Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1399900
33 KEYFRAME You gotta go out there, and you gotta go find yourself. In order for you to live and for you to learn you gotta make mistakes. And she does make a lot of mistakes. She's not the perfect princess. She stumbles a lot." Maya is a conflicted character, and this is deliberately reflected in her design, beginning with her partial buzz cut and lopsided half-bob, showing that she is torn between being a princess and being a warrior. It's also represented in the Eagle Claw club passed down from her father, a weapon that weighs a little too much for her, just like her responsibility to become a queen. These are the kind of thoughtful details that help capture each character's story, and as with everything in Maya, the choices are deliberate. For the creation of Maya's mother, the Queen of Teca, "we wanted to make [her hairdo] look regal,' Equihua says, "and I always thought that antlers look like crowns. I thought, wouldn't it be beautiful if she was wearing a crown of her own hair that almost resembled antlers, tied up with different colored ribbons?" The ribbons were inspired by Equihua's family heritage in the Mexican state of Michoacán where the indigenous women perform a dance wearing long braids intertwined with brightly colored ribbons. This, combined with the antlers, is an example of Equihua leaning into the story's magic, which meant, as far as she was concerned, " the sky's the limit." Breaking Barriers One of the biggest challenges was uniting the intricately detailed characters with the epic-scale backgrounds. " We wanted the environments to feel rich and supportive of the characters, but not compete with [them]," says Sullivan. The production team sought ways to balance cultural inspirations with character designs so that "each of [Maya's five lands] is really representative of a particular character or a particular group of characters and a particular culture." To make these differentiations, the representation of different color palettes was considered early in the process, after assigning color to each character and world. Sullivan explains that the symbolism of the assigned color would influence when a character was more represented in a scene by that character's color palette becoming stronger. For example, when Maya came into contact with an antagonist, color proportions were used to reflect the dynamics of the relationships and which character was dominant. And in the Kingdom of Teca, where there is a large volcano behind the city—whenever the antagonist came into that world, the volcano changed the color of the sky. To help the artists understand this storytelling better, Head of Story and Co- Executive Producer Jeff Rango explains that there were table reads to give them "a sense of how [scenes] should be played." Then the artists could ask questions or toss out ideas. The opportunity to take part in the creative process impressed Sequence Director and Story Artist Rie Kooga, who bonded with Gutiérrez over their shared love of vintage anime. "Jorge gave us enough information of what he wanted to see, but after … he gave us lots of freedom. This [was my] first opportunity to work on stories and character development." FALL 2021 33 "We wanted the environments to feel rich and supportive of the char acters, but not compete with [them]" -Paul Sullivan