Car chases are the backbone of any great action movie. There’s an inherent tension. Will the characters get where they’re going, or will they be stopped just short of their destination? And if they don’t get there, what happens then? After more than a century of moviemaking, one might think there are no new ways to turn a wheel, but animation filmmakers are still creating exciting, suspenseful chase sequences that keep audiences perched on the edge of their seats.
First, though, you need the car.
In DreamWorks’ new heist film, The Bad Guys 2, each major vehicle is a narrative device as much as it is a prop. In the opening flashback sequence, Mr. Wolf and his criminal crew steal a sleek, shiny muscle car, reminding the audience of how successful they were in their criminal heyday. Then, in the present, reformed and trying to walk the straight and narrow, they drive Betty the Beater, a busted-up hatchback, making it clear how far they’ve fallen.
In designing the various cars, and especially Mr. Wolf’s little junker, “the real challenge for us was how vastly different our characters are in terms of morphologies and size,” says Director Pierre Perifel. A well-designed animated car needs to have room on the inside to fit all of its passengers without scaling down the models—audiences tend to notice if a character that was previously twice another’s size suddenly shrinks to fit comfortably into the middle seat. But Perifel realized they could use the characters’ size discrepancies to push the comedic and narrative weight of the car, squeezing Mr. Shark into the backseat and perching Ms. Tarantula on her own mini seat. The Bad Guys don’t fit into their new life, literally. It’s no surprise that they’ll do anything to change their circumstances, not to mention find a new car.
But a great car design is more than just a story engine. It can tell the audience about a character and the world they’re living in. Ronnie Senteno, a Vehicle and Prop Designer on Batman: Caped Crusader, goes through a series of questions every time he designs a car. Who’s going to drive it? How much money do they have? What purpose will the car serve the character? Other questions deal with worldbuilding. When is the project set? Who designed and manufactured the car?
Thinking like this comes naturally to Senteno, since he started out studying Transportation Design at ArtCenter College of Design. The work left him unsatisfied, though. He’d gone into vehicle design because he loved cars and was fascinated by how designs and tastes change from decade to decade, but he found the industry wasn’t a place to pursue his passion.
TAG Vice President and Art Director Roger Oda, who worked on Motorcity as a Background Designer and later designed vehicles as a Vis-Dev Artist on She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, has met many animation artists with transportation design backgrounds. “But early in their careers they might have gotten an internship and realized how corporate it is,” he says. “Car design is about the product, and there are lots of restrictions, including those based on economics, so you’re going to end up designing a cup holder. Or if you’re lucky, you’ll design a rear-view mirror. In animation you get to design the whole thing. And you get to design really crazy things.”
This was the case for Senteno. When he switched to animation, he could finally use all the knowledge and research he’d acquired over the years. “Back at ArtCenter we had to think about who the client is,” he says. So, designing Eel O’Brian’s car for Caped Crusader, he asked himself questions like what would a sporty, single guy drive in the 1930s? “Business coupes were a really popular body style with single dudes,” he says, choosing a look that fit not only the character but the world of the show.
Race to the Finish
Beyond the design, the condition of a car can also say a lot about a character. Mr. Wolf’s beater in The Bad Guys 2 may be in terrible shape, but he keeps it clean on the inside because it’s a point of pride for him. From the smiley face Mr. Piranha draws on the back window to the bungee cord they use to tie their stuff down, “there’s a story in every little detail,” says the film’s Co-Director JP Sans.
[A car] needs to [be able to] turn sharp corners and run along a road that’s uneven.—Matt Baer
But car designers need to know more than the character’s relationship to the car. They also have to know physics and engineering. A well-designed car has to function at every step of the animation pipeline, which essentially means it has to move like a real car. “It needs to [be able to] turn sharp corners and run along a road that’s uneven,” explains VFX Supervisor Matt Baer. In other words, the car needs to be designed with high suspension and wheels that can turn without hitting the body of the car. Plus, he says the car needs enough volume on the outside to support camera rigging—there’s a computerized, not-quite-real feeling that comes when the camera is just floating outside the car and not mounted to the car’s frame. But these challenges don’t need to be restrictive. “You can be so unique within constraints,” says Senteno.
