To celebrate this week’s release of Wreck-It Ralph on Blu-ray Combo Pack, Disney released some concept art from the film, along with some information from the visual development artists, including, Mike Gabriel, Art Director; Ian Gooding, Co-Art Director; Lorelay Bove, Visual Development Artist; and Cory Loftis, Visual Development Artist who all gave information on the inspiration and creation of this (to quote Vanellope) “ADORABLE!” movie.
Mike Gabriel revealed that the inspiration for switching between multiple video games came from our new highly technological generation of children. “The way that kids today click around devices and multitask, it’s seems ridiculous to think about trying to give them an hour and a half in one simple world. Why not let them jump into a new world every 20 minutes? That’s what we do with this movie. It’s a different experience for the audience, and it’s exciting.”
This makes a lot of sense. Everyone seems to need everything fast and exciting, and it is good of Disney to evolve to accommodate these changing technologies.
Gabriel also emphasized that these different worlds are based off of basic shapes in order for them to be contrasted with each other. “Niceland [the world of Fix-It Felix, Jr.] is based on squares that make it feel very solid and rigid. In Hero’s Duty, we wanted Ralph to be scared, so he gets thrown into this violent world of diagonals with a triangular-shape language. Sugar Rush is cute, benign and childlike, so if you look closely there are circles everywhere.”
Ian Goodling stated that the world of Fix-It Felix Jr. was actually a difficult one to create. “Fix-It Felix, Jr. is an 8-bit world from the 1980s, and at first I thought it would be simple to create, but it turned out to be very challenging – in a fun way. How do you design something that shows that real people live here but at the same time shows the technical limitations of processors in the 1980s? That was the challenge. The one thing that John Lasseter kept rubbing in is you have to celebrate the 8-bit as much as you possibly can in this world. Whenever we didn’t jump on an opportunity, he would notice it and say, ‘That’s not right here.’ It was fun to squeeze as many square-centric, 8-bit things you can into one environment and still have it look sophisticated, believable and fun.”
The animators also had to play around a lot with the fashion of the Nicelanders. “We had a lot of fun dressing the [Niceland] characters of this world. When you take something very sophisticated and tailor it with little hats and brooches, and you put it on these funny little people, it becomes hilarious. The more serious you get with the clothing, the funnier it becomes. They dress 80s-centric because that’s their era and they think that’s really cool. Again, really cool and serious becomes funny when you scale to the people of Niceland,” said Goodling.
Lorelay Bove explained that the inspiration for the design of the world of Sugar Rush came from his Spanish homeland. “When we first started working on Wreck-It Ralph, we wanted to create a candy world that was new and different to anything we’d seen before. I’m originally from Spain and I’ve always loved Antoni Gaudi and his modernist architecture. When I was little, I thought his architecture was made of candy. That’s where the idea came to use this modernist architecture movement and mix it with candy to make our own world and our own style. We took a research trip to Spain to study the shapes, rhythm and patterns of the architecture of Gaudi and it seemed to fit our new world perfectly. But we did not directly copy Antoni Gaudi or the modernist architecture; we just caricatured and made it a new, distinct world. Alongside the trip to Barcelona, we also took a research trip to the world’s largest candy convention in Germany. It was like the Comic-Con of candy, and we took lots and lots of pictures for reference.”
While this may not be fresh, new art for Wreck-It Ralph 2, it’s still cool to see behind-the-scenes and understand where the inspiration comes from for such an amazing movie. What do you think of this concept art?
To see more of the interview, check out: Animation World News
