‘Living Between 2D And 3D’: How ‘The Bad Guys 2’ Pushed Its Hybrid Animation Further

For 2022’s The Bad Guys, the team at DreamWorks established a hyper-stylized, graphic look that enhanced CG animation with qualities of traditional hand-drawn works.

Now in theaters, the sequel follows the quintet of anthropomorphic criminal animals living in a fictionalized version of Los Angeles as they try to clean up their reputation. As Ben Willis, head of animation, and Matt Baer, effects supervisor, explained during a recent interview with Cartoon Brew, the scope of this new film surpassed its predecessor, which presented opportunities to expand on what they had already experimented with in the first film.

For The Bad Guys 2, the team was eager to continue pushing the stylization they had implemented by infusing many more 2D elements across all aspects of the production.

“That goes from the way the trees look to the way things move to the textures that you see,” said Baer. “Even the hand-drawn motion blur — we wanted more and more of that to put the audience more into that hybrid state where you’re living between 2D and 3D.”

Willis, who was animation supervisor on the previous outing, explained that the intent was not to change the style but rather to build on the aesthetic choices they had mastered in the first film. “From an animation standpoint, we thought, ‘Can we be a little bit more expressive in certain moments? Can we push the style just a little bit more?’” he said.

“We started watching more anime and brought more people on to throw even crazier anime ideas at us,” added Baer. “That affected all the departments and required us to do a lot more things technically and creatively across the board.”

On the first movie, Baer explained, the artists were essentially inventing on the fly as they tried to figure out the look of the world and the characters. They embraced flexibility, which meant they utilized techniques that were more manual than they would have liked.

“Even a fold in Wolf’s jacket was heavily art-directed, but very bespoke and hand-created,” Baer added. “We like those chunky folds — they’re super cool. They’re 2D-inspired. But on this one, we didn’t want those to be so manual because we wanted to free up our character effects team to do even more new things.”

Each department picked a few manual aspects that they wanted to automate further. For example, Baer recalled that his team redid all of the clothing setups to simplify them even more than before. Now, the production’s clothing artists and the people animating the hair and other character components had more time to iterate on newer things in the film.

By pulling more and more realistic details out of the scene, the effects team enabled Willis’ animators to take more stylistic risks.

“The more we flatten things out, the more the audience is accepting of a really pushed animation style,” Baer said. “If everything was physically accurately rendered, that mismatch might break the illusion for the audience. It’s kind of a circular pattern. If we pull more details out of Wolf’s jacket, that allows you to hit even more stylized poses. The same goes for the car, same goes for anything happening around that city.”

The Bad Guys 2 opens with a high-stakes, impressive chase sequence set in Cairo, Egypt. Featuring incredible stunts happening in a densely populated capital presented specific challenges for the artists. Chief among them was the number of people involved — both the cops chasing the protagonists and the locals going about their day.

“We had to work with rigging, we had to work with crowds, we had to work with a number of different departments just to try to figure out how we could achieve it so that it was possible for the animators to sculpt the performance and do exactly what they wanted to do,” said Willis.

And even though Baer noted that the production generally tried to rein in the more painstaking tasks, the “cop blob” — a large number of police officers that eventually end up piled on top of a single motorcycle during the chase — proved to be a labor-intensive piece.

“One thing we learned on Bad Guys 1 is that quite often we really needed bespoke hand-animated crowds,” Baer said. “A lot more than we had on previous films. We probably overdid it on the Cairo sequence. But we decided at the very beginning: ‘Let’s just make every single cop that jumps on top of that scooter — and there’s 55 at its maximum — all hand-animated.’”

Baer described the Cairo scenes as “heavy,” given how visually congested they are. “There are hundreds of thousands of set dress props down every single alley,” he said. “All of that was meant to give you a slightly different experience than the first show.”

To distinguish the sequel, the team also envisioned wilder stunts in that opening. In order to make it manageable — considering the distance the Bad Guys travel on screen — they broke the sequence into six different neighborhoods, each with its own intricacies.

“There’s a lot trickier choreography on this one,” Baer added. “Because there are so many other moving things happening. Crowds are moving, and things are falling down. We didn’t want to make it feel like animation led the whole thing. We wanted to make it feel like everybody was naturally there, all working together.”

The new movie’s climax occurs on a space shuttle. According to Willis, the extreme situations the characters are placed in required the animation team to go beyond what the characters’ anatomy was originally designed to accommodate and, once more, get closer to hand-drawn animation.

The image of Wolf and his friends trying to go up the rocket to reach the shuttle reminded Willis of the iconic poses of the lead character in Hayao Miyazaki’s caper Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro.

“One of the reasons why that’s one of my favorite shots is because Wolf’s upper body is down, and meanwhile his butt is up in the air while his legs are kicking. And for anyone who’s animated in 3D, these characters are modeled and rigged standing straight up in a T-pose,” Willis explained. “Anytime you get them far away from where they were originally, it takes a little bit more effort and it’s a little bit more challenging — because you start to get axes that are maybe off or things that aren’t quite right.”

Throughout the production, Willis repeatedly referenced 2D animated films, trying to pull from them and infuse the world of The Bad Guys with the freedom the technique offers.

“The Bad Guys is not a hundred percent anime, but it’s not a hundred percent traditional 3D animation,” Willis said. “We find this interesting — I like to call it sophisticated — intersection where we don’t just hold a cel like anime, but sometimes we do, kind of. But we still have just a little bit of hair moving, or we have a little bit of motion that’s still on them.”

The goal, Willis said, is for the animation to still feel grounded and “not necessarily cut out frames that are just being held there.” The result avoids the stiffness that can sometimes hinder 3D animation, while also embracing the way 3D facilitates creativity.