“It’s super easy to fall flat on your face,” Erik Nordby, the visual effects supervisor for “Pokémon Detective Pikachu” (due May 10), said in a recent telephone interview. “The fans are in their 20s now and grew up with these characters.”
So the filmmakers spent a year — about twice the usual prep time for a project like this — redesigning roughly 60 Pokémon from the anime series. In this comic mystery, the titular yellow sleuth (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) helps a young man investigate the disappearance of his father in a city where people and monsters live side by side.
Nordby explained how five of the film’s most prominent Pokémon were reimagined:
Pikachu
“Whenever you have an extraordinarily simplistic face shape, which is essentially a flat yellow pancake, the challenge to get any real emotion out of it without feeling cartoony is huge,” Nordby said. “We shot Ryan doing a whole series of facial expressions and mapped those onto Pikachu’s face. Then we worked on it for six months until we got it right.”
Devising the detective’s body was equally challenging. First, the potentially controversial decision was made to cover him with fur, for maximum cuteness. “Then we became amateur zoologists and scoured the world for analogous animals that actually exist,” Nordby said. The closest parallel to Pikachu? Wombats. “They’re so fat and adorable.”
Not everything about Pikachu is rooted in reality, however. Take his deerstalker cap, which was a carry-over from the “Detective Pikachu” video game that was first released in Japan in 2016 and inspired the film. “It made no sense because how could it ever stay on?” Nordby asked. “And he can’t actually put it on — his arms are not long enough. So who the hell puts his hat on?” That’s a mystery even Sherlock Holmes might not be able to solve.
Psyduck
Vulnerable to stress, the angst-ridden sidekick to a reporter is constantly on the verge of exploding. Much of that anxiety is expressed in his oversize eyes, but they had to be scaled down because “they couldn’t fit inside his skull,” Nordby said. The other obstacle for Psyduck was figuring out how to keep up with the fast-paced action, given his short legs. That’s why they came up with the backpack the reporter carries him in, Nordby said. “Originally we laughed at the idea, but it ended up working quite well.”
Charizard
The dragon-ish monster that faces off against Pikachu in one of the film’s biggest battles had to feel legitimately threatening without losing the character’s essential appeal. “He’s got a fat-guy-in-a-suit vibe, with a bit of a potbelly,” Nordby said. In the original design, “the wings aren’t quite long enough or wide enough to fly, so we had to make them twice as large.” And to ensure that Charizard seemed believably menacing, the effects team added crocodilian scales to his skin.
Bulbasaur
A gaggle of these friendly, bulbous creatures come to Pikachu’s rescue, falling all over one another. “We took a series of clips of bulldog puppies jumping on top of each other and copied their movements with a rotoscope,” Nordby said. “The playfulness and top-heaviness you have with bulldogs, where they don’t quite seem like they’re ever quite comfortable on their feet, worked really well with the body shape of the Bulbasaur.”
Snubbull
The right-hand monster to the police detective played by Ken Watanabe is “a big pink fluffy mix of a rabbit with a bulldog’s face,” Nordby said. Director Rob Letterman instantly loved the design, but getting the OK from the Pokémon Co. in Japan proved more difficult. “From a Western point of view, you look at it and go, ‘This is the most adorable thing on the planet,’” Nordby said. “From their point of view, they kept using the word ‘scary.’” A lengthy negotiation led to an agreement on a revision, splitting the difference between cute and creepy.
“The entire process was a series of compromises, but the movie is better for it,” he added. “When our first trailer came out, we were very nervous, but there were all these videos online where you could see fans reacting with this childlike wish fulfillment. We wanted to root this in the real world, so these kids who had grown up and always wished they had their own Pokémon could now see a film that made them feel like they could reach out and touch them.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.