Disney Animation is certainly pushing the limits.

With Ralph Breaks The Internet, the animation staff is already going beyond the boundaries with creating thousands of unique background characters of both Net Users and Netizens to populate the world of the Internet.

To accomplish this feat, Disney brought in the same team that helped animated the hundreds of animals in Zootopia and Big Hero 6. This animated team was certainly up to the challenge to create unique and random characters to support Ralph and Vanellope as they trek through the Internet.

At a special event at the Disney Animation Studios over the summer, LRM was invited to witness a presentation by the animation team that created the inhabitants of the Internet from the Netizens to the Net Users.

Afterwards, LRM sat down with Cory Loftis (production designer), Dave Komorowski (head of characters and technical animation), Renato dos Anjos (head of animation) and Moe El-Ali (crowds supervisor) on their animated goals and how they worked their Disney magic to make this Internet world come to life.

Ralph Breaks The Internet stars John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch, Alan Tudyk, Mindy Kaling, Joe Lo Truglio, Ed O’Neill and Dennis Haysbert. The film arrives in theaters nationwide on November 21st.

Read our exclusive interview below.

LRM: Let me start off with the nice obvious question. When they pitched it to you guys, did you guys didn’t think that this was an impossible thing to do with such a broad project that to populate with hundreds of thousands or millions of characters?

Moe El-Ali: I mean it was extremely daunting. I think is one of the best ways to put it. I think what was even scarier, it wasn’t just this Internet large place–it’s the multitude of places we visit and how different they are. Cory said it best when he said something like, we’re working on ten films at once. In the sense of like the set and what the people are doing, the types of characters, how they interact differently with each other because like net users a different to netizens and the difference to real people, a different things that we can’t talk about yet.

There’s all this stuff in this, the Reef which we showed an example of which is insane. So yes, it was extremely daunting. We have to work very, very closely together early on. We all dove into the deep end and kind of try to resolve as many issues as possible. As early as possible before production started, which is the only way we kind of just scraping the yard this.

Renato dos Anjos: Being an animator, I would like to say, “Man. That’s cool.” I didn’t really think about the consequences, but the premise was so appealing. Where the directors were taking the characters when you first heard about it, it just felt like an amazing place to go with those characters. I didn’t really think much about how difficult would it be. I thought it would be cool.

LRM: You guys make it look easy. So what was the real difficulty?

Renato dos Anjos: Everything.

Dave Komorowski: Yeah. It’s all of it. We have a blank sheet of paper, right? I signed up immediately. I loved the character. Just count me in. It’s a sequel. It can be pretty easy, right? We got all those characters made and everything. Of course, we don’t stop there. Right. We do keep pushing things and pushing things and pushing things.

Renato dos Anjos: Is there anything on Ralph and Penelope that’s different from the original? I don’t think so. Right? The look is different. The hair’s different.

Dave Komorowski: It’s all been slightly modified.

Renato dos Anjos: And updated.

Dave Komorowski: Honestly, maybe her the piece of licorice in her hair. It’s interesting because I remember the beginning of the movie. It seemed manageable, right? I remembered making a comment saying, “Oh, it’s Ralph 2. There’s not going to be a lot of hair in this movie.” Then we get a princess sequence. We got Merida. We got Rapunzel. We’ve got Ariel. We’re like, “Oh, my God. All these big haired characters!” We just took it as it came.

Renato dos Anjos: On what Cory did, he helped a lot. It’s how you managed the structure of the characters, the population. It felt like that was kind of well thought out and easy to follow.

Cory Loftis: One of the hardest things is to just accept that the movie could be about anything, right? Like that sounds ridiculous, but I think we all in some way had to go, “You know what? They could ask for absolutely anything and we need to have a plan to how to make anything.” So we came up with these real sort of robust packages on how we could make almost any medicine that they could come up with. Or if they had a specific idea for a user, we could invent almost any user. This is the same team from Zootopia. We got really good at that. At the end of Zootopia, we just had to accept for the fact that the filmmakers might ask for any animal. So how do we make any animal out of what we have in that mentality? It sort of came into Wreck it Ralph. They could ask for any character from the Internet. So how do we make any character? It ended up just being a really robust plan.

LRM: So are there animals or children in this film?

Dave Komorowski: It’s the Internet. You can’t have the internet without baby videos, right? Like there’s definitely a lot of baby videos.

