Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1343869
D E PA R T M E N T 29 KEYFRAME Images courtesy of Walt Disney Animation Studios. SPRING 2021 29 is "just a mess of tech and robots," while Tadashi's is "more organized and well rounded. The goal being that the viewer could tell who lived in the house without ever seeing the people." This design approach overlapped with efforts to show that the house had a past. According to Production Designer Paul Felix, "We tried to give the idea that someone, at some point, had taken out the original layout of the house and then replaced it with something else. We came up with some small differences in floor levels that you would have to navigate, and some odd placements. While none of this really gets seen in the film, "It was nice that we all had a shared sense of what the history of the house was. I think on some level, in the story, [that makes it] feel more like a real place." Shelter-at-home verdict: A homey abode where you can immerse yourself in your passions, from coding to baking sourdough bread to tackling DIY house projects. BIG HERO 6 WALT DISNEY ANIMATION STUDIOS ART DIRECTION: SCOTT WATANABE Not only is the family home in Big Hero 6 a reflection of the movie's fictional San Fransokyo, a portmanteau of San Francisco and Tokyo, it is also a deliberate reflection of its inhabitants. For example, when the character of Aunt Cass—guardian of teenage Hiro and his older brother Tadashi—was developed, Art Director Scott Watanabe says, "an idea formed that she could be a kind of boho/hippie, and [a] setting in the Haight-Ashbury district seemed a no-brainer. So [the house] became a mash-up of San Francisco Victorian architecture mixed with a [ground floor] café from the Meiji/Sho – wa periods of Japan." In addition, Watanabe says, "I found that sometimes there was beauty and charm in simple mundane imperfections, such as an inconveniently placed structural beam in the café or cramped living spaces for Hiro and Tadashi. Something to keep it specific to the architecture while filling the spaces with the embodiment of the characters that lived there." Hiro's room, for example,