Chatrasal Singh on animating ‘Strange World’: ‘The challenges are the joys’

Disney’s latest animated action adventure Strange World takes place in Avalonia and a world-within-the world. Directed by Don Hall ( Big Hero 6) the film featuring a stellar voice cast including Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid and Lucy Liu, is filled to bursting with bright colours and wonderful creatures.

Inspired by Hall’s love for pulp fiction and retro sci-fi, the animation style, according to Chatrasal Singh, one of the lead animators on the film, is stylised and super pushed. Speaking from Burbank, California over a video call, Chatrasal says, “There are references to Disney movies from the ‘60s and ‘70s. We were going for quicker transitions. The style was snappy but we were also holding the golden poses important to tell the story in a particular scene.”

Going for gold

A still from Strange World

The golden pose, Chatrasal explains, is the one that conveys emotions and their transition. “When we first start to animate, we block out the characters. A two-second shot will have 48 frames and if we need to convey two emotions, we need two strong poses. The transition between the two needs to be fast. In those poses, we need to convey what the character is feeling—are they angry, sad, happy or proud.”

The 33-year-old Chatrasal is a graduate of the Vancouver Institute of Media Arts and has been animating professionally for 13 years now. Having worked on projects including DC’s League of Super-Pets, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, Wish Dragon, Sherlock Gnomes, Monster Hunt 2, Kung Fu Panda, he says he was drawn to Strange World.

“It is a cool adventure story about three generations. Just those words were fun enough for me to get attached to the project. There is a lot of stuff that we could relate to.”

Getting it right

Getting the right emotion across to the audience is probably the biggest challenge of animation, Chatrasal says. “It is also the most fun. The director has the bird’s eye view, the vision about what he wants to tell in each scene and sequence and knows where that lies in the arc of the film.”

In animation, Chatrasal says, the animators have a notion only of the scenes they are working on. “We might overdo or undersell it. To be able to find that balance so that the story goes in the right arc is demanding.”

Basic physics

Animating humans and creatures come with their particular difficulties, Chatrasal says. “It is easier for the audience to tell when something is wrong with humans because we know what the physics looks like, how humans move. If something is off, the audience will be able to catch on that quickly. Getting that right is difficult.”

A still from Strange World

In Strange World, Chatrasal says, there are many imaginary creatures. “They could be a combination of two or three different animals. We try and get information from all of them and put it together to create the creature. While it is tough, with the creatures on Strange World, it would be hard for anyone to tell what is wrong because they do not exist in our reality.”

The same is the case with real and imagined worlds, according to Chatrasal. The laws of physics apply in the real world and the audience would be able to say immediately if something were off. “It is probably hard for us to cheat in creating the real world—we do cheat a lot in animation to try and make things look the way they’re supposed to. In imagined worlds audience do not have a reference to draw upon and say that is not looking right.”

Strange World is currently running in theatres