Narrator: "Pokémon Detective Pikachu" marks the first time
the anime characters have stepped onto the big screen
as photorealistic creatures, but creating these characters
for the real world without upsetting diehard fans
was no easy feat.
It required an army of animators,
over a year of design collaboration,
a meticulous study of animal biology,
and even enlisting the help of a famous mime.
♪ I wanna be the very best. ♪
Narrator: Animated Pokémon were first introduced
to the world in 1996, and for the 2019 live-action movie,
it took a lot of time and a large team
of people to get it right and make sure the fans
would approve of the updated look.
Pete Dionne: How can we add additional detailing without
ever breaking the spirit of the original character?
Narrator: That's Pete Dionne, VFX supervisor at MPC,
which worked on "Detective Pikachu,"
as well as other big films like "The Jungle Book,"
"The Lion King," and "Godzilla."
MPC Film had over 600 people working on the project
with the help of hundreds more from other VFX companies
like Framestore and Image Engine.
The VFX team spent an entire year designing the characters
before the filming even started,
working closely with The Pokémon Company in the process,
which had one main rule.
Pete: No matter what situation they're in,
they always have to be cute.
Narrator: This meant no creepy, gnarled teeth,
nasty fingernails, or skin blemishes,
although they pushed the limit with Lickitung
and his slobbery appendage.
About 60 Pokémon from the original series
were recreated for the film.
They started with the original 2D anime characters
and video game models as a base.
Pete: There's that one main Pikachu that we see
in all of the anime that we really recognize,
and that's the one that we chose to embrace.
Narrator: Next, they would find some real-world
animal equivalents or as close as they could get.
For Pikachu, for example, they looked at animals
like bush babies and lemurs.
Pete: We wanted to represent it as
a very confident quadruped animal.
Narrator: They would then take the skeletal structure
of these animals and tweak it to fit the character's shape.
In Pikachu's case, the skull needed to be enlarged
and the limbs needed to be elongated.
Once the structure was laid out,
they would then add layers of fat and muscle.
Pikachu: I'm trying to get in 100,000 steps this hour.
Narrator: And on top of all that, the fur.
They studied the fur patterns on animals like rabbits
to make it look more natural.
Pete: When we get really close to Pikachu,
you really see kind of all that detail.
Narrator: Here's an example of the various layers
of creature creation from another of MPC's past projects,
"The Jungle Book."
Next up, movement.
They started rigging the characters early on
in the design process.
Rigging is when you lay out the framework
for how a character will move, and for this,
they took their biology into consideration.
In cartoons, characters can squash and stretch,
but since these characters are based in reality,
they had to rely on real physics and specific proportions.
Pete: We grabbed clips of bulldog puppies frolicking
and playing with each other,
animate our Bulbasaur creature to match that.
Narrator: Mewtwo was modeled
to look like a muscular child,
but his movements were heavily influenced by cats.
The most difficult Pokémon to nail down?
Mr. Mime.
Pete: With Mr. Mime, we actually did the opposite
of what we did with all the other characters,
which was, how do we make this thing not look like a human?
Narrator: To accomplish this, they used recognizable,
synthetic materials to make up his form.
His shoulders are like the old red kickballs
everyone remembers from childhood,
the body and horns on his head are made
to resemble worn Nerf football foam,
and his skin is like silicone,
which absorbs most of the light.
Pete: I think it worked. I don't think anyone
thinks he's a human.
Man, he's still creepy though.
Narrator: And to model his movements,
they actually hired a real-life mime from New Zealand
named Trygve Wakenshaw.
Some of his scenes were rotoscoped
from his actual performances.
When it came to the battle scene
between Mewtwo and Pikachu, the animators made sure
to stick to canon as much as possible for their move sets,
each a recreation of the original moves
but with more realistic flair influenced by smoke,
plasma, and electricity.
Pete: The end result was something that felt
kind of photographically realistic, but at the same time,
when you kind of compare side by side with our references,
they take on a lot of the same qualities.
Narrator: Since Pikachu is the star of the film,
they spent a lot of work on his facial features.
They attached a camera to Ryan Reynolds' head
and captured 80 different expressions.
Next, they looked at the cartoon Pikachu's
range of emotions, which were very limited.
Pete: We took Ryan Reynolds' expressions,
we took Pikachu's expressions,
and then we created kind of our hybrid set.
Narrator: So once the team had
the characters nailed down,
they needed to start integrating them
into the real world and the filming process.
Typically with these types of productions,
they first create some puppets or stuffies,
which are used on set in place of the animated character.
They shoot several takes with the puppets
so the actors have something to work with
and so the animators can get a sense of important details
like lighting and reflections.
Pete: And often, those were the best takes,
and we would use those takes
and just paint the puppeteer out after.
Narrator: Afterwards, they would shoot clean takes
without the puppets.
For some secondary characters,
they just made texture balls with swatches of fur.
To get accurate reflections in the Pokémon's eyes,
they also took 360-degree images of the set
and mapped them back into the orbs, as you can see here.
Pete: And we could see exactly, you know,
in the glass eyes of our Pikachu puppet,
exactly what that environment reflected
into his eyes should look like.
Narrator: They had to make sure the real-world canvas
had the right look and feel to make the cartoonish Pokémon
seem as real as possible when integrated into it.
They shot the movie on 35-millimeter film
instead of digital to add a grittiness,
and it was filmed on location in Scotland and England
as much as possible "to ground the more surreal elements
in a lived-in reality." And because it's a detective movie,
Ryme City was given a noir feel,
cool and dark colors with plenty of shadows
and neon lights reflecting off wet streets.
Another crucial factor in blending the characters
with the real world is props.
The team used a mix of both digital and practical objects.
Pete: We were sticking props everywhere,
just for Pikachu to bump into.
Narrator: For example, in this scene,
when Pikachu's walking around the office,
there are real strings tied around the room,
but any strings he touches are actually digital,
as we see here.
Anytime you see him pick up a coffee cup,
those are digital, but when he bumps into something
like a chair, they would have a puppeteer move it
at the right moment.
For the parade scene at the end,
the team created real balloons
and were prepared to raise them in the streets of London,
but it was too windy, so they never got them off the ground.
While you still see these semi-inflated props
in a few shots, the rest are CGI.
Another challenging scene for the animators
that mixed real props and CGI was the Torterra forest.
Most of the first shots were filmed
in a real valley in Scotland to set the scene,
but they created massive rigs for the actors
to move around on, which were later combined with CG.
The result of all these techniques and attention to detail
kept the Pokémon true to their original form
while at the same time immersing them in a new,
more real world for fans of the franchise to enjoy.
Justice Smith: Seeing the characters realized
with fur and textures,
it's so cool. It's like a childhood dream come true.