‘Isle Of Dogs’ Featurette: See The Work That Goes Into Creating These Very Good Dogs
Wes Anderson’s stop-motionIsle of Dogswasn’t easy to make. A whole team of animators worked obsessively to bring the detailed, animated world of the film to life. A newIsle of Dogsfeaturette takes you behind the scenes of Anderson’s latest, and shows the meticulous work that went into creating these very good dogs.
I would very much like to seeIsle of Dogsnow, please and thank you. But I’ll have to wait until the film shows up in my neck of the woods. For now, though, there’s this delightful behind-the-scenes featurette that details all the exhausting-looking work that goes into creating a stop-motion animated film like this. It looks very frustrating, and meticulous, and potentially anxiety-inducing. But in the end, it’s worth it to create something unique. Watch the featurette below.
Isle of Dogs Featurette
Just from watching this, I can confirm that I would never, ever want to be a stop-motion animator. I’m too impatient, and the key ingredient to stop-motion animation is time. It took a team of 27 animators and 10 assistants hours to create a simple on-screen movement for these characters, and it’s not as simple as moving a limb or two here and there. The animators have to get an actualperformanceout of these puppets. AsMark Waring, head of animation, puts it in the video: “We’re trying to get a performance out of these lumps of metal and rubber and silicone; they’re inanimate objects, but we have to bring life to them.”
The video also reveals that the personality of the actors playing the dogs was used to help create the characters. That cast includesBryan Cranston,Edward Norton,Bill Murray,Jeff Goldblum,Kunichi Nomura,Ken Watanabe,Greta Gerwig,Frances McDormand, and many more.
My favorite part of this video is the reveal that the animators compiled “a database of dog action”, attaching GoPro cameras to real dogs in order to better capture canine movement. I sincerely hope that dog database is included on the eventualIsle of DogsBlu-ray, because I will watch the hell out of it.
