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52 cgw e d i t i o n 2 , 2 0 2 0 Unique Design The artwork from the book is sparse, giving production designer Kyle McQueen a clean palette to work from. The design he and the filmmakers chose is certainly atypical, one that feels homemade. "The stop-motion influence in The Willoughbys came from this idea of an old-fashioned story – kids growing up on books rather than the Internet – and so we really wanted to dive into that from a visual standpoint and create something that didn't feel digital," says McQueen. "We wanted a world that really felt tactile and visceral, like turning the pages of a book and smelling the ink." Adds Pearn, "I wanted the audience to think they could go to Michael's [cra store] and buy all the materials to make this movie." The characters are disproportionate in shape. But what stands out the most are the textures. The Willoughby family, as generations before them, have big red hair that looks as if it is made of yarn, a notion that is emphasized by the fact that Mother is obsessed with knitting. Nanny also sports a big head of hair, only hers is dark brown, curly, and heart-shaped. Likewise, all the clothing looks handspun, too, like you would see on a stop-motion character – making them look like minia- tures. That is, except for Tim, who is wearing a too-small explorer-like outfit he outgrew many years ago. "When I pitched the idea to Kyle Mc- Queen, he immediately got excited by the notion of boiling down the shapes to simple cartoon principles with heightened textures, almost in the vein of stop motion," says Pearn, who spent part of his career at Aard- man Animation, known for its stop motion productions such as Shaun the Sheep. "Ev- erything in stop motion is handmade, so we started wondering, what if everything in this world was handmade? Hence, countless frames [are] overflowing with textures and toy-like components." Unique Animation Approach As big a role as stop motion played in defining the film's look, it is Pearn's 2D animation background, with its hand-drawn approaches and pose-to-pose animation, that held sway when it came to making the characters move. "Early on we looked at 2D pose-to-pose animation, and I challenged the animators to create a movement style for each char- acter based on who they were," says Pearn. For example, Tim is very still, almost like a grown-up. Jane, meanwhile, represents the future, she just wants to escape. She's like a bird, fragile but tough, which played into the way she moved through the use of arcs." While the film is informed by a stop-mo- tion aesthetic and 2D animation principles, the world of The Willoughbys is neither in actuality. Rather, it is 100 percent CGI. And, "tricking" the computer into believing oth- erwise during the creation process was the biggest challenge Pearn and the crew faced. Textures were key to achieving the tactile aesthetic of the characters. The way Pearn used the cameras also provided a stop-mo- tion feel. To this end, McQueen devised an environment that could be captured without a lot of digital moving cameras, and Pearn decided to use minimal motion blur, citing Hal Ashby's Harold & Maude and three-cam- era sitcoms as inspirations (see "Inspiration," page 55). "When we do move a camera, you feel it," says Pearn. "We tried to pick cameras and do setups that gave us a lot of width. We use a lot of depth of field so that your eye always knows where to go. It does kind of feel like miniature photography. And that's a big part of the stop-motion appeal." Creatively, the lack of camera motion also gives the sense that the children are stuck in the house. "I wanted to shoot the house like it was a practical set, like a sitcom. Locking the camera allowed us to give the audience that three-camera setup feeling where there are long takes, you trust the acting and let the composition do the work," Pearn explains. "On the flip side, when we unpin the camera, it drives a story point. When the children leave the house, we let the camera dolly up, because that telegraphs to the audience that we're now loose and out The Willoughby children long to be rid of their parents. The Willoughby history of greatness skipped Dad's generation.