Beyond car design, setting is used to create scale, tone, and feel—in suspenseful car races, as well as car chases. Even though Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph and Ralph Breaks the Internet are in the same franchise, the video game car races in the two movies couldn’t be more different. For Sugar Rush, the candy-themed racing game in Wreck-It Ralph, Lead Designer Lorelay Bove wanted it to be appealing. Using warm pinks, chocolate browns, and soft creams, she took inspiration from Antoni Gaudi for the adorable, fantastical designs. But the look doesn’t detract from the tension of the sequence. In fact, it was in line with the twist: certain characters seemed sweet on the surface but hid danger underneath. “I loved the idea of contrasting cuteness with the danger of the race,” she says.
Meanwhile, in Ralph Breaks the Internet’s Slaughter Race—which contains a car chase—the design team crafted a gritty, urban environment filled with destruction and detritus to avoid on the road. The danger and suspense come directly from the obstacles and the lengths the characters go to avoid them. The cars are designed not for visual gags but to up the stakes of what maneuvers the characters can and can’t pull off. For tension between sweet Vanellope and tough-as-nails Shank, Vanellope’s car is a mid-engine and Shank’s is a front-engine. This means their cars bear weight differently and thus are limited to certain stunts.
The film’s Head of Cinematography and Layout, Nathan Warner, knew that tension in Slaughter Race would come from realism—the closer to life the driving looked, the more real the danger would feel. Stunt driver Jeremy Fry was brought onto the project, and cars’ movements were inspired by his actual driving. The animators even went to a racetrack and learned how to drift so they’d know exactly how the characters would move their hands when they rounded a tight corner. Having also used Fry as a consultant on the original The Bad Guys, the second movie in that franchise also sought to keep things grounded. “Sometimes with animation, it might be so detached from reality, audiences watch from the outside instead of feeling like they’re in it,” says Sans.
In the script for Ralph Breaks the Internet, only one moment—looping around a Circus Liquor store—was boarded and approved for the entire Slaughter Race sequence. For the rest of the route, Warner mapped it out in 2D first, then collaborated with Layout Artists to build out the initial rough track in 3D. “Like Hot Wheels on a track,” he says. Layout Artists and Animators worked in tandem to figure out exactly where a car would go and what the cameras would see, and they built the set around that.
As for filming, every car had seven cameras attached that were running at all times. To make the cars look faster, they used long lenses, added props in the foreground of shots, and changed shutter speeds to create blur. They wound up with 115 minutes of footage for just a three-minute sequence.
The Bad Guys 2 also used strategic camera placement to up the stakes, mounting cameras at low angles just off the sides of the car to make motion feel even faster. They found that the car needed to move at consistent speeds through each shot. If the car moves too fast, it looks ridiculous zooming past the sets. If it goes too slow, the scene isn’t exciting enough. The Character Animators and Pre-Vis Artists used a speedometer to set the speed of the car as it entered and exited each frame. “We’d always find that the MPH should be around 80-120,” says Baer.
Rules of the Road
In the first The Bad Guys, the effects department used a novel mix of 3D procedural and 2D illustration workflows to create natural phenomena that looked as if they were created by hand. Procedural techniques use a computer to simulate visual effects—for example, the computer can generate a dust cloud that kicks up after a car accelerates by using the principles of physics to determine where each particle of dust would float. The team then tweaked these effects to give them a painterly quality. For example, they rendered the dust to make it look like an artist would lightly dust by hand, using small, dashed lines to emphasize motion and create a blurring effect. In The Bad Guys 2, Baer and the effects team wanted to take this a step further, developing more techniques that allowed them to integrate hand-drawn effects across the entire film. To do this, the 2D and 3D effects were sculpted frame by frame, creating an artistic, bespoke look.
This artistry elevates the tension, especially in the opening scene where Baer and Art Director Floriane Marchix each used their own specialties to bring a hectic Cairo market to life. Baer focused on crowds, making sure the extras were reacting properly to the chaotic chase. “[And] we knew the market sequence would be insane so we added tons of props,” says Marchix, explaining that they wanted the streets to feel busy and precarious. “In terms of assets per shot, it was one of the heaviest we ever did at the studio,” she says.
While at a glance, car chases may seem as simple as getting from plot point A to plot point B (with maybe a few explosions along the way), the teams behind animation’s best sequences continue to find ways to make them the highlight of any film.
The Bad Guys 2 images courtesy of DreamWorks Animation. Batman: Caped Crusader images courtesy of © 2024 Warner Bros. Animation. Wreck-It Ralph, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and 101 Dalmatians images courtesy of Disney.
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