Female Leaders of Animation

Cartoon Scoop interviews Jennifer Yuh Nelson (director), Melissa Cobb (producer), and Clare Knight (editor), three of the women who were key to Kung Fu Panda 3's current success.

Jennifer Yuh Nelson: ... We did two films, because the first two films were so embraced by the Chinese audiences we wanted to make something we could push further and since this is a co-production, it seemed like the perfect time to create something that felt native to Chinese audiences. Usually they have to deal with a dubbing situation or subtitles, and it takes you out of the experience. That’s why we wanted to make something that felt really immersive for them, but it takes a lot of work to make 2 versions of a movie! You have hundreds of artists you’re dealing with across the world and the scale of this movie was insane—we had a parallel pipeline going on where you had two versions recording Mandarin voice actors, getting it to be funny for Mandarin audiences going beyond a straight translation, and then animating it and lighting it, it’s a lot of work.

LC: What kinds of differences are there in the two stories?

JYN: The visual differences for example included of course adjusting the facial acting, if they ad-libbed something we’d have to account for that. ...

LC: The 3D in this film and in the whole franchise has such a unique and believable quality but it’s very otherworldly. Both the computer animation and the 3D stereoscopic vision.

JYN: One of my favorite things about the film is the look of it. We never go for realism. I think a lot of time when people go for 3D that’s the mistake. Because we’re never going for full realism—for computer generated live action films like Avatar the goal is realism, to make the audience feel like they are seeing something that is real. Lord of the Rings had character design and environments to make it look real, whereas we aren’t going for that, we are going for something that is theatrically, viscerally, and emotionally real. That’s why the colors pop, you have hard edges, you have graphic shapes, even the explosions and bits of dust that are kicked up have an art directed shape to them that fit the look of the film. That’s actually really hard to do, but it creates a cohesive and very real world of its own. ...

JYN: Never once in my 18 years here has anyone said “you can do this because you’re a woman” or “you can’t do this because you are a woman”. It’s never even come up. ...

Clare Knight: What I find at DreamWorks is it’s always about strengths and what people are good at. But with Jenn and Melissa and I, three women working on one film, I’ve really enjoyed it because we’ve worked enough together that we’ve developed out own language. ...

Jennifer Yuh Nelson's earlier TAG podcast is here and here.