Director Rob Letterman and his VFX team, led by production visual effects supervisor Erik Nordby, had to translate not one but dozens of creatures (around 65, according to Nordby) into believable CG versions with specific textures, colors, and lighting that would integrate with the flesh-and-bone elements of this hybrid adaptation.
It involved a great collaboration with the Pokémon Company and all of the original creators in Japan. They did a lot of trips to Tokyo to sit down with them, to understand exactly what it was that made a Pokémon feel like a Pokémon.
Except for Mr. Mime, every single Pokémon could be broken down into specific animals that were used for reference. This was done very scientifically. They took the 2d concept and created a texture sheet, which is almost like a color model sheet, that is usually used for classic Disney cartoons. These texture sheets would show wherein the real world those textures would come from. They adhere to a specific type of reptile, frog, rock, shell, bird, or a specific feather, a type of jewel, or even bizarre underwater creatures, and every single texture in between. They would pass that off to the vendors, who would then explain how these textures would work, such as they were actually paying close attention to the way that light would fall on those different textural references.
"It wasn’t easy. It was a lot of trial and error, a lot of stick-to-it-iveness from our director not ever letting go of this idea that he wanted these things to feel real." -Norby
"And so, there were these moments where we’d be in Tokyo and we’d be sitting down with the original creators, and just really on a napkin they could sketch these extraordinary basic shapes, and you realize that that was the inspiration, that was the base version of that character, and they provided immense resources, these bible character sheets that show you those base sketches."
"So we’d start with the silhouettes, and then Rob and I would work with a whole series of concept artists to work through something that felt like it was really like it could actually exist, and then we would move into animation. The animation than would prove a bunch of other stuff that we didn’t know, and we’d have to go back and change the shapes and the rest of it so we could actually animate it in a way that would feel real. That’s how we approached the original design."
A great number of Pokémon were planned to appear in the movie (about 100) but it was slimmed down to about sixty species.
"Around 50 or 60 percent of them were in the script. Of those, a lot of them would change along the way. Rob and the writers would write scenes specific to different Pokémon, specific to different Pokémon talents and different Pokémon sizes, and all other considerations in terms of whether they could inhabit the space that the scene was in. That process went for almost two straight years, up until about six months before completion."
It takes about three months to build a creature in VFX, so about six months before the film was done, they were still adding Pokémon that we really believed in.
"There’s probably about 25 that we started in some way and then had to give up because we couldn’t figure out ways to completely get them into the film, and I look forward to making many more if that ever happens in the future."
With the number of creatures that they had to create and different companies and interests to guard the pipeline to make them work had to become quite regimented. Each character went through numerous design phases involving the director Rob Letterman and The Pokémon Company approving the designs for the design/animation teams.
"If we didn’t have enough of the reference for those textures, we would go and shoot those textures and do our own set of photography. It seems bizarrely simple, but it just requires so much extra work from development, and wrapping everyone’s head around the asset build itself."
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