AnimWatch - Scary Godmother

A few years ago, you might have caught a show called Reboot on Saturday morning TV. If so, you're no stranger to the work of Canada's Mainframe Entertainment. I have always been shocked at how much CG they can get to the TV so quickly.

Based on the work of comic book artist Jill Thompson, Mainframe brings you Scary Godmother. I had a chance to view the show not long ago, and I thought it was pretty good. Mainframe's visual quality has certainly come a long way since the days of Reboot!

The look of the show is a mix of 3D and some hand-drawn elements as textures, which lends an interesting, pseudo-comic book look to it all, capturing the feel of Thompson's work fairly well. But I was particularly taken with the Scary Godmother herself. I found her very appealing, though still shots don't do her justice.

I think little monsters will find Scary Godmother to be a delightful addition to their Halloween scary viewing. (And I believe I caught a few things in there for big monsters as well...)

CLICK TO VISIT MAINFRAME'S WEBSITE

"The script for the Scary Godmother Halloween Spooktakular was adapted, strangely enough, from a play. It's probably the first animated film ever made from a stage play. The play was based on Jill Thompson's award-winning children's books and comics and was put on by a Chicago community theatre group in October of 2001. When Jill and her writing partner, Heath Corson, were writing the play, they had to keep in mind the production limitations they faced working within a community theatre. So they crafted a script that had few locations and was heavily weighted towards dialogue gags.

Smart dialogue is something sorely lacking in many cartoons today and it was a breath of fresh air to have such great lines for our characters to deliver. The minimal number of sets simplified the production process immensely -- the fewer sets to build, the more resources that could go towards animation. It really was a unique approach to making an animated film.

It was terrific having Jill on board as the Art Director and the two of us worked together closely on developing the look and feel of the Spooktakular. Jill painted numerous watercolours that we used as designs from which to build, and, in many cases, as matte paintings in the show. In order to capture the richness and beauty of Jill's watercolour artwork, we had her paint all the textures for our sets and used an ink-line shader along with her paints to create 3d versions of Jill's paintings.

Jill had always envisioned an animated Scary Godmother that looked more like old claymation cartoons than anything else. We took much inspiration from the Rankin and Bass Christmas specials and also Aardman's fabulous Wallace and Gromit films. The trickiest thing from a character design standpoint was staying true to Jill's idea that the older kids would all have little beans for eyes rather than realistic eyes with pupils and whites. Her vision was that the older kids were more cynical and jaded while Hannah (our younger protagonist) was still innocent and open to the world. This was reflected in her huge anime eyes, which contrasted nicely with the older kids' tiny black dot eyes. In animation, however, it is hard to tell where a character is looking when they have no pupils. So we ended up having to cover most of our eyelines with exaggerated head turns.

But by far, the biggest challenge was the character Bug-a-boo. He's basically a big furry sphere with a huge gaping mouth, and animating him took a lot of experimentation. We found he worked best when treated as a big face. We didn't worry about how his body would move, really, and simply concentrated on capturing his expressions as if we were animating a close up talking head shot. He became everyone's favourite character once we figured him out. One of the coolest things about Bug-a-boo was that we could animate the number of eyes he had. Normally he would have five eyes but we could give him as many 12 when he was surprised or was being particularly frightening.

Jill was adamant that there be a dance scene in the film and the animators had great fun coming up with funky dance moves for all the monsters. We crafted Scary Godmother's moves after a silly dance Jill used to do with her friends and some of the other stuff we got from watching old Bollywood pop videos. Mr. Pettibone was the most fun to groove with, since being a skeleton, he's not adverse to tossing his head around.

Having worked a lot in 3D television animation on client properties, it was a rare treat to make Scary Godmother prior to selling the show. Any producer will tell you this is exactly the wrong way to go about making a film and they would probably be right from a budgetary point of view. But it afforded Jill and me an artistic freedom that has been unique in my extensive production experience. On every aspect of the production, the final creative decisions lay with Jill and myself. If we liked something, we did it. It was a hell of lot of fun and I hope I'm in the position to work under similar circumstances again one day.

I'm very pleased with how the Scary Godmother Halloween Spooktakular turned out. I think we succeeded in our goal to create a film with broad appeal that will engage parents as well as children. Everyone can relate to fun characters and a good story regardless of their age."

--Ezekiel Norton, May 2004