While Solo: A Star Wars Story performed poorly at the domestic box office, grossing only $101 million on opening weekend, one of the highlights of the Han Solo origin film directed by Ron Howard was the superior animation used to bring the characters L3 and Rio to life.
Industrial Light & Magic, the VFX and animation studio that has worked on the Star Wars franchise in the past, recently explained how they used a mixed-animation technique, blending CG and other practical elements to create these two unique characters. Even though Ron Howard was late to the project, having taken over as Solo’s director once Chris Miller and Phil Lord were removed from the project, the acclaimed director still had time to implement his own vision for the design and animation for Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Rio Durant, the six-limbed pilot who was voiced by Jon Favreau, was originally supposed to be a puppet character with a CG face under the guidance of Miller and Lord. According to Matt Shumway, ILM’s animation supervisor, in the final version of Solo, Ron Howard decided to design Rio using more computer animation instead of puppetry:
“Ron came on and wanted to explore doing more robust CG work on him. In the end, we still had a performer on set, Katy Kartwheel, who was in full Rio costume, and they cut out a hole in the mask so she could see. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but it gave the actors wonderful performances to play off of.”
Not a lot of animation was required to create the sassy android L3, who was voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Similar to the animation used for the film Ex Machina, L3 was created using a hybrid animation technique. Waller-Bridge wore a green mobcap tracking suit and the rest of her costume was fastened onto her body. After filming, Waller-Bridge’s head was digitally substituted with L3’s robot head and wires were added to give her character more of an android appearance. Shumway went into more detail about L3’s hybrid animation:
“There were only a few cases where animation needed to jump in and do some tweaks. The arm and leg pieces were hit and miss, depending on how well they held up. But all of the performance was based on what Phoebe did. There was no interpretive performance at all. She’s just another good hybrid of CG elements and live-action prop pieces. And, hopefully, you can’t tell which is which.”
While the spin-off Star Wars film has received mixed reviews from fans and critics alike, arguably the best part of Solo: A Star Wars Story was getting to see these two lively characters brought to the big screen.
Solo: A Star Wars Story is currently playing in theaters!