Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1399900
But if you ask Gutiérrez, who is also the director and executive producer, if there's ever such a thing as too much, he'll reply: "Everybody who keeps saying less is more—I say, no! More is more!" This is why an epic, nine-chapter, four- and-a-half hour, animated fantasy "event" perfectly suits the idea that had been swirling around in his brain for years. Back when he was a kid, Gutiérrez asked his father: Why are we both named Jorge? "My dad is quite the character," he says. "He took me and showed me an art book with a painting, St. George Kills the Dragon. And he goes, George is Jorge, and Jorges kill dragons. You are going to kill dragons. I was like, what?!" As Gutiérrez grew up, he fell in love with The Lord of the Rings, ancient mythology, and fantasies about witches and warriors fighting dragons. "I would read those books and watch those cartoons and see those movies," he says, "and I kept thinking, man, if that camera would just go south, I bet there'd be people like us." He was right, and as he learned more about the mythologies of Mexico, Latin America, and South America, he was fascinated to realize that a god that had one name under the Mayans might be the same god, but with a different name, under the Aztecs. "Just like Roman and Greek mythology. You start seeing overlaps. You start going, oh, this is like greatest hits." His love for a mixed-tape version of storytelling also comes from going to 30 KEYFRAME Gutiérrez enjoys pushing characters—like King Teca—into exaggerated forms, but "you've gotta think about all the people who are going to be animating it," says Equihua. "It's a great sculpture, but how's it going to work? It's a lot of back and forth. A lot of teamwork." school in the U.S. when he was young. Every weekday he would walk back and forth across the border from his home in Tijuana, passing vendors whose stalls were filled with a mélange of wares. "Aztec sculptures next to Darth Vader," he says. "Then Marylin Monroe sitting with Pancho Villa. So seeing all of those things together, that was a huge influence on me. It made having Mickey Mouse next to a Mayan god be normal. We were used to seeing [that]. It was our culture. The mix of cultures." As the idea for Maya and the Three grew, Gutiérrez's obsessions with pop culture and mythology united with his passion for the Mayans, Incans, and Aztecs, as well as modern-day Caribbean culture. But as intrigued as he was by all of this, he didn't want to do a straight history. "Fantasy is definitely the foundation," says Production Designer Paul Sullivan. "The history was for the sake of being informed. You've gotta know the rules before you break the rules kind of idea. From my perspective … I wanted to make sure I knew a lot about each of these cultures so the decisions we were making in design were intentional departures that would be based on the story." He also describes his deep dive into historical research as a North Star that helped him use history when it did ser ve the story. One such example was learning that " the Mayans are credited by some scholars with the discovery the Golden Ratio for proportions. They were mathematicians, they were very intelligent, so we used that idea of shape proportion balance. We put it in the door ways. We put it in the tree combinations. We put it in the bricks and some of the design elements. [It's] an artistic principle that a lot of people follow." F E AT U R E