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This story originally ran on November 13, 2019.
It has been expanded and republished for our The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation package.
Animation has always been more effective than most art forms at convincing viewers of its own magic.
Early experimental works passed off thousands of hand-drawn stills asparty tricks.
Animation is very hard to do, says Cat Solen, the director behindShivering Truthson Adult Swim.
But you’re free to do things with animation that you couldnt do with any other media.
Its impossible in a way that feels like youre working within another dimension.
Not 2-D, not 3-D, not CG, not anything.
The main takeaway: The work might be boundary-breaking, but its definitely not magic.
Here are those creators on their hardest gigs in animation yet.
Have an animation story to share?
Let us know at stories@vulture.com.
And I went to films where people were in combat.
And even while theyre fighting, what are they fighting about?
Both sides of the equation were there in that moment.
Jenner was saying, Lets go on stealing electricity from the farmer.
Lets go on doing what were doing.
Take everything you’re free to as soon as you’re free to.
And then you have Justin saying With knowledge comes responsibility.
So the two were battling it out over a philosophy.
So, it was actually the most fun Ive ever had making a film.
The greatest challenge on the film was simply creating the look of Miless world.
We needed to simulate a new reality.
I wanted the characters to have linework defining their expressions.
I needed the audience to see that it wasnt just a trick.
Working with Danny and his team, we discovered so many techniques while experimenting on other things.
What made finding this story so difficult is the fact that its the fourth film.
You have a character who has had a life-changing experience three times.
We were also working with a set of characters and a world that is across generations.
Can we break some rules that we established in previous films?
[Her] combined footage from the first three movies was about six minutes.
But you could tell she was a pivotal character to Woody.
We found embracing that, we needed to change her and make her the driving force of changing him.
The films we make are for everyone and that is an immense challenge.
Its the kind of idea thats easy to write, but hard to visualize.
It ended up sort of being a combination of dressage and ballet movements, including hurdle jumps.
In general, realistic dancing is always a challenge for me.
I always need to look at reference.
I referenced some YouTube videos and broke down the key poses, and it started to make sense.
And you just had to poke the wire into the set to get them to stand up.
And there were 13 of them all running around for one shot.
I lost my mind for about a month straight every day trying to animate that thing …
It took me six months to shoot the entire Whack Bat sequence.
It was a shot where it was scripted as an establishing shot a beautiful beach scene.
That whole season was set on an island.
Archer had just crashed a plane into the island.
That was from the script.
We had no idea how we were going to do it.
It was just such a huge ask.
How to do it in the time that we have?
We realized that the shot is asking for three things.
The beautiful island, the reveal of the plane, and Archer and Pam looking at it.
Its a camera-tracking shot rather than a dolly zoom and pan all at the same time.
We knew how to do far-off ocean, you just need to see the smaller ripples.
The hard part is you see it lapping on the coast.
We didnt know any way to do it.
We ended up using a lot of effects in After Effect to make it look right.
I would have loved to get that if we had the time.
The stuff in the far background is in 2-D layers.
Heres a tree, heres a rock, heres the things.
We just put them back in space.
That worked with the camera move we put in.
It would look fake and wrong.
InArcher,we used a lot of 3-D assets, but theyre for things like vehicle animation.
They had to match our camera move in 3-D. And they made a cartoon about him for some reason.
You know, squash and stretch, and lip sync, and stuff.
But I was assigned a speedboat racing through a harbor.
An animators best friend is YouTube, really.
Meanwhile, they had no idea that YouTube is our number-one source for animation inspiration, in many ways.
So basically, I took like an hour and I animated this water.
I was the last one in the building before I was satisfied and turned it in.
And then it was approved and I just had more shots.
OnBoJackandTuca & Bertie,we just have a guy whos our go-to effects guy.
He just hits our effects, basically.
For theTuca & Bertieepisode where they go to the Jelly Lakes, he was the jelly guy.
And he pretty much animated all the jelly cycles, pretty much all episode.
But on [Kid Notorious], it was just kind of like whatever scenes came down.
And so I was getting what everybody else didnt want to do.
When I animate a character having a strong emotion I tend to get into that characters mind-set.
Quality control took forever, too.
I gotta hand it toRick and Mortyfor challenging me in every aspect of animation.
All of my best shots are from this show.
I started working on Light Fury forHow to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.
Shes the female counterpart of Toothless.
She is so seemingly simple but she is so challenging.
You would think we could take Toothless and make him a white dragon.
But the director wanted more feminine qualities.
Her scales are even more curvaceous and not linear and no hard edges.
She also has an iridescent pattern to her.
If you look at Toothless youll see almost a leopard pattern if the light is hitting his scales.
She has the same thing but it was iridescent.
How much do we reveal that and how much do we hide that?
I went on it for months just trying to get the balance right.
So we did imply some eyelashes and eyeliner to accentuate some femininity.
It seemed simple, but it is a balance of not too much and not too little.
That was one of the hardest things.
I worked just on that for two months.
It takes months, but that is one of the challenges.
When you draw a 2-D version in Photoshop, it looks great as a still.
It was almost four years of just punishing, punishing animation.
I still cant believe it took that long.
The camera work was a nightmare too.
And then so many things went wrong in postproduction.
Some people now tell me that its their favorite.
Above is a short time-lapse video from animatingThe Meaning of Life,which was shot between 2001 and 2004.
The first one of those was when I first started in animation.
At that point,everythingwas the most difficult thing.
I guess I was working on theAladdinTV series.
Sometimes I would work until 11, 12 at night to get those drawings done.
