Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1378252
SUMMER 2021 33 D E PA R T M E N T The tools that artists now use to bring live-action/cartoon hybridization to life are not only more manageable than the old Mylar, they're also more plentiful since the days when rotoscope animation allowed Koko the Clown of the Out of the Inkwell shorts to interact with his creator Max Fleischer. Walt Disney started experimenting with live action and animation melds with the Alice Comedies of the 1920s, and as the years tumbled on, his toolbox expanded to include the sodium vapor process, in which filmmakers set up a white screen behind the actors and flooded it with sodium vapor light. The multi-head optical printer developed for Disney by Ub Iwerks (earning him an Oscar for Technical Achievement in 1959) allowed filmmakers to combine and layer special effects and matte paintings, making for a more seamless blend. As the technology improved, the hybrids kept on coming (see sidebar). And mixed scenes like Mary Poppins' "Jolly Holiday" outing or Eddie Valiant's chaotic visit to Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit turned out to be among the most memorable sequences of those beloved movies. 2D TAKEOVER Details of exactly what the blended worlds of Space Jam: A New Legacy will look like are being carefully guarded before the film's July 16 release, but Brandt notes that the new Jam offers one obvious and quite significant feature. "For a certain portion of the film, LeBron James will be a 2D [cartoon] character. Obviously, he's a new character in the 2D world, and he had to kind of be invented. We had to explore how he would move and fit into the Looney Tunes world and still be believable as LeBron. I think people had a lot of fun animating those scenes and these characters and all of the scenarios we placed them in." King James is not the only one who will be getting a visual metamorphosis. Watching the Looney Tunes characters morph from their hand-drawn roots to digitally enhanced CG through the course of the movie is something that artists and longtime fans of the characters should both appreciate. "It's nicely integrated into the story, and it all makes sense," says Brandt. "2D animation onscreen is becoming exciting again. It's kind of becoming a new look, and then we're also able to do the CG version of some of these characters. This will be the first time we see Bugs Bunny in that full CG." "We used tons of ink lines and shadows and tones and colors, celebrating all of these amazing characters and giving them extra spin for 2021," adds Devin Crane, the animation production designer on the new film before he was promoted to co-animation supervisor. "We found a way to stylize these [CG] 'toons in the computer which would help celebrate everything we love about them but make changes and improvements that would make them sing. We pushed textures and feathers and fur."