Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
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D E PA R T M E N T 41 KEYFRAME MONSTER CULTURE As Hollywood has learned in recent years, every project offers a chance to champion diverse voices and characters—even ones that are urban legends. For his third installment of the Hotel Transylvania franchise, director and co-writer Genndy Tartakovsky took his show on the road as new monsters joined a cast that includes Dracula and Frankenstein. The challenge was using creatures that reportedly go bump in the night around the globe but are also known quantities for the mainstream audience in the United States. Tartakovsky says his and co- writer Michael McCullers' original script called for El Cucuy, or the Hispanic boogeyman. After the joke fell flat at a test screening in Kansas City—not to mention that some of the audience felt the animators were making an obscure inside joke at their expense—he says they changed it to a different demon. Now one lucky cartoon chupacabra, or the rumored bloodsucker who feeds on livestock, gets treated to a whole goat in a cocktail glass. "I want to represent everybody from Russia to Mexico to France to whatever country," says Tartakovsky, who was born in Moscow. "Obviously, being an immigrant, I fully support all the different cultures." The joke is also noteworthy because it's quick—really just a line followed by a fast gag of the character grabbing the drink. Chris Reccardi, a story artist on the film, says this is very much on brand for Tartakovsky. He quotes Maya Angelou's infamous line: "People don't remember what you said or did, they remember how you made them feel." "Genndy has a very direct, economic directing style, but when he wants to make a point or joke, he knows how to milk it without wearing out the welcome," Reccardi says. "When we have day to night transitions, we'll say the sun's coming up so there's a sunrise. That gives me another trick to have a bright warm sky, but it's not day because we can't have day because it's vampires," says Wills. "We just try to be as bright and as colorful as we can. It's super colorful, but I feel like I have no colors left in the spectrum." Visual development artist Lizzie Nichols adds that "we had this beautiful cool moonlight as our ambient light, and added warm local lighting to the characters as needed." Her background is in painting—she was hired as a painter before switching to the environmental design team—and she says she always includes "places in my designs for light sources" such as hanging lamps or candles. She says she then tries to "create shapes where the ambient light can fall on surfaces and interact with the space in an interesting way." "Of course, you have to think about where the characters will perform, and how light will fall on the characters as they sit or move within the space," she says, adding that working in CG allows them to place the light wherever they like. "But giving the light at least some SPRING/SUMMER 2018 41 >> >> Drawing by Genndy Tartakovsky Artwork by Scott Wills