Disney in the 90s in Australia felt a lot more like the Wild West.
When the end of the six months came around, I had made quota, I got the job.
So that was the hardest thing at that time.
I had never done that before.
Eventually, I got something I wasnt really happy with.
But it was on a production so I had a certain amount of time to do it.
But later on, on the same show [Dogstar], I got another scene with some steam.
So I got another shot at it.
This was a sci-fi show, so there was lots of steam coming out of pipes, apparently.
And I got a lot of opportunities to get it better.
So eventually I got it to a point where I was really happy with it.
From then on, that studio always tried to work the steam animation that I did into every project.
Weve made leaps and strides over the seasons about getting faster.
It was four times the speed of normal animation.
The character design process is very specific.
They did a great job of research on the 20 candidates.
We had people studying Marianne Williamsons mouth movements to check that they were accurate as possible.
That was all the prep work we could do before the debates.
Then we were ready to react to what happened the night of.
We had artists checking Twitter before the debate for the released pictures.
MSNBC released where they would stand the day before so we could lay things out.
The thing we had to react to was what they were wearing.
That was such a speed rush to get that done.
We accidentally kept Andrew Yang with a tie on.
That is the one thing we kick ourselves about.
One of the other things we pride ourselves on is to be smart about how we prepare for topicality.
We had enough evergreen material that we could get a head start.
Steve Conner, animation director: The first night we knew we were delivering after the second night.
We wrote that night, booked voice talent in the morning, and animated that night Thursday.
It had to be a fast turnaround we had a 6 a.m. hard deadline to deliver the show.
That was the peak of all of it.
That is when it seemed like everything was going.
That was probably the most fun.
That allows us, depending on the character, to contribute lines way up until the last minute.
Conner: Our animation is drawn on a computer.
Any big action is still done by hand, traditionally, more or less, which is time-consuming.
Our dialogue-based stuff, we can crank that out at a rapid clip.
Thankfully no one started throwing punches.
Luecke:We have a unique process where its traditional hand-drawn and cutting-edge digital animation.
Every lip shape is drawn for that character, every eyebrow shape is specific.
They supply the acting that does all of these hand-drawn features.
It is made for actual live animation, which we picked up and started doing atTheLateShowabout six months in.
Those were successful enough and we wanted to expand that, and that is how the program came together.
Well absolutely do it again.
Unfortunately were crazy and it was exciting enough and the reaction was great.
It was the most challenging but the most fun Ive had on a project.
One of the challenging sequences was a canyon chase sequence.
At that time, I was a lead lighter.
They have color cues and rough painting that show the pallet of what you are going to do.
I had to set it up for a team of lighters.
How do you move the lights around but make it look like theres continuity?
Part of it was analyzing the geometry of the canyon itself and how do we break it up.
It ended up being successful.
We want to mimic live-action film.
If a character is whipping by, they spread throughout the image, so its more pixels to render.
In a chase sequence, we had a ton of motion blur.
And we do all of our films in stereo, 3-D, so youre essentially rendering everything twice.
But there are also other people trying to finish, so you cant be a render hog.
You have to figure out, how can I make this so it renders in an efficient time?
Thats when it hurts.
Thats the part we have to think about when setting up the shot.
It was BoJack having a panic attack.
But the thing was, I had never spoken to Raphael before.
And getting called into his office, I dont know why, but it kind of rattled me.
It made me kind of anxious and nervous.
So I got super nervous about it.
And he seemed happy with it.
I was going a little method animating, because I was having a panic attack about it as well.
He told me what he wanted, and I went and did it, not stressed at all.
How do you even do that sort of thing?
But to Raphaels credit, he just sort of acted it out.
And I could say, Cool, I can see what you want from me.
That one was directed by my good friend Aaron Long.
We were making season four, episode 11.
It was towards the end of the season.
We were running out of money.
It was just an expensive season.
And the line producer was like, We are not creating any 3-D assets.
And he was like, No, were not making any 3-D bedrooms.
Were not making any 3-Danything.
But we didnt have the money.
And it was like one of those wonderful moments where compromise meets idea.
So not only is that an unsettling thing, but it actually cost less money to not make faces.
And then there were the people who were too painful for her to think about.
Those people have scribbles on their faces.
And that scribble came right out of the storyboard.
What can we do thats cheap but very unsettling?
It was such a particular challenge.
It was so great for the animators to be featured in that way.
How do you make a character emote and show how that theyre thinking without saying a word?
Were like actors in that sense.
You have to get into that characters headspace.
you’ve got the option to act out a lot of stuff while were sitting there.
When you talk to people most of the time youre looking at their eyes.
you could tell so much by keeping a characters eyes alive.
Just the timing of a blink or the eyebrows.
you’re free to say so much with so little.
I always use this analogy: You cant have an abstract sci-fi painting.
Sci-fi tends to be inherently strange, pushed to an extreme at some point.
An abstract painting is the visual extreme of someones belief or emotion that they are trying to convey.
I remember when I got the linework, I was excited and scared at the same time.
So I needed to make this abstract world feel distant, but still weirdly understandable to ours.
(Gromflomites and Gear World).
It was a lot.
With Gear World specifically, this method was most helpful.
So to avoid this we always would go back to our main reference point: Tinkertoys.
Each shape has a specific color.
This gave us visual familiarity and the connection we needed to the audience.
This made an extremely complex and crazy world feel cohesive and understandable.
Like something you remember from your childhood or something youve seen or watched.
Its a show built around nostalgia thats slightly twisted and pushed.
When you combine those pieces together you get the beautiful and psychedelic mosaic that isRick and Morty.
