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14 cgw m ay . j u n e 2 0 1 6 bilitation center and aquarium loosely based on California's Monterey Bay Aquarium, and into a kelp forest nearby. At MLI, Dory meets the other three stars of this film: a beluga whale with faulty sonar skills named Bailey, a clumsy nearsighted whale shark named Destiny, and a seven-legged octopus named Hank. "I saw a beluga whale in Vancouver and couldn't keep my eyes off it," Stanton says. "The animator in me wanted to see what kind of character that species would be." Character Designer Jason Deamer created the carica- tured whale. "He's like a giant pork bun," De- amer says. "I looked at pork buns for reference, for the texture of his skin. It's so, with ripples." For Destiny, Deamer picked an even more unusual reference. "She was weirdly difficult to design," he says. "I pitched the idea of thinking of her as an oven mitt with big mouth shapes. But we painted her like the real thing." Bailey is gray. Destiny has evenly spaced dots on her tail, a more chaotic pattern on her middle section, with increasingly dense dots moving forward to her head. As for Hank, he was the most challenging of the three new characters for Deamer, the technical directors, and the an- imators. But, arguably, the most helpful to Dory. "We had to move Dory across the Marine Life Institute," Stan- ton says. "So one reason we thought of Hank was because he's so ambulatory, and octo- puses are known for being good escape artists." In one scene, for example, Hank grabs a ride on a visitor's back, camouflaged as a backpack. H A N K "Hank is my favorite character in the movie, and he was one of the hardest things we've done on a character level," Deamer says. "We wanted him to be a lovable, grumpy, old octopus. But what makes an octopus look old? We struggled so hard to make him appealing. These things are slimy and gross. They're super intelligent, but that sideways eye thing doesn't make you think of motherly love. And where do we put his mouth? We ended up tucking it under his tentacles." For Hank's color, red was the obvious choice. "Hank is red because we thought if an animal could change color, he'd choose or- angey red," Deamer says. "And, it contrasts with Dory's blue." But Hank also changes color. And patterns. And shape. He's a cat on a wall poster, a camou- flage backpack, even a potted plant. To create those textures and colors, the team wanted to mimic how these changes happen in the real world. "We wanted it to look natural and not like a cross-fade," says Jeremie Talbot, character supervisor. "Our artists wanted to do something similar in the computer to what happens on a cellular level on animals." Simply put, the artists ma- nipulate many circles, dots if you will, that create a texture with changing colors over Hank's body. "When we combined that with noise, we got a naturalis- tic effect," Talbot says. "Hank could match a background or a supplied painting." Finding a way to make that work took the team two years. Creating Hank's shiing shapes fell largely to the animators, but with new tools and sophisticated rigs making it possible. Even so, a shot of Hank sliding into an aquarium, for example, took six months for the animators to do. "That's how hard it was to animate this character," says Mike Stocker, one of two super- vising animators on the show. "We had two challenges. Getting all those suckers moving, and getting a rolling feeling for the tentacles. The muscle starts from the body and works to the tip, and that rolling feeling was something we wanted. Jeremy [Talbot] made a super compli- cated rig. We could use a 'grab cylinder' that I called the elbow. We had to lead with the elbow, not the end of the tentacle, to get an octopus feel." Another tool within Presto, Pixar's proprietary animation system, gave the animators a starting point. "We could draw a tentacle and snap the model to the drawing," Stocker says. "That got us 60 percent of the way. Then, we polished the pose." Talbot's character department BAILEY THE BELUGA WHALE HANK THE OCTOPUS