WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.429 --> 00:00:06.240 The previous episode covered an atrocious kid’s movie, so now let’s feature a good 00:00:06.240 --> 00:00:08.520 one: Ernest & Celestine. 00:00:08.520 --> 00:00:12.040 And let’s focus on how the movie’s art style is animated. 00:00:12.040 --> 00:00:17.360 I’m not going to talk about the story or the plot at all other than to say it’s fantastic, 00:00:17.360 --> 00:00:20.750 solid script writing for a young children’s movie. 00:00:20.750 --> 00:00:24.030 If you go to watch the movie, it is originally in French. 00:00:24.030 --> 00:00:29.070 I ended up watching it in French because the English voice acting doesn’t quite match 00:00:29.070 --> 00:00:31.120 the mouth movements perfectly. 00:00:31.120 --> 00:00:32.160 Take a look at the art. 00:00:32.160 --> 00:00:38.640 Ernest & Celestine the movie is like a prequel to the Ernest & Celestine series of children’s 00:00:38.640 --> 00:00:39.640 books. 00:00:39.640 --> 00:00:43.441 The animation style here mimics the watercolor illustrations common in kid’s books around, 00:00:43.441 --> 00:00:47.620 I wanna say, the late 1800’s to 1990. 00:00:47.620 --> 00:00:53.489 The characters in the movie are a little bit more… digital than, for example, The World 00:00:53.489 --> 00:00:55.240 of Peter Rabbit and Friends. 00:00:55.240 --> 00:01:01.239 I say that because the line style, although broken, is thick and bold, and the watercolors 00:01:01.239 --> 00:01:03.829 are lighter with more subtle texturing. 00:01:03.829 --> 00:01:08.150 But this does pay better homage to Gabrielle Vincent’s style of watercolor, which is 00:01:08.150 --> 00:01:10.530 known for being soft and fading. 00:01:10.530 --> 00:01:18.390 Funny note about the author Gabrielle Vincent, by the way: she DID NOT want her work adapted 00:01:18.390 --> 00:01:19.390 to TV. 00:01:19.390 --> 00:01:23.740 A few years after she died her publisher sold the rights for a TV series. 00:01:23.740 --> 00:01:29.030 The producer for this movie swooped in and insisted Ernest & Celestine become a film, 00:01:29.030 --> 00:01:30.670 not a TV series. 00:01:30.670 --> 00:01:35.180 Only a film gets the amount of time, money, and dedication put into it to create this 00:01:35.180 --> 00:01:37.040 kind of animation style. 00:01:37.040 --> 00:01:41.720 The backgrounds in the animation are real watercolors not made on a computer. 00:01:41.720 --> 00:01:46.720 There are a whole bunch of study, practice, and reference drawings that happen first. 00:01:46.720 --> 00:01:50.869 These get worked into a final layout of what the scene looks like. 00:01:50.869 --> 00:01:54.820 Then the background artists get a picture of that layout so they know what to draw. 00:01:54.820 --> 00:01:57.159 They do inking with a pen. 00:01:57.159 --> 00:01:59.280 Then they do watercolor separately. 00:01:59.280 --> 00:02:02.190 The inks and the watercolors are combined on the computer. 00:02:02.190 --> 00:02:07.870 This is the final handmade background. 00:02:07.870 --> 00:02:12.810 Foreground elements and characters are digital made in Flash. 00:02:12.810 --> 00:02:16.640 I’m amazed this is made in Flash. 00:02:16.640 --> 00:02:20.510 The only time you can really see it is up close, when there’s a line that got erased 00:02:20.510 --> 00:02:25.650 it’s neatly clipped on the end, and the older version of Flash they made the movie 00:02:25.650 --> 00:02:32.329 in has this thing where you draw a straight line and Flash screws it up and makes it wobbly. 00:02:32.329 --> 00:02:36.930 They left the wobbliness in. 00:02:36.930 --> 00:02:42.519 To make the animation, first the animators draw the line art. 00:02:42.519 --> 00:02:45.599 Then colorists come in and color everything. 00:02:45.599 --> 00:02:49.370 After that the flat colors need to look watercolor like the backgrounds. 00:02:49.370 --> 00:02:54.230 Watercolor is not something Flash can do, so the team had to hire people to invent a 00:02:54.230 --> 00:02:58.419 program that could take these flat colors and make them look like this. 00:02:58.419 --> 00:03:03.919 Overall, the real watercolor backgrounds and the loose, unconnected line art are what define 00:03:03.919 --> 00:03:04.919 the style. 00:03:04.919 --> 00:03:09.219 So if you can reproduce those two things and are a strong character animator, you could 00:03:09.219 --> 00:03:10.269 recreate the style. 00:03:10.269 --> 00:03:15.489 And in fact, the recent film “The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales” uses almost the exact 00:03:15.489 --> 00:03:16.489 same style. 00:03:16.489 --> 00:03:23.290 Though that’s not a surprise since it’s made by a lot of the same people. 00:03:23.290 --> 00:03:29.379 If you’d like to read more about the making of Ernest & Celestine, the director drew this 00:03:29.379 --> 00:03:34.819 highly amusing, very informative comic that takes you through the journey of the film’s 00:03:34.819 --> 00:03:35.819 creation. 00:03:35.819 --> 00:03:38.999 It covers every step of making an animated movie. 00:03:38.999 --> 00:03:43.000 I’ve linked it below. 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:48.229 In the last episode I asked for a bad movie you’ve seen and what you would change to 00:03:48.229 --> 00:03:49.229 fix it. 00:03:49.229 --> 00:03:51.790 Here are a couple highlights. 00:03:51.790 --> 00:03:53.739 Which movie did people pick on the most? 00:03:53.739 --> 00:03:55.239 The Emoji Movie. 00:03:55.239 --> 00:03:57.219 Is it really that bad? 00:03:57.219 --> 00:04:43.060 Maybe I should watch it.