Detective Pikachu is the first live-action film in the
Pokémon franchise's twenty year history. It showed us all exactly what many Pokémon creatures would look like in the real world - with realsitic textures, hair and whatnot. The studio we have to thank for this is the Moving Picture Company (MPC) who previously worked on
Blade Runner 2049.
The VFX supervisor representing MPC on
Detective Pikachu was Pete Dionne. Dionne recently shared with
DigitalArtsOnline exactly how the team went about bringing Mr. Mime to life without the end result being incredibly creepy. As Mr. Mime is a lot more human in appearance than any other Pokémon, the VFX team weren't going for realism with him but rather the opposite.
The character design of Mr. Mime from the anime (above) is very simplistic compared to the other Pokémon we worked with. He’s got a humanoid form but with super 'cartoony' proportions and face. Honestly he’s creepy, and us imagining him into life as a human would have fueled nightmares without a doubt.
Giving Mr. Mime realistic muscles and human skin would have proved troubling to viewers, so the team placed less of an emphasis on making the Pokémon look like it could actually be a living thing. "Early on we decided that the only way to pull off this character was to try and not make him look like an organic, breathing creature but go in the opposite connection, making him look as synthetic as possible."
"Instead of trying to make Mr. Mime's arms and face look like flesh with anatomically-correct muscle structure, we built and shaded him as if he’s just a huge blob of silicone. The lights then shine on him and make his whole head and arms glow from that synthetic, latex-like material."
Instead of making Mr. Mime look real, their mission was instead to bring him into a live-action setting without the result falling into the dreaded "Uncanny Valley." They accomplished this by making Mr. Mime's body appear to be made out of latex and rubber, therefore out brains would know for sure that what we were looking at wasn't alive.
"His skin looks very recognizable as being real-world materials but it’s clearly not organic. The same thing with his red shoulder pads. We looked at those from the cartoon and decided to make them red rubber kick-balls with that same kind of textured surface. And for his torso we based the whole thing upon foam."
"It's like when you have a Nerf football and you squeeze it and it just has those little micro-wrinkles in there and you can see every pore tightened up loosen as you let go of it," Dionne continued.
We built that same thing into his body so that it explicitly felt like foam. He wasn't a living, breathing human, so we were really able to have a lot of fun because of the forms, especially his facial performance. We could really push it without it looking creepy, as if it was a real human falling into the 'uncanny valley.' And because he had so many of these recognizable photo-realistic shading features on him plus lighting features, he also never really felt too cartoony, despite him having the most cartoonish performance in the whole film.
Ace detective Harry Goodman goes mysteriously missing, prompting his 21-year-old son, Tim, to find out what happened. Aiding in the investigation is Harry's former Pokémon partner, wise-cracking, adorable super-sleuth Detective Pikachu. Finding that they are uniquely equipped to work together, as Tim is the only human who can talk with Pikachu, they join forces to unravel the tangled mystery.