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8 cgw e d i t i o n i , 2 0 2 0 those characters would partially appear and reappear. "We had to figure out ways for them to transition from being fully formed to disappearing, and the timing of that," says Rangaswamy. "The animators would figure out the progression and then work with the effects team to figure out what that transi- tion area would look like." The magic had a glowing element to it that served as a light source for the other objects in the scene. So, as an object disappears, a determination had to be made as to how much of that transition area would glow, what color it would be, and so on. "That's something effects, animation, and lighting worked on together," says Rangaswamy. This meant working in tandem, as lighters did their work while the animators did theirs. Meanwhile, effects had to wait for anima- tion in order to finesse their work. "Then the magical effects are driving the lighting, making things more complicated with all the back and forth between the departments," says Best. Volumetric mesh lights were used on the show, whereby the volume representation of the VFX assets, such as the magic beams or sparks, actually served as the light source – something the lighters were unable to do before, Best points out. "We'd have to use a proxy version of the effect, a geometric meshed version or that sort of thing. The thing is, we have the ability to do things in a very photorealistic way that's physically correct. But the look of the film is fairly painterly; there's a lot of handcraed shot changes. And it's challenging for the lighting artists to marry those two, but now it can be done in a much cleaner way." Without hesitation, Hale points to two se- quences in which the magic was especially difficult. The first was when the boys conjure up their dad, partly due to having so many effects working on top of one another. The second involved the dragon. Throughout the film, Ian is learning different types of spells, but at the end, he must use a culmination of all of them to fight the dragon. "There's a unique look for the different spells, and we had to deal with all the different complexities that we dealt with individually up to this point," says Best. "There were super-heavy simulations, like fire, destruction, and a dragon of red gas. There was interaction with the environment, the dust and destruction on the ground, and every magic spell possible. It's a Level 3 maxed-out version one right aer the other, all playing together. There's everything but the kitchen sink." Hale notes that the formation of the gas's drag and the work on the dragon's wings were very complex, resulting in effects doing some secondary motion on the gas dragon to give it extra weight. "Effects had a big hand in developing and supporting that character, which is not very common for us," he says. "We took all the pieces of the drag- on, which is made out of the high school, and made them feel like they had mass. We added lot of scale. We added hanging cables and bits of red rock and stuff falling off the dragon, on top of the gas that was inside the dragon and its wings, and the fire coming out of the dragon." Hale adds, "This is one of our biggest effects films for sure." Personal journey As Stocker notes, Onward is a fantasy story, yet it is a deeply personal one for Scan- lon. The film was inspired by the death of Scanlon's father's when the director and his brother were very young, and the siblings' subsequent relationship. Initially, the team was unsure whether it was appropriate to offer notes about the story – "it was his, aer all," says Stocker. "But Dan is such a giving director. He invited us to really poke at the story and make it better. He would pitch us a sequence and then we would pick it up to animate and brainstorm, then we would pitch those back to Dan. He would decide if they fit or if they were funny or not. It really invested the ani- mators into the movie, to make it better." As Rangaswamy notes, on previous Pixar movies, there was always a certain challenge that the group had to overcome, whether ocean waves and refraction with Finding Nemo, animation controls for a vehicle in the first Cars, vegetation for The Good Dinosaur, or the world of the dead for Coco. On this movie, however, he believes the challenge was in the culmination of things that de- manded their attention. "We had all those things in one film. There's an ocean and water, characters that are human-like and ones that are furry. There's complex clothing interaction that required a lot of simulation. There's a lot of magic, and the battle at the end is a big effects extrava- ganza," he says. "We had to do all these things that are really high level." Indeed, Pixar used a lot of digital magic to bring us this story, which opens our eyes to the little bit of magic in all of us. Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of CGW. There are many colorful characters in the film, including this manticore. Ian and Barley's relationship evolves during their adventure.