Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1358125
a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 1 c g w 1 1 of the crowd animation department. In Raya, it's the big things, and little things, that can make a significant difference. Animators worked with choreographers and experts in the Trust to accurately portray movement such as dances. They also learned how to remove shoes properly be- fore entering a sacred location, which they passed on to the CG characters. Such atten- tion to detail can be found throughout the film. "I think people who have some exper- tise in these areas will recognize the moves, stances, and postures," says Odermatt. In one of the more impressive exam- ples of authentic animation, there is an intense and brutal face-off between Raya and Namaari that is based on a Philippine martial arts fighting style called Muay Thai kickboxing. Providing the animators with guidance and reference was Qui Nguyen, one of Raya's writers, who hails from South- east Asia and just happens to have been a fight choreographer at one time. "I wanted to make sure that our martial arts were correct. So oen when you see a big action movie that is depicted with people who look like me and [co-story writer Adele Lim], the martial arts can be just any combination of anything, even made-up moves," says Nguyen. "But for this, it was very important the fighting styles that Namaari, Benja, and Raya used were ground- ed in real-world physics and were based and rooted in Southeast Asian martial arts – specifically, pencak silat, Arnis, and Muay Thai. Of course, this being animation, we could have had the characters do fantasti- cal moves, but if we did, then suddenly the dragon would not have been such a magical element in the film. So, as a story element, it was important that we separate the actions of the two and ground this human fighting motion in reality." Sisu, meanwhile, is a changeling, requiring two different rigs: one for her as a dragon and one for her as a human. She has a unique look for a dragon, with a long, flowing mane of blue hair with pur- ple streaks, and more of a furred body than a scaly one, with overall elements of water in her design. She has a long, serpentine body, which presented a rigging challenge. "We hadn't really done a character that was quite like that, where the spine was going to be so long that it would need to be potentially inverted if she was walking on hind legs or flying, where her kinematics Animators used Disney's proprietary Toxic to simulate and groom the characters' hair. The animation for the fight between Raya and Namaari is based on reality.