Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505195
FALL 2023 19 WHEN IT COMES TO MAKING ANIMALS RELATABLE, ARTISTS AND ANIMATORS USE A CLEVER COMBO OF REAL-LIFE REFERENCES AND VISUAL TRICKS. Whether it's frog and toad best friends, a monkey with supernatural powers, or a family of loveable sharks, "creating anthropomorphic animal characters is something that humans have been doing for a long time," says Cheryl Johnson, Art Director on Nickelodeon's Baby Shark's Big Show! "We love to see ourselves in animals." Whitney Ralls, Executive Producer and Head Writer on Baby Shark's Big Show! and Script Writer for Baby Shark's Big Movie, agrees. She says that this has its roots in ancient mythology, the way we tend to take things that are "very animalistic, but looking at them through a human lens." As for how to accomplish that in animation, it's about finding the happy medium. With details like the ears, nose, whiskers, and feet, the more animal-like, the better. But the more expressive the face, mouth, and eyebrows can be, "the easier it's going to be to relate to those characters," Johnson says. Take a shark, for example. "It can be tricky, because you don't want to have too many big pointy, scary teeth," says Johnson. So her team made the sharks' teeth a bit chunkier and gave each shark its own uniquely-shaped teeth to differ- entiate it. These tweaks made for friend- lier creatures. For the Titmouse/Apple TV+ series Frog and Toad, based on author and illustrator Arnold Lobel's much-loved books about a friendship between two amphibians, Executive Producer and Head Writer Rob Hoegee notes that all of the characters in the show are animals and their names reflect exactly what they are. "Frog is a frog, Robin is a robin, so they're inherently animal," says Hoegee. "That being said, they talk. They wear clothes. They cook breakfast. Most of them live in houses." As well, Frog and Toad is largely about feelings and emotions. To convey this and humanize them, the animals do things that you don't see animals doing in the real world, such as smiling, laughing, and crying. In the book series, while Frog and Toad are already more like humans, the other animals "really felt just like critters," says Supervising Director Sarah Johnson. A conscious decision was made to humanize Frog and Toad even more, while keeping the other animals somewhat humanized and leaning more into their animal qual- ities. It was a fine balance because they didn't want to lose the idea that this is Frog and Toad's world. "While we would have Mouse run in and out on all four legs and do little mousy actions, I never wanted to see Frog and Toad hopping along the ground like animals, because that would feel inherently weird," says Johnson. That said, they did want to con- vey some of their more nuanced animal aspects, such as the tongue flicks added to Toad by Storyboard Artist Amy Mai. Baby Shark's Big Show! and Baby Shark's Big Movie images courtesy of Nickelodeon. FALL 2023 19 Mouth shapes are crucial to making animal characters feel relatable. For Frog (opposite) it was important to make sure the black space of his mouth didn't overwhelm his face, and for Baby Shark (above), reducing the number of his teeth and rounding his mouth gave him a friendlier look.