INTERVIEW: Pixar Animator Becki Tower on ‘ELEMENTAL’

Last Friday I had the privilege of speaking with veteran Pixar Character Animator Becki Tower. Tower, who has been working on Pixar features since Up (2009), broke down how animation works, what makes a character come to life, and how Elemental, the latest Pixar film which stars a girl made of fire and a boy made of water, broke new ground in animation beyond what we can even comprehend!

BOSTON HASSLE: I saw Elemental last night and I still don’t understand how it worked.

BECKI TOWER: It’s crazy, right?

BH: I was really impressed with the character animation. The water people had waves on their heads that were curling, but not really? Can you tell me how you ended up with Pixar and what was the first thing you worked on? Was it always character animation?

BT: Yesterday was my 15-year anniversary with Pixar. I came in through the internship. I did study character animation, so that was 100% all I wanted to do. Pixar is so big people usually specialize. I came in as a character animation intern, did the internship, which is about three months long. It’s classroom-based, so they strip you down to the basics, like having you animate a bouncing ball. They build you up and you get into more sophisticated acting. That was the summer program, and in the fall they kept me and I became a fixer. A fixer is entry-level– you’re doing quality control, really. If they call “fix” on a shot, you go in there and work on somebody else’s shot and fix it for them. It’s a good way to learn from other animators who have designed the shots from scratch. That was on Up, and I got into crowds on Toy Story 3, which was background animation. That’s another step up in complexity. After that I got into shots. I was on Brave for a long while, then Finding Dory, Coco, The Good Dinosaur. A lot of films!

I always knew I wanted to be an animator. I know I’m odd like that; most people don’t know what they want to do, but this was it for me.

BH: It’s always felt like Pixar has always been good at fostering talent like that.

BT: They’re amazing at investing in potential. The interns all show talent, but they look at the potential. Pixar will invest in people in the long run. They understand it will take years for people to get to their peak of performance, and they’ll put that time in. Our internship program is super important to us.

BH: When you say shot animation, do you mean full scenes or specific motions?

BT: It’s really “hero animation,” where you animate characters in the foreground. You are responsible for the main performance of any given shot. A newer animator would be doing the background movement.

BH: I know there are a lot of shows that are storyboard-based, but I know Disney and maybe Pixar assign animators specific characters?

BT: It’s open to the person. For Finding Dory I animated one character for nine months and I loved it. For other movies I animated a bunch of characters. You’re kind of like an athlete, where your leaders will cast you according to your talent and your preference. So if you have a preference to stick with a certain kind of character, usually they can accommodate that. And if you have a preference to stick to a specific kind of animation – maybe it’s physicality, maybe it’s subtlety, maybe it’s high emotion – they can usually cater to that as well. Your leaders are always looking to grow your next level of skill, so they might say “Hey, Becki, you’re really good at physicality, but let’s try you in some sensitive acting shots. I’m gonna force you to go into a comedic shot, just to grow you, just to push you, just to make you uncomfortable in a good way.”

BH: There’s always something in a Pixar movie where I can tell they’re trying to create a new visual language. When you’re animating, what’s the number one thing that tells you, “It’s alive now, it’s ready?” What is the tipoff?

BT: Technically you’re moving around a puppet, but so much of where we live and emote comes from our face, specifically our eyes. So I say if you’re short on time, or you really have to be hyperfocused on getting something to live sooner rather than later, you put a lot of effort into the facial and eye animation. Even a simple breath in a pose goes a long way. A character can die in the eyes, a character can live in the eyes. You’d be surprised how much life you can get out of the top half of the face.

BH: I remember reading when Toy Story 3 came out that Woody’s face had “over 500 nodes for expression” and wondering what that even means. The first thing I noticed in 3 were the trees swaying in the background and I knew Pixar had really leveled up since 2. For Elemental specifically, I am so fascinated by Wade and Ember’s characters because… what are they? What are they made of? They’re fire and water but they have a shape, and there’s something that’s keeping them together. What is determining that shape, program-wise? Is it a memory foam sort of thing?

BT: It starts with an animation rig that looks very human. There are some extra joints that could make it look noodly. We are intentionally over-animating and adding in extra levels of physics to break up the anatomy so it doesn’t just feel like an elbow. The same can be said for the torsos and the legs, we’re constantly trying to break up the shapes and give you something that feels very fluid or gaseous. On top of that, once we’re done, we also have these combs that represent Ember’s hair shape that we’d use for overlap. Once we’re done with animation and we send it to simulation, they are actually simulating on top of what we’ve done. It’s a marriage between a fire simulation that lives on top and within our character animation. Yes, we are controlling the silhouette value, we are controlling the shape language of what you’re seeing on screen. But you’re also seeing simulators that are adding a whole level of complexity within Ember’s figure. 

Same with Wade, the water. We had the wave shape we’d animate back and forth on his head. They’re simulating water in it. It’s crazy. It’s the first time I’d ever even heard of something like that. Simulation matched with character animation. We were holding hands in what the end result looks like, which is scary because simulation comes after animation. There’s a lot of trust fall that’s happening. You just gotta hope that relationship and visual language maintains across the whole film. I think it just looks beautiful.

BH: They do stretch and grow, but you can always tell what fire is Ember and what water is Wade.

BT: The rig itself had so many controls that you could just squash it and make the whole body pliable, like Gumby. You could really do anything, which begs the question – what’s on model? At what point are you breaking something where it’s too far off? With Wade, you could do anything you wanted and it kind of made sense. With fire you could have her head disappear as water hits it and play with transparency. It was just incredible.

BH: With Inside Out and Soul, the characters are particulate light dots, but they don’t stretch or get small or anything. There’s a part where Ember is exhausted and she just shrinks a bit.

BT: We even have controls where it’s like a zipper effect – you could almost zip it transparent and zip it opaque. You could turn that geometry on and off for acting. You could shrink the actual head. We had tons of flexibility as animators to make it look anyway the emotions required.

BH: Was there a style guide you had setting out?

BT: Yes, that’s the responsibility of the leaders in animation. They set the tone for the expectations of a character, the cans and can’ts. We have a documentation system that gets passed out to all the animators to inform what the end product should be. We set up the stakes. “She would do this, she wouldn’t do this. Physically this is okay to see onscreen. If you run into a problem with her pupils, do this.”

BH: At a certain point it just seems like math.

BT: It’s all programming, it’s all physics. It’s all handcrafted. That’s the fun thing about animation. Technically we’re using software to achieve this but it’s 100% crafted, every single frame. It’s beautifully personal, the experience of animating.

BH: What would you say to someone who’s starting out in animation?

BT: Study life. That’s what we’re doing, we’re capturing life in every shot. Get a sketchbook, draw what you see, try to understand the emotions around you. There is no cliche for what any specific emotion needs to look like. The more you can study life, relationships, physical anatomy, acting, the more your stuff is believable and resonates. They’ll say, “That just feels right.” Because it’s well-observed and exists in the world out there.

BH: I assume there’s a lot of secret Pixar projects you can’t tell me about.

BT: There’s a lot of features in production, there’s so much cool stuff happening.

Elemental
2023
dir. Peter Sohn
109 min.

Opens in theaters everywhere Friday, 6/16