Those who are surprised by the runaway box office success of “A Minecraft Movie” would do well to remember what director Jared Hess (“Nacho Libre,” “Napoleon Dynamite”) and his screenwriters always understood: The universal appeal of exploring a fun, open world. Or, in this case, worlds. They were able to translate that appeal to film and give it a compelling focus. “A Minecraft Movie” leans into both the inventiveness of the games and the timeless urge to champion freedom vs. oppression.
In this latest iteration, that fight is against the villainous Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House and performed by mo-cap actor Allan Henry), the Piglin ruler of the Nether underworld, who was created specifically for the movie. However, Malgosha, like everything in the film, needed to convey the game’s iconic blocky aesthetic, or “A Minecraft Movie” would have fallen into pieces.
“The biggest challenge for all of us was to find that line between working with [live-action] photography, and working with actors [led by Jason Momoa and Jack Black] that were going to have to live within the same world with these characters,” production VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon told IndieWire. “But also respect the game and fans’ expectations of what these characters should look like.”
But dealing with such low-fi animation was totally new to Lemmon, who previously worked on the innovative “Planet of the Apes” and “Avatar” franchises at Wētā FX’s when he was employed there. “The characters needed to be able to not just appear as if they belonged in the space, but move and perform in a way that could connect with an audience on an emotional level,” he added.
Fortunately, Lemmon reunited with Wētā (led by VFX supervisor Sheldon Stopsack and animation supervisor Kevin Estey), which did all of the character and world building for the expansive and organic-looking Overland and the dark and lava-filled Nether. (Assets were handed off to Digital Domain, which focused on the climactic battle, and to Sony Pictures Imageworks for their work on the Midport village battle.)
”Everything that you see in the picture is essentially a built asset: shaded, lit, and rendered,” Wētā’s Stopsack told IndieWire. “ So, with that in mind, we had to figure out technical ways to do that based off of the idea of ‘Minecraft,’ where we have everything assembled out of blocks in one way or another.”
The aesthetic necessitated the creation of a new “Bloktz” tool that helped “blockify” any geometry in Houdini with full Atlas instancing. Characters, though, came first, having to be modeled in cubic fashion and keyframe-animated with tactile photorealism. Their movement was aided by FauxCap for a smaller footprint on set, using large puppets and actors as stand-ins.
“We looked at a lot of different things,” Lemmon continued. “Carl from ‘Up’ was a very interesting character design that pushed that general direction of being very square. The ‘LEGO Movie’ was another. We looked at it, but we didn’t want to emulate that. We really wanted to embrace a live-action world where ‘Minecraft’ is a parallel dimension that is just as realistic as ours but has different rules and a different sort of physics.”
Wētā’s art department worked closely with director Hess on the look and feel of all the CG characters. For the Piglin army, they designed and created 12 different variants, all with individual characteristics and personalities. They also made the sheep, bees, pandas, zombies, skeletons, Iron Golem, and lovable wolf Dennis. However, there was some redesign for better articulation because characters in the game are straight-limbed.
“ We needed to explore their locomotion, their body language, their performance,” added Stopstack. “We explored a wide range, from very cartoony to something that is very true to realism. We needed to figure out where these personalities lie.”
The most challenging character was the tall, green Creeper, which originated as a deformed pig because of a coding error. The Creeper contains green blocks stacked on top of one another with a stretched neck and a head with cutout eyes and a frown.
“When we talked to Mojang [Studios] about what a Creeper is, they said they really didn’t really know,” Lemmon said. “We actually went through a number of design studies. Some were much more turtle-like or creature-like, and others were where we ended up coming quite a bit closer back to the game. We tried to just stick to that pixelated kind of face in particular, and some of the Mojang folks said they referenced the fixed mask from Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away.’”
But the centerpiece was Malgosha. She serves as a successor to the game’s major antagonist, The Great Hog, and is influenced by several characters, especially Emperor Palpatine from “Star Wars,” which is obviously apparent by her dark, gaunt face, menacing voice, and cloak. Like Palpatine, she is also a sorceress who seeks total domination.
For Wētā’s Stopsack, Malgosha also channeled a bit of Mama Fratelli (Anne Ramsey) from “The Goonies.” “If you think about it, this is already quite a strange mix, but the goal with her was really to try to find a menacing character who’s also comedic and tragic at the same time.”
Like the other Piglins, Malgosha’s snout was shortened to make her more expressive and to also accommodate the voice acting of House. But Stopsack additionally credited Henry for creating her physicality as the on-set character proxy. “He gave us a very good understanding of where he and Jared wanted to take the character with his very unique movement,” he said.
But thanks to some great improv banter at the end between Jack Black’s Steve, the master of Minecraft, and House’s never-say-die Malgosha, the villain goes out with a better finish than was written on the page. “This desperate attempt, trying to throw this knife in a ‘sneak attack,’ came about in many ways and wasn’t necessarily scripted,” Stopsack added.
“I remember being on set in Auckland,” he continued, “and Jared and Alan and Sarah and Jack worked on this, and it was essentially a moment of beauty. The whole crew was standing around there, and everyone really had to hold it together because it was so funny. And Sarah ended up being very unique in her own right.”
