Three new animated films are showing up in theaters this spring—DreamWorks’ Dog Man, Warner Bros.’ The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, and Nickelodeon’s Plankton—and each one presented filmmakers with unique challenges. For Dog Man, it meant adapting Dav Pilkey’s quirky humor and naive illustration style from the books into a more complex CG feature. In The Day the Earth Blew Up, Looney Tunes’ timeless antics had to resonate with modern audiences while honoring Bob Clampett’s 1940s legacy and evoking a fresh style. Similarly, Plankton faced the task of spotlighting a supporting character from SpongeBob SquarePants in a new way that also felt familiar to audiences. The teams behind these films relied on new CG techniques, creative storytelling, and a respect for the source material to ensure these beloved characters leapt off the screen. Here, we talked to them to get insight into their creative journey.
What prompted you to pursue feature animation?
Dave Needham: I was doing TV, and I did a test for DreamWorks and storyboarded on Penguins of Madagascar about 12 or 13 years ago. I’ve pretty much worked in features ever since. I love both TV and features, but they’re slightly different beasts to make and work on. It’s always the special thing about movies that you get to tell a big story.
Ernie Gilbert: I’ve spent most of my career in television episodic animation. I happened to be art directing Kamp Koral at Nickelodeon, [and] when they needed help on the Plankton movie, I was in a good position. I started to split my time on Plankton and then eventually came over full time because I had a couple of years in the CG SpongeBob universe. I was in the right place at the right time.
Anthony Zierhut: I’ve been working in feature films, starting in live action, for close to 30 years. For me the long form is extremely exciting and especially in animation where you can be on the same project for two years, three years. Seeing it evolve from inception and script and some rough sketches to a final finished product is one of the most exciting things ever.
Cassandra Fanning: I’m going to be honest here and say I didn’t plan to pursue it. I actually wanted to do live-action stuff. I wanted to do effects, and ultimately in my pursuit of that, I found compositing and ended up in animation and found that I really enjoyed it. Throughout my time at DreamWorks I’ve experienced different departments, different areas of the pipeline and of the process, ultimately taking me to this Digital Supervisor role right now.
Christopher Zibach: My dad is in this line of work, a Production Designer at DreamWorks, too. [Watching] him freelance formed me in those early years to see art as this amazing career. He did Space Jam and stuff that—for me at a teenage level—I was just freaking out that this kind of work could be done. I wanted to pursue it because I had an amazing figure in my family doing it, too.
Alex Kirwan: I, too, have spent the majority of my career in TV production in various forms as a Designer, as an Art Director, and also a Supervising Producer. But I’ve always very much loved feature animation. In many of the projects I’ve worked on, I’ve tried to take a feature animation approach… to give a richer, more cinematic experience. I love in a movie how you can really make a meal out of each moment. So, this was a great joy to finally get to tell a long-form story.
Nick Cross: I mostly only worked in television, and I’ve done all different jobs, but in the last 10 years I’ve mainly been doing art directing. In the TV world, everything is very fast paced, schedules are very tight. It was nice when I got to come onto a feature, and I could actually take time and explore a style and figure out how it should flow throughout and have time to refine it.
“There’s so much heart and honesty in the Dog Man story that it felt like this is a humble service to be a part of. And [to] enjoy drawing in this naive, childlike version of myself… I can’t believe I get to do this for a living.” -Christopher Zibach, Art Director, Dog Man
“We were told that one of the motivations for Dav [Pilkey] to make the [Dog Man] books was to help kids learn how to read. … This story has a really wonderful message about family and friendship and overcoming odds … Being able to bring that to life was fun.” -Cassandra Fanning, Digital Supervisor, Dog Man
“There’s something about the original property of Dog Man that is so full of light and energy and excitement … Knowing that we were doing an honest and true adaptation of these books is great.” -Anthony Zierhut, Head of Story, Dog Man
How has feature animation evolved since you began working in it?
Dave: Anthony, you said you’ve been working in features for 30 years.
