DS3 - ANM 375: WEEK 15

Favorite Character Designs

Great character design really is the foundation of what makes the work of Disney, Pixar, Warner Brothers and so many other film and game studios so successful. It's hard to pick favorites, but I particularly enjoy some of the female villain characters Disney has come up with other the years.

There are so many wonderful characterizations of the 'Villainess' in the Disney catalog starting with Maleficent and the The Evil Queen from Snow White, but these villains, while definitely evil, were more cerebral and aloof to me as characters. We all know I love the Rescuers, so no surprise that Madame Medusa is a favorite villainess of mine. Other favorites: Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmations and Yzma from the Emperor's New Groove:

Starting with Cruella De Vil, these nasty antagonists really started to take on a exaggerated personality of their own. The visual character designs are fantastic but so too are the vocalization performances that really sell the uniqueness of these individuals. The emotional swings these characters demonstrate are truly astounding. Trying to keep the character 'on-model' must have been a real challenge for the animators at the time.

On a side note, The Emperor's New Groove is actually one of my favorite Disney movies and unfortunately underrated IMO. I find David Spade as annoying as anyone, but somehow he works in the role of the spoiled brat emperor Kuzco. The character arc of this character is pretty convincing and I can't stop laughing at the Patrick Warburton's hilariously dim-witted Kronk, Yzma's side-kick through the film. I recommend this fun diversion if you haven't seen it.

How To Train Your Dragon is one of my favorite films... and it's sequel one of my least favorites. The 3D human character design style of this film takes some time to warm up to, but it is appealing, partly due to great writing, good voice casting and of course, the amazing Toothless. Looking at the character cast as a whole, you really see how varied the silhouettes are. The character design along with great posing telegraphs the personality of each quite well:

Somehow the sequel didn't work at all. I definitely hated the story direction of this film, but part of the lack of appeal was in the character design as well. Taking place several years after the original, the younger characters had to 'grow up' in appearance; a good amount of appeal was lost, particularly the design of Hiccup and Astrid, and the result I thought was pretty bland overall:

One more of my favorites, this time from the video gaming sphere. In developing Team Fortress 2, the team at Valve looked hard at character design principles from Disney, et.al. The original Team Fortress game relied on more realistic and rather bland visuals; in order to stand out from the throngs of massively-multiplayer shooter games flooding the market, the sequel needed something more. The new direction had a ton of personality and appeal as is evident in the silhouettes alone: