“Transformation should come from the inside.” This quote from Daniel Lopez, one of Luca‘s character artists, became the driving force behind one of Pixar’s most impressive animation feats to-date. Luca is about a pair of young sea monsters who live off the coast of Italy and decide to spend their summer adventuring on the shore. See, when these sea monsters leave the water, they transform into people, and the film is absolutely filled with those transformations. Sometimes they happen quickly, and other times only certain parts of the characters’ bodies are affected. Still, each of these independent sequences is a sight to behold, and watching these young boys go back and forth between their different forms never becomes tiresome.
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With transformation at the center of this coming-of-age story, the animation of those physical transformations had to be executed perfectly. Not only to they need to captivate the audience, but they also need to match the unique style and tone of the film itself, which is set in a neorealistic version of the Italian Riviera. The character team went tossed around all sorts of ideas for how these transformations could work, but it was that idea from Lopez that influenced the winning direction.
“We looked at lots of imagery from the natural world, things like reptilian and fish scales. We looked at fur. We looked at wind and waves, lots more natural things,” Luca character supervisor Sajan Skaria explained during the film’s early press day. “We quickly concluded that the sea monster transformation shouldn’t be creepy. The look should be bold and graphic, to fit in with this title of the movie. And so, we looked at this [inaudible]. And this came from one of our artists, Daniel Lopez, who said, ‘Transformation should really come from the inside.’
“And that was really a breakthrough moment for us. And it made a lot of sense when you look at a movie. So, our shading art director, Jennifer Chang, put all of these ideas together from nature and created this quick loop, which looks a lot more organic and less mechanical, just to show how transformation should work.”
The result is a very natural progression in which the bodies of the characters turn in on themselves, allowing scales to make room for skin and vice-versa. The slower transformations almost feel like a wave of dominoes collapsing on one another, revealing a brand new image on their backs.
“It was really challenging to get a nice boundary between the human skin and the sea monster. But with the help of all the tools that we had created, we were able to make it work,” said character supervisor Beth Albright. “And, in the end, the transformation shots fit seamlessly into the style of the film. And they’re crucial to telling the story. And they’re a great example of how we were able to free up our artists to just express themselves and have fun, just like these kids having the best summer of their lives.”
Pixar has spent decades upon decades breaking new ground in the world of animation, and Luca continues that tradition proudly.
Luca arrives exclusively on Disney+ on June 18th.