Anthony: Well, the first half of that was live action. And really, in terms of the job, in terms of what’s asked of me and what I deliver, it’s all storytelling. And that changes very, very little. It’s about solving problems with characters, about staging, about figuring out how the characters are behaving in the sequence. The main change has been, for me personally, more toward digital and less toward paper and pencil where it started. I’ve embraced a lot of the tech of storytelling. I love After Effects and Blender, and any program that you can use to help tell the story in an exciting way. But the basics of it, you can still do with a number two pencil and a stack of Post-Its.
Dave: I would agree with that. I think the process is always the same. It starts with Post-It notes and pencils because I like to [spend] an evening storyboarding for an hour or two when I’m not actually at work. Then I take those rough drawings, putting them through the process of Photoshop on a computer to make my storyboard. But I think that these are just tools. The change I’d say for me is I’ve worked at a few different studios… and the lovely thing about DreamWorks was [that] every department was somewhere on the campus. [Now], when I’ve been directing, it’s been with overseas studios, and that’s a different thing where you have to get to know people in [different time zones] and maybe different cultures.
Ernie: Something Dave just said. When you’re working with an overseas studio … the cultural differences. This doesn’t really get a lot of attention, and when it comes to telling a story, and especially a story with humor, that can be a bit of a stumbling block. You realize how sort of culturally specific our senses of humor can be when you’re trying to get someone else across the globe to execute [something] in the funniest way possible. It’s definitely a learning curve.
Cassandra: I’ve been at DreamWorks for 18 years now, [and] with new technologies, whether it’s the software advancements or rendering advancements… we went [through] a photo-real kind of timeframe where everything needed to look like a live-action film. Then we kind of changed, where everybody’s got a unique look, and you’re trying to differentiate yourself from your competitors. I feel like we’re in a 2.5D sort of range now.
“For me, the most exciting thing about this project is getting to work with these characters and getting to be a part of this long Looney Tunes legacy that goes back almost a hundred years.” -Alex Kirwan, Supervising Producer, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movies
“Getting to play specifically in the Bob Clampett world of Looney Tunes—in a world that was still figuring out animation and how to push things in a really weird way. That’s the kind of stuff I like … It was one of those rare moments in my career.” –Nick Cross, Art Director, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
What was the vision for the films you worked on?
Cassandra: Chris, you were such a huge part of coming up with the look of [Dog Man]. I’d love to hear how you were thinking through that.
Christopher: Thank you, Cassie. Yeah, we looked at Dog Man from the perspective of what are fans going to expect from this ultra-flat, very naive, very simplified, silly world that [author Dav] Pilkey draws. Taking this black comic world and trying to elevate it to the high-end handmade vision that our director was calling for, I found myself—with the art team—grasping at handmade media. That’s grade school media, that’s pastel, that’s watercolors. Anything that felt rushed and energetic and scribbly and colorful was really a touchstone for me.
Anthony: Compositionally, whenever we would storyboard something from the script, and it was referencing stuff directly from the book, a lot of the shot choices are Dav Pilkey shot choices. I can think of several examples of taking a first pass with a board artist on it and then going back to the stack of books, finding that sequence, and reboarding it exactly as Dave did it. I think the fans will love that because there’s a lot to recognize in terms of shots.
Alex: [The Day the Earth Blew Up] is unique because as an interpretation of a source material, everyone is familiar with what Looney Tunes looks like, and… it’s a specific era of Looney Tunes that we’re influenced by. We are trying to evoke Bob Clampett cartoons of the mid-1940s, which feel different than say a [later] Chuck Jones cartoon. Even though I have primarily worked in 2D hand-drawn animation, a lot of the animation I’ve worked in is very deliberately stylized. The challenge with a project like this is finding the people who love this stuff and still know how to do it. And just to set Nick up a little bit, while we do try to evoke that classic Looney Tunes stuff, we experiment quite a bit with style in our movie, as well.
Nick: Like what Alex was saying, we tried different styles within the movie, kind of in the same way that Looney Tunes used to do it. Not every Looney Tunes cartoon looked the same. In this movie there was a sense of inconsistency, which is really fun. We wanted [it] to look like a Clampett cartoon, so it was a faux-watercolor style, but also done in a cinematic way. Then there’s a flashback sequence that we tried very hard to make look like [painter] Thomas Hart Benton’s style, that warm Americana look. And there’s also super-cinematic sci-fi elements, which break out of the Looney Tunes universe into its own cartoony sci-fi sort of thing.
Dave: Where was it animated? Was it done in L.A. or all over the place?
Nick: It was done all over, [but] we actually animated a certain percentage of the film in-house in Burbank. To have that much animation being done with our colleagues right here in the same city was really great.
Dave: Plankton has a lot of tricks up its sleeve. My pitch for [its] flashbacks was basically the further we go back in time in Plankton stories, the further we go back in animation style. So when you see Plankton as a little boy, it’s rubber hose and black-and-white. And we’ve got a sequence where [the character] Karen imagines herself transforming, so we did that in ‘80s Transformers style … But the majority of the movie is CG. That’s why Ernie was so invaluable to us, because he’s been working in the CG SpongeBob world.
Ernie: Well, SpongeBob really takes advantage of the fact that it’s a series of 2D drawings, and the audiences expect such extreme poses and expressions and takes. It’s very foreign to a lot of CG artists to be able to create rigs that can push things that far. Trying to communicate what is needed and what the rigs need to be able to do without breaking is important. You end up creating a lot of special kind of added models, blend shapes, and added poses just for one gag. The idea is you want it to feel like SpongeBob, and you want it to feel familiar to the fans. It takes a lot of work and a lot of people to make that happen.
“I’ve been a fan of the original SpongeBob show for years, and it’s fun to work in that universe. I think [Plankton] is one of the best characters in the show, so it’s fun to see him get his day and be featured throughout the entire film.” -Ernie Gilbert, Art Director, Plankton: The Movie
“I love to learn stuff. The thing for me is that Plankton is a musical, and we’re working with Karyn Rachtman, who’s such a big name in music supervision. I really enjoyed learning more about the musical side of things.” -Dave Needham, Director, Plankton: The Movie
Were any new technologies or processes used during your productions?
Ernie: We were struggling to get some of the effects from the overseas studio to feel like we wanted them to feel—the cartoony style that fans are familiar with—and we ended up having someone in-house do a lot of those in After Effects, in a kind of semi-2D way, but integrated into the 3D scenes. That was a pivot where we had to think on our feet and figure out a quick and cheap solution toward the end.
Cassandra: A lot of our renderers nowadays want a photo-realistic look—that tree where you can see the detail of the leaf. What we were doing was kind of backing away from that, putting more of the strokes of the paint into the leaf and not as much detail. Using depths and lighting to push it back a little bit and make it feel more like the [Dog Man] books themselves. I know from my own personal experience [early in my career], we couldn’t wait to get a renderer that could do all these things that we [struggled] with for years. Now we’re trying to dumb down the renderer to not do as much. It’s an interesting balance to see how things change over time.
Alex: [For The Day the Earth Blew Up], there’s a lot of modern conventions that I think we wanted to avoid, like putting really soft shadows and highlights on the characters. When there was lighting, we wanted it to be very hard-edged, like an inked cel. There were a lot of things that when they weren’t feeling right, we had to get a little more old school, and we had animators animating on paper. Not all of the movie was animated that way, but a lot of the people who could really nail the look and feel were working in an incredibly traditional way.
Nick: A lot of how old animation was done, it was very analog, and now we live in the digital age. It’s hard to go back to that time and make things look that way. Everything tends to look polished, and so we are trying to make it look a little raw, kind of like you could see the artist’s hand and some of the painting. We spent a lot of time going over background paintings that would get sent back [to us]. … The invention was trying to, as much as possible, do an old pipeline.
Alex: It does seem like for any film to achieve a look that feels more specific, which I think all of us are trying to do, it really comes down to curating. You have to strip away a lot of what is possible to carve out your territory.
Dog Man images courtesy of DreamWorks Animation. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie images courtesy of Warner Bros. Animation. Plankton images courtesy of Netflix/Nickelodeon Movies.
