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| Edited By: Rucha Sharma |Source: DNA webdesk |Updated: Aug 26, 2017, 04:20 PM IST
Chris Renaud is the name every animation lover and especially the fans of yellow, fussy, and totally fictional yet adorable minions must remember. Director and producer of Despicable Me series, Lorax, The Secret Life of Pets and the sequel, The Secret Life of Pets 2 was also nominated for an Oscar for an animation short film called No Times For Nuts, featuring Scrat the squirrel from Ice Age movies.
By now, you must have come to know that Renaud is one of the strongest forces at Illumination Entertainment. The filmmaker-illustrator talks about how it is to work on animation movies that have managed to garner an immense fan following.
I studied illustration and drew comic books for Marvel and DC. So my background is really in drawing, not filmmaking actually— storytelling through drawing. I also used to write occasionally. Animation came to me while I was working on a TV series. The good thing is right now animation is a robust part of the film industry.
One of my biggest influences is Peter Sellers, the English comedian and actor from the movie Pink Panther. His performance is a little over the top but that is a lot like animated characters. That was an early love for comedy for me. What added to this love was cartoons like Warner Brother’s Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck. I would watch them as a kid on the TV.
As we were developing the characters, we were working with our terrific production designer Eric Guillon who has done a lot of design work for Despicable Me. A lot these animals started very stylised but what we ended up doing is that we developed them and treated them in a way that they started to look more realistic. For example, Chloe (from The Secret Life of Pets) is the perfect example, as her face looked like a cat’s face, more like a cartoon cat. We developed her face into more like a real cat, although her body is more stylised. So, we fine tune them to make them look real and relatable to the audience. The great thing about doing that it not just helps us, but also helps the audience to relate with a feeling of “Oh! This looks like my dog, or cat.”
Technology, I believe sometimes overtakes the characters and the process of storytelling. At the end of the day, that’s what the audience responds to. Creating an experience for the audience that comes to see the movie, making them laugh, making them cry, is relatively more difficult. Creating animation with this technology is easy. I think with narrative stuff, it’s a little bit trickier, because it’s so intertwined— you’re trying to construct the idea, even in storyboards, and then the script that is going to work well. But that said, of course, again, depending on where you are in the process, you can change things there too by shifting scenes or editing things down or whatever. So I think those are the ways that the technical aspects have affected the storytelling process. But the storyline is one of the most difficult things that I will keep working on till I die. The important part here is that the audience should leave with a very good experience.
I can’t tell you much about it yet, we are working on the sequel and are going to start the production soon. But, we are still in the developing stages of the story. It is on the lines of Despicable 2 and 3. Currently, we are looking at the main characters of the movie and trying to look at ideas that can be introduced and would be fun to explore to make people feel different in comparison to what we did in the first movie. The biggest challenge about making a sequel is that you don’t want to retell a story. There has to be an evolution of characters, environment and story line.
The relationship between Max and Duke is definitely going to move further. There will be new elements and characters in the sequel. In fact, all the main characters are going to be a crucial part of the story.
Watch The Secret Life of Pets on August 27 at 1 PM and 9 PM on Sony PIX
