Pokémon were not built for life. The ratios of their cartoon bodies – head to torso, limbs to torso, eyes to face – are all wrong. Often their arms are too short to reach their mouths to feed themselves. The size of their heads, the huge weight of their skulls, would mean that many would either fall over or be unable to move at all. Erik Nordby, the visual effects supervisor of the first ever live-action Pokémon movie, Detective Pikachu, wasn’t sure if the creatures could plausibly survive a single night on their own.
“It sounds comical,” he says, “but that was hugely important to us. We needed to trust that a Pokémon could eat, that it could find shelter, that it could communicate with other beings. Whatever we created needed to feel alive in some way. And those body ratios were a massive challenge to wrap our heads around.”
Take the star of the show, Pikachu – who is voiced in the film by Ryan Reynolds. In order to effectively capture the characteristics of a Pokémon in a realistic form, Nordby and his team started with its basic silhouette (not unlike like the ‘Who’s that Pokémon?’ segment from the original cartoon). But Pikachu, in the words of Nordby, has the silhouette of “a sack of potatoes” – requiring a team of concept artists to figure out a design that could feasibly support a skeleton.
“It became like an anatomy book,” he says. “We had to figure out his muscle system, his bones, the amount of fat he has, the fur, the way the fur moves and how it reacts to light, because that colour of yellow doesn't exist in furry creatures.” They knew that giving Pikachu fur at all was going to be controversial, he says: “But whenever anyone brought it up, we would just ask, ‘Well, how could he not be furry? If he's not furry, then what is he?’”
There was a point early in the design process that the VFX team considered simply making 3D models of the original 2D characters. But it didn’t work – they looked too cartoony. At another point they brought on board artist RJ Palmer, who impressed them with his hyper-realistic Pokémon drawings, influenced heavily by the natural world. But that direction didn’t work either; The Pokémon Company, whose Japan office had final approval on all designs, felt it strayed too far from the cartoon original.
A balance was sought – a compromise between realism and the “absolutely crazy design aesthetic” of Pokémon as we know them. Nordby's team reached an agreement with The Pokémon Company that the characters’ eyes – large and oval in cartoon form – must function like an actual eyeball in a socket. Director Rob Letterman also chose to shoot the movie on film rather than digitally, using as many real locations as possible, in order to ground the more surreal elements in a lived-in reality.
But they didn’t always agree. Nordby gives an example of Machamp, a huge, four-armed, muscular Pokémon that wears shorts and a wrestling belt. The VFX team thought they’d struck a good balance with his design – until they showed it to The Pokémon Company. “They came back and said, ‘We think it's good but it appears as though he's wearing clothes and Pokémon can't wear clothes,’” he says. “So then we said, ‘Well, what is he, then? Because he's obviously wearing speedos and he's wearing a wrestling belt.’ And they said, ‘No that's his skin.’ So then we said, ‘Well if that’s his skin, why is it shiny?’”
Discussions like this were frequent, but Nordby and Letterman remained open to concessions. After all, Nordby says: “It might not make sense, but rules like this exist for a reason. They’re what's allowed this crazy brand to become a global phenomenon.”
Perhaps the greatest character challenge was Mr Mime, an anthropomorphic mime artist Pokémon whose live-action debut in the first Detective Pikachu trailer last year sent the internet into meltdown. Many found him hilariously bizarre; his movements were workshopped by comic mime Trygve Wakenshaw. But others thought he was the stuff of nightmares.
“When we got to the texturing part of Mr Mime, it was like, ‘What the hell is this thing?’” laughs Nordby. They ended up taking inspiration from children’s toys; his arm sockets, for instance, are based on a rubber ball. Nordby admits that it was difficult to navigate the “creepy vibe”. “That character would get super creepy and then we’d pull it back to a very cartoony place, but then we’d go too far that way and pull it back again, only to become too stiff and humourless.”
Their many discarded designs are testament to the great challenge of evolving Pokémon for live-action. “One day, I hope we get to release all of the broken versions of Mr Mime,” Nordby says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
