The VFX supervisor who worked on
Detective Pikachu, Pete Dionne, recently discussed (via
Gamefragger) how he and his team went about adapting Pokémon into a live-action setting. Firstly, Dionne spoke about Mr. Mime specifically, revealing that the secret to adapting that Pokémon into live-action wasn't making him look like a living, breathing creature but rather the opposite.
"The character design of Mr. Mime from the anime (above) is very simplistic compared to the other Pokémon we worked with. He’s got a humanoid form but with super 'cartoony' proportions and face. Honestly he’s creepy, and us imagining him into life as a human would have fueled nightmares without a doubt."
Had the team given Mr. Mime human-like characteristics such as realstic skin or muscles, it would've only served to creep us out. By instead making the character very obviously fake, it lets us brain know that we aren't looking at a living creature and thereby have nothing to be disgusted over.
Early on we decided that the only way to pull off this character was to try and not make him look like an organic, breathing creature but go in the opposite connection, making him look as synthetic as possible. Instead of trying to make Mr. Mime's arms and face look like flesh with anatomically-correct muscle structure, we built and shaded him as if he’s just a huge blob of silicone. The lights then shine on him and make his whole head and arms glow from that synthetic, latex-like material.
Many have noticed that in Detective Pikachu, Mr. Mime's shoulders appear to be dodgeballs. This is exactly what the VFX deparment want people to think. By making the character's body out of recognisable materials like rubber and latex it makes it less off-putting as, as mentioned above, our brains won't think that we're looking at a real creature.
His skin looks very recognizable as being real-world materials but it’s clearly not organic. The same thing with his red shoulder pads. We looked at those from the cartoon and decided to make them red rubber kick-balls with that same kind of textured surface. And for his torso we based the whole thing upon foam.
"It's like when you have a Nerf football and you squeeze it and it just has those little micro-wrinkles in there and you can see every pore tightened up loosen as you let go of it," Dionne further explained.
We built that same thing into his body so that it explicitly felt like foam. He wasn't a living, breathing human, so we were really able to have a lot of fun because of the forms, especially his facial performance. We could really push it without it looking creepy, as if it was a real human falling into the 'uncanny valley.' And because he had so many of these recognizable photo-realistic shading features on him plus lighting features, he also never really felt too cartoony, despite him having the most cartoonish performance in the whole film.
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