“Hell yeah,” was Simon Otto’s response when asked If he wanted to work on Flushed Away, the third film to bring together the talents of DreamWorks Animation in Burbank, Calif. and Aardman Animations in Bristol, England. A big Aardman fan, Otto had recently finished doing character designs for Over the Hedge and was one of the few supervising animators that weren’t yet attached to other DreamWorks projects. The serendipitous situation would afford him the opportunity to stretch his abilities and grow as an animator.
“For me, I think it was an enormous leap in experience because working at DreamWorks the styles are similar from one project to the next, and here you are on a project that almost completely approaches animation from a different angle,” he tells us. “That helps you to broaden your horizons and look at things slightly differently. It’s like a painter going from oils to acrylics. It’s the same principle, everything is still there, but you have to approach it differently. I hope that in the future I can keep doing that. I think It’s always good for artists in general to get out of their safe environment and try something new because ultimately you come out more accomplished.”
As a kid growing up In Switzerland, Otto would watch Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit shorts in the cinema and recalls being blown away. He went on to study animation at the world-renown CFT-Gobelins in Paris, France, before getting an internship with Walt Disney Feature Animation in Paris. Otto joined DreamWorks in 1997 to work on the studio’s very first animated feature, The Prince of Egypt, and stuck around to work on The Road to El Dorado and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. He was also supervising animator on the title character in Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.
Otto says one of the most interesting parts of his job as supervising animator is finding all the ingredients that go into the characters and the film as a whole. “Of course, I studied all the Aardman films, which I already knew but I watched them over and over again to understand the characteristics of the style,” he comments. “Then I try to find references like, for Rita, I looked at Tankgirl, Miss Congeniality and even the Spice Girls to find little inspirational ideas. I walk around the streets constantly sketching people. I think the more experience you have as an animator, the more of a library of ideas you put together, ideas that haven’t been used.”
An important tenet Otto likes to keep in mind is the notion that you can’t cheat an audience. “They know when a character is real or when it’s sort of an empty shell,” he says. “In one of the tests I did, Rita is chewing gum and she sticks it behind her ear and she starts scratching herself, kicks stuff away and walks toward the camera in nonchalant kind of way. By doing these kinds of development tests and trying to put these original Ideas into the movie, you inspire the directors and the storyboard artists to say, “That’s the character.”
Evoking the Aardman clay-animation style with CG proved challenging to Otto and his crew, who were instructed by director Sam Fell to give it a somewhat “clunky” look. “It’s not always quite super-smooth,” Otto notes. “At first we tried to animate Flushed Away on twos [(two frames at a time rather than one)]. We, of course, pretty much wanted to make it look like an Aardman movie because all the people who worked on it are huge Aardman fans, but then we had to ask, ‘Okay, where do we fight the computer unnecessarily? Do we try and achieve something that the media in which we’re working is not Ideal for?’ Basically, that resulted in a style that really is its own. What we tried to do in terms of the animation was do less in-betweening, hold the poses longer, have really strong poses and keep them on screen, make them visible. We made It less about the nice, fluid arcs and more about the storytelling poses. That varies between the different characters and I think that’s one of the advantages of this film. The main characters are a little more complex and more subtle, while the secondary characters are more simple and clunky and it adds to the humor.
Otto tells us he’s looking forward to a little R&R now that Flushed Away is finished and in theaters. After that, it’s on to one of several CG-animated features in the pipeline at DreamWorks. As far as career aspirations go, he says he’s content to keep animating but if a chance to direct came along, he wouldn’t exactly flush the idea. ‘That’s the essence of creating, isn’t it? Telling a story?’
Read more about the making of Flushed Away in the November issue of Animation Magazine and check out further observations from directors Sam Fell and David Bowers at www.animationmagazine.net/article.php?article_id=6099.
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