Finally making its way in theatres in May,
Detective Pikachu served as the first official, live-action
Pokemon film ever. Thus, the film's crew were tasked with figuring out how to adapt the popular creatures into the real world. The Moving Picture Company (MPC) were responsible for this task.
A visual-effects supervisor who worked on
Detective Pikachu recently spoke with
DigitalArtsOnline (via
Gamefragger) about how they went about bringing Pikachu into the realm of live-action, revealing some interesting ties to real life zoology.
Dionne explained that, as Pokemon are typically two-dimensional cartoon characters, they have unrealistic proportions which simply wouldn't look right on an actual living thing.
The thing with Pokémon is they’re very simplistic 2D designs. They're really adorable with their big heads, small bodies and big eyes and all the things that in character design you can turn to to make an appealing character but in real life if you saw an animal with these same kind of features and proportions, it would look grotesque and unnatural.
Pete Dionne, the VFX supervisor, then explained that the team looked to real life animals to serve as inspiration for the live-action adaptations of Pokemon. He revealed that they would consider how a Pokemon would be able to survive in the wild:
A term we threw around a lot at MPC was 'How would this Pokémon survive the night?' Could this animal make it through the night in the woods on its own? Would it be able to run away fast enough from whatever predators might pursue it? So we decided to follow the logic of nature's design.
With Pikachu spending a lot of time standing upright, they would have to figure out a way to avoid him coming off as too anthropomorphic. So, interestingly, Pikachu's performance in the film was actually based on a rabbit - standing on its hind legs, for the most part - as Dionne explained:
For Pikachu, he spends so much of his time upright in the film and cartoons, with a range of motion that a human performer would have. But very quickly he turns into looking like a guy in a Pikachu suit. So I imagined him as an upright quadruped, like a rabbit. When you think of a rabbit up on its hind legs they really swing a lot of momentum into their steps. They’re not very well balanced.
The moment that Pikachu would go down on all fours, that’s when we’d allow him to embrace the natural quadruped look. We referenced a lot of red pandas for those movements.