The Re-Making of Dangermouse - Manchester Animation Festival

 This presentation was brilliant. I have never really had a chance to watch Dangermouse, as a child I was too young to ever get to watch it, but this talk was so informative of the whole pitching process that us animators will all at some point have to go through. The whole process of responding to the set brief of the re-creation of Dangermouse was described in-depth and it was really fascinating to see how they took something so classic iconic and moulded it into the modern era.

Robert Cullen (director) Ben Ward (Head writer) Sarah Muller (Exec Producer) were all interviewed. They stressed how they didn't want Dangermouse to be a kids show, they wanted it to be a comedy show, for a range of audiences (mainly children) but enjoyable to everyone by an extent. You can see that this element heavily influnced the character design...

The classic DM has a more rounded shape, more "playful" and "friendly", where as the new DM is more "striking" with corners and defined lines and a frown of determination, not so much childish, he seems more mature a character in aesthetic. He also has a more defined facial structure, his nose now has a distinctive shape, this acts like a logo, this was done purposefully so he can be distinguished just by certain features alone.

The animation of the characters also was advanced, with 3D movements incorporated which ground him and add believability.

The narratives have what is called a "two-line pitch" where an enemy has a motive (spider wants to eat world) this then has a personal effect on DM (he is scared of spiders) which is an effective narrative technique.

With the animation process, the animators and production team wanted to keep the class background idea of involving photographic elements into his environment. Also the iconic characters HAD to be kept, not forgetting how action-packed the episodes were.

With background there were a lot of things to consider. They wanted to include textures and drawn in elements, a blurred line between real and painted. This obviously came with issues, the task of integrating 2D and 3D, tricky to blend perspectives, without it looking like a collage.

Here were some special examples that I photographed of some great concept art for background:

You can see the mix of dramatic compositions, where it is evident the desire to make Dangermouse more cinematic. James Bond like.

What I particularly loved was how they stressed their enjoyment for the project. How they loved coming into work and creating it...  I think that is just great, and you can see the enjoyment within the animation itself.