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