Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505195
FALL 2023 23 straight on at the camera and speaking at all, because we were worried that it would just be a sea of black. It would be too dark because we're emulating the book where the mouth-fill is all black scribbles." Mouse's mouth was a challenge, as well—it's so small that they didn't give him an open mouth shape at all. "When he talks, it's just his muzzle moving," says Sarah Johnson. She believes this led to some really great body animation on Mouse because it forced the animators not to rely on the mouth shapes to get his expressions out. With the Monkey King's mouth, canines were a consideration, and the team debated how much to show because "immediately when you open somebody's mouth and show canines then there is an aggressive feel to it," says Bennicke. "But it was extremely helpful for the shots when the monkey is angry." Stacchi points out that it was especially complicated to animate the Dragon King with his long crocodile-like mouth. "The corner of the mouth has to travel so far for different mouth shapes—stretching the surface and the textures," he says. They had to determine how far back and forward the corner could go "without [the mouth] chattering around so much that it looks distracting." WINDOWS TO THE SOUL Cheryl Johnson pays close attention to an animal's eyes. The more closely the eyes of the sharks resemble human eyes, the more relatable they are. In practical terms, "you usually want to have eyes with a lot of white around them, like ours, and a really clear pupil," she says. "The minute you give an animal character a solid, dark eye, or a black dot eye, it's going to instantly feel more animal-like and be a little bit harder to relate to." Baby Shark's Big Show! Animation Director Crystal Stromer also emphasizes conveying emotion through eye movement. "A well-timed blink can just really hit home," she says. If a character is sad or surprised, changing up the timing of a blink alone will say so much about how a character is feeling. "That's what really telegraphs that these characters are alive." Along with more human eyes, they gave the sharks eyebrows to help with expres- sions, but in Frog and Toad, the characters don't have eyebrows at all. To add emo- tion, Sarah Johnson says they had to lean on the animation team to push what they did have. The team made use of the under eyelids coming up and upper eyelids com- ing down to get more expression. Sometimes, though, the element used to express emotion can take a surprising form. When writing for animal characters, Ralls says she likes to focus on something that's unique to that animal. In Baby Shark's Big Movie, for instance, they intro- duced a lantern shark named Lannie. Ralls explains that lantern sharks glow different colors. This led to the idea of the colors representing different human emotions. In a sense, Ralls says, they were anthro- pomorphizing the colors to represent the human emotions that make Lannie a lov- able, relatable character who is a bit all over the place because what she's feeling is obvi- ous to everyone. It also helps with the com- edy because Lannie is always putting her foot in her mouth (proverbially) by revealing her true feelings in her glowing colors. Another unconventional example is a sea urchin in Baby Shark's Big Show! He was particularly challenging because he's basically "a circle with some quills sticking out and like one eyeball," says Stromer. "If he gets excited, we'll shake his quills a little bit … or droop them to show that he's sad." Be it a raised eyebrow, a well-timed blink, or quivering quills, there are myr- iad techniques that can bring animal characters to life to make sure audiences forge an emotional connection. FALL 2023 23 Faced with unusual facial features, including a lack of eyebrows, the artists on Frog and Toad used the lower and upper eyelids to help convey emotion. "The minute you give an animal character a solid, dark eye … it's going to instantly feel more animal-like and be a little bit harder to relate to." — Cheryl Johnson