Captain Marvel VFX Supervisor on Turning a Cat into a Flerken

In the lead up to Captain Marvel, fans were left wondering whether the production would be treating Goose like it’s comic book counterpart. Even though the alien had a new name in the film, they kept the character entirely comic-accurate, even ripping one scene straight from the comics. Part cat, part Flerken, Goose’s visual effects were some of the trickiest to do, even in the midst of larger-than-life space battles between Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) and the Kree Starforce led by Yon-Rogg (Jude Law).

ComicBook.com recently spoke with Christopher Townsend, the visual effects supervisor on Captain Marvel — and he broke down for us exactly what it took to craft the fan-favorite Flerken.

“The tentacles and the actual look of the character had not been established for a long time, and it ended up with some poster art that we had and some comic book art that we had,” Townsend says. “We actually had some of it up on our walls, and said ‘Actually, that looks pretty cool! Why don’t we make it look kind of sort of like that, like it’s being depicted in these comic books rather than trying to come up with something different?’”

Townsend tells us that whenever he works on a Marvel project, he and his team try to pay homage to the comics whenever they can, at least when it makes sense within the movie. To craft Goose’s alien character, he worked with the team at Industrial Light & Magic to come up with the perfect look. In fact, Townsend says his team drew most of their inspiration from how the aliens interacted in Men in Black while keeping true to the wall art.

“In this case,” says Townsend. “We liked the tentacles look and then we tasked ILM with creating multiple pieces of artwork to try and come up with some ideas of, ‘What do the tentacles look like? Are they silvery? Are they metallic? Are they totally organic? Do they look like octopus tentacles or squid tentacles? Should they look like larvae or snakes?’ and they came up with a whole bunch of different looks and some with more or less tentacles.”

As with everything involved in the production of a big-budget blockbuster, the team had all sorts of initial looks to choose from in relation to how the character’s alien parts looked and worked. Coincidentally enough, they settled on the look that ended up being most comic-accurate.

Captain Marvel is now in theaters and will soon be available digitally (May 28th) or on home media release (June 11th).

What was your favorite part in Captain Marvel? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or by hitting me (@AdamBarnhardt) on Twitter to talk all things MCU!

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