetic at the same time.”
The Bad Guys features a voice cast that includes Sam Rockwell, Awkwafina, Zazie Beetz and Richard Ayoade. Animated movies traditionally record each voice actor separately, but Perifel wanted to try to do sessions with more than one at a time. Ironically, the pandemic helped make that possible.
“We'd all log in on Zoom (and) each of them had their own mikes or their home studio,” he says. “And we could record them together without having the fear of overlapping their voices. They could be isolated, and yet speak with each other and interact with each other so fluidly. It would feel very organic, very live-action, and they could improvise. So in a way the pandemic helped us big time.”
Blabey has just finished writing books 17 and 18 in the series, which was always planned to run to 20. “I can see the end of the tunnel, but it's very exciting,” he says. “And as for the movie ...”
Perifel jumps in: “Well, we're crossing our fingers. I think all of us here and Aaron included would love to spend more time with these characters on the screen. It's always a complex set of circumstances. Hopefully the movie does great enough that we can do some more.” With a solid 86 per cent at rottentomatoes.com, and a respectable US$24-million bow last weekend to top the North American box office, that possibility just got a lot more likely.
The Bad Guys is in theatres now.