Cory Loftis: Internet is made of cats. [Laughs]

Dave Komorowski: I think there’s a lot you’re going to see a lot of that throughout the film in different forms. So much sometimes you actually forget about all this stuff.

Cory Loftis: Call me crazy. We had a cat system, didn’t we?

Dave Komorowski: We did.

Cory Loftis: We made a cat systems in this movie, because we knew we were going to have to make a lot of cats.

Dave Komorowski: Because it’s the Internet. There’s a lot of cat videos. [Laughs]

LRM: When you guys were developing the net users and the netizens–how do you basically decided saying, “Okay, the one group is gonna look like this. Another group is going to look a different way.” Your net users look like a bunch of short little block heads. For the netizens, they look very diverse. How do you guys came up with that approach?

Cory Loftis: One of the biggest differences is just the purpose, right? So the users are us. So we tried to come up with as many options as we would want in any sort of avatar creator. And we looked a lot. I’ve made avatars for, for different game systems or for different social media outlets. Well, I want this many options and we tried to duplicate that. When it came netizens, it was more about them being branded to the website that they represent. So if we could feature almost any website, we know that we could have to make anything. We tried to give them as many colors and as many clothing options as we could come up with it. It felt like they could work at almost any website. That was the biggest divide, right? One is us and the other is branded to a particular website.

LRM: With the background for the background characters., is it just randomly computer generated or do or did you guys actually specifically input certain characters that certain places.

Dave Komorowski: It depends on what it is. We generated enough variety. Along with the system that Cory is talking about, we’ve generated this thing we call the Uber Palette. It basically just accepts a random value and we’ll assign a random property to that character. There are very specific characters in there as well. If they’re in a story point or if it’s something that’s close to the director’s heart. They might have a special look on there. So there’s, there’s a mix of both.

Moe El-Ali: Even with the random stuff, everything is scrutinized. We will say, “No, that doesn’t work next to that character. That’s clashing too much. This changed the the look on the little guy in the background there.” So everything is scrutinized. We never really leave it as is. We try and go and do a couple of passes to make sure–anything that’s randomized is hand picked out some way kind of thing.

Cory Loftis: We had plenty of conversations on percentages, right? Every now and then, the users will have different hats. Some of them are very normal looking. Some of them get a little bit crazy. You’ll get some wizard hats, some crowns or this giant tall bowler hat. We had to agree upon it percentage of how often do you see that? It’s not completely random numbers or else it would just be pure chaos. Some of the crazier options have smaller had smaller percentages. Some of the more normal unassuming, not distracting options have higher percentages. We had to have lots of conversations about that.

LRM: People love Easter Eggs. Obviously, you guys created avatars of yourselves. Are you guys in the movie?

Dave Komorowski: We’re not, unfortunately. [Laughs]

Moe El-Ali: I don’t think we ever thought of it.

Cory Loftis: We didn’t do it for this film. We tried doing it on a previous film. With the scope is this film, it wasn’t feasible to try and get in like the whole studio with the people into the film. That said the number of variations on those net users, you can very easily mix and match and build yourself.

Moe El-Ali: I think everyday when you come in, this movie is so complicated. Every data we came in, we had something that we needed to figure out. Your day’s taken by figuring out things for the movie and make sure that movies moving forward. I don’t think we ever had enough time to think of anything like that. [Chuckles]

Cory Loftis: There’s plenty of Easter Eggs in there. For us, they’re just not characterized. So anytime you’re on a screen and you see a comment or there’s a user name, a lot of that is us in there. Even keep a profile.

Renato dos Anjos: Where do you find time for that? [Laughs]

Dave Komorowski: Just FYI, there are a lot of Easter Eggs in the movie. We’ve made sure that in almost every area you go to.

Cory Loftis: It’s almost kinda hard keep track of them.

LRM: One last question. This has been bothering me a lot. Explain the riddle of the four finger characters. [Laughs]

Moe El-Ali: I think it’s a old style of designing things. We try to always keep giving a nod to it. In animation, even when you have five fingers, you try to group the two fingers together because it’s just easier shape. When you’re drawing that in the fifties and forties, it was just became like a pattern that people drew. We’re still stuck with that.

LRM:That’s a great answer. Hey, thank you very much.

Ralph Breaks The Internet arrives in theaters nationwide on November 21st.

Source: LRM Online