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IMDB rating: 7.70 Plot: A group of animals look for a way off of an eccentric billionaire’s own personal Noah’s Ark. |
Available versions:
DivX Version (Normal Quality)
Actors: AnimationComedy,
CGSociety - The Missing Lynx
It’s the story that matters. It can make or break a film. We’ve heard it a thousand times. Still, in many cases these phrases don’t translate into concrete results, especially in the CG medium.
‘The Missing Lynx’, a film directed by Manuel Sicilia and Raúl García, co-produced by Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, may be one of those worthy exceptions to the rule.
The movie chronicles the misadventures of Felix the lynx and his group of animal friends as they fight for freedom while trying to stop the plans of Noah, an eccentric millionaire.
Kandor Moon’s first incursion into the animated feature format transmits a mature filmmaking style, with playful use of ellipsis and association of images in editing, as well as frequent plot-points and effective directing of action sequences.
All seasoned with a good dose of humor, aimed at both young and adult audiences, which turn it into a highly entertaining film. The project started when Consejería de Medio Ambiente, a Spanish environmental agency, came up with the idea of working on videos for teaching ecological values to children. “What they initially had in mind was something completely different” says Manuel, “the original idea was more didactic: a film with animals where a lynx walks around [the park] with children, throws papers in a garbage can, prevents a fire from happening, etc.
But then these crazy guys (us) came up with a James Bond-type story, featuring masked soldiers, a hunter from Africa, and what not. Truth is we were lucky to convince them.”
Digging a bit deeper, one understands why The Missing Lynx, in spite of being a first feature, transpires a sense of filmmaking experience: Raùl García has worked as an animator for Disney, Gaumont and other companies in films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King.
After years of working professionally he founded Kandor Graphics in 1995, and gathered many awards and produced work for clients such as NASA, the European Space Agency and John Malkovich, among others.
Antonio Banderas, who joined them as co-producer has also been a big boost to the production of the film. From the very beginning of the project, Manuel, Raúl and co-writer José Enrique Machuca focused their efforts on the development of the script.
They firmly believe that there is no point in having millions of polygons, the latest technology available and countless hours of rendering if the story fails.
Early on they decided to sacrifice certain aesthetic elements, such as the animal’s hair, to concentrate their resources on the story.
“Half of the work for creating a script is developing its structure”, says Manuel, “we dedicated a lot of time to that.” They also put special effort in the conception of the characters, some of which bear classic Chekhovian traits: “we worked thinking how to make the relationships between them interesting.”
Hard work paid off, and brought some surprising results: as the script evolved certain characters started taking a life of their own. Gus, an alarmist chameleon that has problems with his camouflage and sees conspiracies around the corner began stealing protagonism from Felix, the main character.
The audience proved them right, Gus has become one of the most favorite characters of the film. Raúl García compares him to Aladdin’s Genie, in that it’s a secondary character that grows in importance as the movie progresses, and ends up almost stealing the show. For the production of the film Manuel and Raúl chose Autodesk 3ds Max. Animation was done using Character Studio’s Biped, and the quantity and variety of animals as well as humans proved to be one of the main challenges for rigging and animation. One of the most complex cases the team faced was rigging birds’ feathers.
Manuel explains that the feathers located at the extreme sides of the wings are generally used as hands or fingers, to help give bird characters more expressiveness. Due to time constraints they solved the issue by doing two types of setups, one for the acting parts, and another one for when the birds were flying.
“I would’ve loved to have the time to do a proper setup that could be used in all situations”, says Manuel. The great work done by animators on lipsync and facial expressions was handled using traditional morph target techniques. Custom software was also developed in-house for speeding-up production such as a point cache tool for baking the animation data from characters that helped them significantly reduce time when rendering many frames, as well as enhancements to the Biped system.
Another challenge posed by the film was the great number of landscapes that had to be created. The 3D sceneries needed to resemble real places from Andalucía, and the public was expected to be able to recognize some of them. Characters get to travel a lot through southern Spain, from Doñana to Almería, and according to Manuel the amount of landscapes turned it into some kind of road movie.
“Joaquín Catalá and Dani [Daniel Alejo], the ones who coordinated this task did a great job, they managed to automate much of the process and output a great number of landscapes while retaining that natural touch.”
