We are living in the era of cute. On our screens, characters like Baby Yoda, Detective Pikachu and the unstoppable Minions have shown that adorable creatures can prompt a deluge of viewership, online engagement and merchandise that any brand or franchise would be happy to cash in on.
But while these creations are often unfussy in design, there’s nothing basic about them. Engineered by concept artists, animators, visual effects teams and puppeteers, their every characteristic is carefully considered, from the millimetres of distance between their eyes to their exact head-to-body ratio. And when the formula is even slightly off, the results can be more monstrous than lovable.
Paramount Pictures learned this last April, when they released the initial trailer for their live-action Sonic the Hedgehog film, which is released in cinemas this week. Fans were so swift and vocal in denouncing the design of the titular character – specifically his mouth of human teeth, beady eyes and child-like body – that the studio redesigned the character and pushed back the film’s release by three months.
“[Designing cute characters] seems really simple, but it's not. It’s really not! It’s trial and error,” says Anthony Francisco, a senior visual development artist at Marvel Studios.
Francisco, who created the concept art for Baby Groot for 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, as well as future iterations of the sentient tree creature, recalls trialing endless combinations of head sizes, facial proportions, colour saturations, textures and more before finding an option that worked. But all of that came after deciding the size of the eyes: “For something cute, you always want to design the eyes first to see how big [they] could be in proportion to the head; to start off that way first and then start adjusting.”
Throughout the design process, Francisco drew on anime and old Disney cartoons for cues. But he says the bulk of his inspiration came from his own children’s baby pictures.
This makes sense: The connection between babies, cuteness and positive social response has been well documented since 1943, when Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz first introduced the concept of Kindchenschema (baby schema), physical characteristics in infants that motivate care-taking in adults – including the small mouth, big eyes, large head and round face found in Baby Groot.
In 2014, Marta Borgi, a researcher specialising in human-animal interaction at the Centre for Behavioural Sciences and Mental Health at Italy’s National Institute of Health, co-authored a study that found children as young as three recognise and show a preference for high baby schema in both human and animal faces. We're hard wired to "find the cute" she says.
“From an evolutionary perspective, if we find the cute represented in a baby, we are also prone to be attracted to it, to care for it, to protect it,” Borgi says. “We generalise this response to adults, to animals and even objects.”
However, Angela Tinwell, a senior lecturer at the University of Bolton specialising in the uncanny valley phenomenon (the uneasy feeling we get when faced with something that seems almost human) in robotic and virtual characters, cautions that anthropomorphising a character too much can kill likability.
The more they resemble us, the more critical we are of their defects, and the more conscious we are of what they’re trying to communicate. (This is the trap the original Sonic design fell into.) “We move them from the category of cartoon-like or cute character and we start to go into our category of human, and it makes us work harder,” Tinwell says.
“As those characters become more and more human-like, we innately react to their facial communication for our own survival mechanisms. We have to immediately think, ‘Oh, it’s not a cute character. It’s actually more human. What are they trying to communicate with us? Are they going to be a threat toward us?’ That’s the underlying psychological response that invokes the uncanny.”
When developing creature designs for Detective Pikachu, art director Ravi Bansal (then global head of art at visual effects studio MPC) knew there were certain real-world traits he’d had have to omit altogether in the interest of cuteness.
“It’s finding the balance of those elements that gave [the Pokémon] cuteness in the line drawing with the reality of it,” he explains. “There’s the reality of creatures that we know that have nails, eyelashes, tear ducts and usually toe nails and stuff like that." Incorporating those things will ground the design in a sort of fabric reality, he says, "but then it also gives it a sort of gnarly quality". "So it’s finding that balance between suggesting the real and tailoring it back so that it has an appeal and it is adorable.”
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Overall, Bansal says the Detective Pikachu team spent eight months perfecting its hero. But three years after production began, he still struggles to break down just what makes their Pikachu so cute.
“It’s difficult to distill a formula if you’re looking for it. I think it comes down to each individual thing and the balance of the factors there – you know, eyes, nose, mouth – and how that works together,” he says. “It can be something as subtle as the twist on the corner of the mouth that can suddenly give it a slight idea of a smile that might be enough to make it cuter.”
Borgi, for her part, agrees that “it’s not easy to have a mathematical correlation” between certain traits and cuteness, given the importance of proportion and individual features.
So it looks like, while the guidelines exist, studios will still have put in time at the drawing board – or in the lab – if they hope to capitalise on the cuteness craze.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
