Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
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WINTER 2024 37 D E PA R T M E N T NO GOING BACK SPELLBOUND Skydance Animation Most animated teenage princesses want to break free from their old lives and adventure through a new world. But in Spellbound, all Princess Ellian wants is to get back to normal. She's not rebelling against her parents, she's trying to save them—they're monsters, and she desperately needs them to be human again. While this emotional core stayed consistent throughout most of the film's three years of production, the challenge was building the story around it. "You can be 100 percent sure that something will work, and then it doesn't," says Brian Pimental, Head of Story. Spellbound relied heavily on a brain trust of workers across all departments, as well as writers and heads of story from other projects at Skybound for feedback. They'd hand out surveys after in-house screenings and look for trends. Pace was a key factor. Sometimes Pimental didn't even need the surveys. He could just watch the audience and feel the points at which they started to get restless. Often, that meant cutting sequences and shifting storylines. But it also allowed for the discovery of new characters and ideas. For example, the oracles started as one character, and split into two later on—a decision that gave the artists the chance to do a fresh spin on an old married couple and play with comedic yin and yang. A hilarious body swap storyline (that leads to one of the funniest songs in the film) only came about after the second act was mostly constructed and they realized it needed more silliness. "It was fun to be so free to experiment," says Sasha Shotzco-Harris, a Story Artist on the film. A big priority was making sure the film maintained its comedic tone. In early cuts, it was clear from the beginning why the parents turned into monsters. But holding the reveal until the end meant that the audience could get to know the parents as monsters first and slowly see their humanity along the way. As monsters, the parents are bumbling, destructive, and impulsive— great for physical gags. When constructing their movements, Pimental compared the father to a dog and the mother to a cat. The father was always sloppy and goofy in his movements, while the mother was quick and likely to climb up the curtains. The monster parents' physicality was a subject of debate and change throughout the film's production. Sometimes they were ferocious, genuinely scary. In other cuts, they were playthings: silly creatures who could no longer function as parents, but still posed no real threat to anyone. Walking that line came down to having Ellian as a figure who could always calm them down. They may be monsters, but they never harm her. Ellian herself was another character who required careful work to keep the tone comedic and light. "Everyone likes to have a plucky, chipper female heroine, but this was also a character that was experiencing an ever-deepening well of hurt, anger, and frustration," says Shotzco-Harris. She wound up drawing on her own mannerisms to convey Ellian's attempts to bury her feelings and maintain her spirited optimism. When the filmmakers realized they needed to show more of Ellian's world outside her family, they added a sequence at the beginning of the film of Ellian riding her griffin with her friends. Doing this then made it necessary to revise other scenes. For example, for the song "The Way It Was Before," Ellian's hope for breaking the spell on her parents has been dashed, and she yearns for the time before they turned into monsters. Now that griffin riding had become part of her character, that was threaded into this sequence where she remembers the life she wants back. "A big thing I learned from this process was: sometimes you never know until you try," says Shotzco-Harris. She recalls working on the "Remembering" song sequence, where Ellian's monster parents regain the power of speech, and she tries to help them remember their lives before they were transformed into monsters. The director had asked Shotzo-Harris to keep the camera in constant rotation around the family for the entire song. In experimenting with the mechanics of the movement, she realized that the rotation caused the subjects to appear close together for one half of the circle, and far apart for another. She used this discovery as a storytelling device, to emphasize the closeness that Ellian longed for juxtaposed against the distance she was experiencing. Through trial and error to find the best version of Spellbound possible, Pimental and Shotzco-Harris said goodbye to some scenes and sequences they loved. Both learned lessons about kill- ing your darlings and being open to new ideas that they hope to take with them into future projects. "Storyboarding almost feels like a meditation in detachment at times!" says Shotzco-Harris. In the final moments of Spellbound (no spoilers, don't worry), Ellian finds that she can never truly go back to the way it was before, but the future she builds can be just as beautiful. During their own creative journey, the filmmakers learned this same transformative lesson. ABOVE: Princess Ellian riding her griffi n; OPPOSITE: (Top) A painter depicts Princess Ellian's parents before they became monsters; A moment of comic relief with the oracles and a "rideshare" frog literally receiving a fi ve-star rating. WINTER 2024 37 Images courtesy of Net ix.