Costume Designs Get a Big Toon Up

SKILLED ARTISANS PUSH THE LIMITS OF CHARACTER HELPED BY BETTER TECH TOOLS

had this hunter’s costume that showed that showed her feisty, rebellious kind of nature. And along with that comes this hood that’s like a big angular shape. “I think we knew that would be an iconic shape even when she’s in the forest and surrounded by curves and organic forms, that this would stand out as this hard edge that would make her seem out of place in the forest.” For “Over the Moon,” filmmakers had to imagine a look and character design for a mythic Chinese being. Famed fashion designer Guo Pei was brought in to create looks for the character Chang’e that were both traditional and modern. Chang’e moves between many worlds and time periods in the film so her costumes are intended to reflect those travels. Many of them retain traditional elements that pay homage to Chinese color symbolism. “Actually no one has ever seen Chang’e, but she has a common look, elegant and beautiful, wearing a gorgeous dress and wrapped in a high chignon,” says Guo through a translator. “When I designed her costume, I certainly fit into people’s impression of Chang’e, such as the traditional gown when she meets Hou Yi. But Chang’e in the movie is very different from the traditional one, she has the new looks like a singer, a ping-pong player, a queen, etc. So I have used some modern and even futuristic elements in the costume design.” Guo is best-known for designing red carpet couture like the knockout yellow dress worn by Rihanna at the 2015 Met Ball. The designer also has a showroom named Rose Studio in Beijing. “The costumes are faithful to the character, and I want people to be able to feel the changes in Chang’e’s emotions through them,” says Guo. “When playing pingpong, I hope people could feel her vivacity; the green dress when reuniting with Hou Yi, I expect the audience to understand Chang’e’s cautiousness when she meets her love, that she has taken off her queen’s costume and reverted to Hou Yi’s more familiar image.”

‘SOUL’ MAN ”Soul’s” Joe (above) voiced by Jamie Foxx, was clothed in soft textures but as he transforms in the film, his clothes become more sharp and stylish. ANIMATION FANS oooh and aaah over gorgeous color palettes, brilliant lighting and characters that look progressively more human, but costume design is often overlooked. It’s a crucial part of creating a character and costume designers working in animation do research and source fabrics in the same way as a live-action film costume designer. Animation costume and character designers used to have to carefully calculate what they would choose to do because it would all have to be hand-painted. Now, they have almost no barriers when it comes to design since processing power has increased, and computers can render detailed designs that used to simply be impossible. The range of what can be done is more sophisticated but still begins with using materials to develop a character. Production designer Kendal Cronkhite knew “Trolls World Tour,” the sequel to the original 2016 “Trolls” release, had to reflect a rock and roll world. But animated trolls have different costume needs than people. “For some of them they’re actually tied into their initial design as characters; for instance, like the techno mermaid troll fish,” says Cronkhite. “It was in the skin of the fish so there was a lot of research that we did on all these different musical genres and the culture around it and the costuming around the culture. So our character designer Tim Lamb and I always talked about how can we incorporate it actually into the character instead of it always just being a human piece of clothing we’re adding. What was really inspiring about the fashion in the movie was how it affected the environments. We took it all the way through because ‘Trolls’ is a fiber-inspired look anyway.” Trolls weren’t the only characters with chunky, touchable materials this year. In “Soul,” the latest release from Disney/pixar that follows a jazz artist named Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) as he struggles to find a way to live the life of his dreams, designers looked to the Harlem Renaissance to infuse African-american art into the character design. They also looked toward jazz icons including Miles Davis and John Coltrane for a sense of timeless style. Finally, they pulled raw materials to give the animators and character designers a real sense of how everything felt. “For [directors] Pete [Docter] and Kemp [Powers, who also co-wrote], they really wanted Joe to feel not sure of himself in the beginning but at the end he’s in a really well-cut suit in really nice material,” says Bryn Imagire, shading art director on “Soul.” “We looked at Jamie Foxx because he has a great sense of style, too. So I loved looking at all of his suits from the Oscars. He has an amazing sense of color. He mixes blue-green with an ultramarine blue and purples. He was a wealth of inspiration. “To get that soft effect [on the sweaters] they had to put hairs on each fiber so it had that feeling of wool or cashmere, which isn’t easy to do in CG. For Dorothea’s [Angela Bassett] costume and Libba’s [Phylicia Rashad] costume we went out and bought bolts of fabric. For Dorothea’s, we experimented with really thick silk, sort of like a charmeuse and we decided it felt too liquidy. It’s always best to have actual reference because the outcome is always so much better.” The filmmakers behind “Wolfwalkers” leaned into historical research as they told a supernatural story that takes place during the time of Oliver Cromwell, circa 1650. In the film, a young girl named Robyn travels to Ireland with her father, an English soldier. His task, though, is to destroy a pack of wolves, but she makes a connection to another world where nature is free in contrast to the uptight Puritan world of the town. “I think the fact that she was wearing britches was already showing that she was a little bit rebellious that she wasn’t dressing like the other girls,” says Tomm Moore, co-director of “Wolfwalkers.” “She wanted to be a hunter so therefore she was going toward boots and pants. I think that showed a lot of her personality. When we were developing the characters, we were showing how Robyn could be in her scullery uniforms that would show her being really, really trapped. But in contrast she

DUAL WORLDS The costume design of “Wolfwalkers” incorporated both its historial setting and an homage to nature.