Thanks to Covid-19 testing, it is normal for someone to become familiar with the interior of the human nose in recent years. But in researching his new animated feature, director Chris Williams delved deeper into the nostrils than most of us.
“I’ve been watching videos of tiny cameras navigating the nasal passages,” he said. He also searched Google Images and looked at the sinus cavities of several animals.
The impetus for Williams’ nasal acquaintance was a scene in “The Sea Beast,” on Netflix, which is arguably the most ambitious digitally animated project the streaming company has undertaken to date. Directed by Williams and written by Williams and Nell Benjamin, “The Sea Beast” is set in a fantasy world where crews of fighters fight against colossal monsters using large wooden ships. (Influences included “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” King Kong and Renaissance-era maps showing illustrated monsters chasing the high seas.)
The story follows Maisie (voiced by Zaris-Angel Hator), the daughter of two fallen monster hunters, who escapes from a stuffy group home to join the crew of a legendary ship known as the Inevitable. There she meets Jacob (Karl Urban), a head with windswept blond hair who is poised to become the Inevitable’s next captain.
Their opponent doesn’t talk: it’s a regal monster known as the Red Bluster, or Red for short, who starts out as the target of a hunting mission, but eventually bonds with Maisie and Jacob. At one point, Maisie and Jacob find themselves in one of Red’s nostrils.
Here’s a look at how the filmmakers designed the beast and thought through some of the film’s other visual highlights.
The skin
A priority for Williams and his team was to create a compelling, lived-in world — to “sweat the details,” in Williams’ words. “Hopefully we’ve cast a spell that gives the audience a sense of a deep history,” he said. That philosophy is reflected in the design of Red’s face, from which a scratched and battered horn protrudes.
“We wanted her skin to be beaten up because she’s been through a lot of fights with the fighters,” said Woonyoung Jung, the film’s art director.
And yet, they also wanted Red’s skin textures to be simpler and more mammalian than some of the other beasts featured in the film, so audiences could bond more deeply with Red. “We have easier contact with mammals than with insects or fish,” says Matthias Lechner, production designer. “So the monsters that were opponents were more hard-shell.” An example of this is a crab-like creature, on which you can see photo-realistic hairs and bumps that create an eerie valley effect.
The eyes
The placement of Red’s eyes, which sit lizard-like above the ridges on the sides of her head, was determined in part by a scene where Maisie and Jacob each perch in front of one of Red’s eyes and signal her where to swim. “There had to be a place where they could stand,” Lechner said, “and the eye had to be a certain size.” To help sell Red’s character arc from enemy to friend, the team chose not to make the irises human and instantly recognizable – they’re closer to a cat’s eyes. “It puts a bit of an emotional barrier between the audience and the creature,” Williams said, “something they have to overcome.”
The size
Early on, the concept was that Red and the other sea monsters would be remarkably large. But size presents challenges for animators. “You could become Godzilla giant, but at some point it becomes unrelated to humans,” Lechner said. “So a lot of this film was figuring out scales that are as impressive as possible, but still relate.” The size also had to be manageable enough for human characters to fit into the frame when interacting with the beasts, whether fighting or befriending them.
To convey the large size and weight of the animals, the team relied in part on the animated seawater, which is realistically simulated. “We know water,” Lechner explained, “so we can estimate distances and scale based on the water quite easily. It’s like a ruler.”
The color
Lechner cited ‘Porco Rosso’, a 1992 Studio Ghibli animated film featuring a striking red airplane against a blue ocean, as inspiration for the color palette of ‘The Sea Beast’. But there were practical considerations in choosing the particular shade of red that the character Red would be. “When I turned up the saturation too much, she looked small — she became like a toy creature,” said Jung, the art director. “When I turned the saturation down, she got too realistic, like a live-action creature.” The team wanted something that felt natural and organic, yet vibrant on screen — something that would “embrace two different worlds,” Jung said. They settled on a slightly unsaturated red that leans toward magenta. When the character is far away, that tone is cooled to give the impression of atmosphere between the camera and the character — in the same way that in real life, distant mountains often skew blue or purple.
Overall, the creatures and natural environments in the film are colorful, while the human elements—particularly the sterile, baroque kingdom from which the Inevitable departs—are relatively bland. “Baroque gardens are all about controlling nature,” Lechner said. “It’s very restrained, while the pop of color in the wild gets out of hand and is fun.”
That way, he added, “we side with nature.”
