Series Craft: Director Robert Valley Explains His Approach To Adapting Marc Laidlaw’s ‘400 Boys’ For ‘Love, Death & Robots’

In the fourth volume of Love, Death & Robots, Tim Miller’s Netflix adult animation anthology, Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning director, animator, and illustrator Robert Valley returns to direct his third installment for the show, “400 Boys.”

The piece is based on Marc Laidlaw’s 1983 post-apocalyptic short story of the same name which was adapted by Miller for the anthology. Valley said Miller selected the story for him, and he was immediately intrigued and challenged by the surreal battle between telekinetically-empowered humans and the giant baby monsters that come to wipe them out.

Valley said it was a creative puzzle to find a way to interpret the story in a manner that would satisfy both “Netflix [and] Tim, so he won’t lament his decision that he gave you this story that he loves so much, and how I’m bringing something to the table by providing my little angle on the creative part of it.”

As a 20-year veteran animator and director for Passion Pictures, Valley said projects like Love, Death & Robots, in which he has to serve multiple clients’ needs, make him rise to the creative occasion. “There’s no such thing as limitless freedom in these jobs,” he told Cartoon Brew. “If you want to do that, you need to work on your own project. So, you have to thread the needle in a way, and to be honest, I actually really enjoy that.”

Cartoon Brew dug into the inspirations and new territory that “400 Boys” inspired in Valley, as he walked us through the progress for some key scenes featuring the Brothers gang discovery of rival gang leader Hilo who is mourning the loss of his crew at the hands of the 400 Boys.

Cartoon Brew: To establish your take on this singular future in “400 Boys,” did you start with character design or the landscapes?

Robert Valley: There was a holistic approach to the artwork in the very first stages. Right from the beginning, there were a couple of particular sequences that really stuck out in my imagination. One of them was that bridge getting ripped up and thrown at the moon. I remember reading that thinking, “Wow, that evokes really interesting imagery — and weird imagery, as well.” There’s maybe two or three sequences in there that had that evocative, weird, surrealistic thing, so that was a really good place to start building those first few concept images. This was very much a film where the characters are making their way through an environment, and they’re interacting with the environment.

Miller said he envisioned a The Warriors film-like vibe for the gangs. Were there other references you sought out?

The Warriors was the first thing that came to mind when I read the script and I was happy [supervising director] Jen Yuh Nelson told me that Tim was a big The Warriors fan, so we were both thinking the same thing on that one. I felt like I was pretty safe in mining that little bit of reference. I sent some other reference material, and a lot of it had to do with this Brazilian film called City of God. I was trying to do the animated equivalent, in a way, with the characters. One thing about that movie is each character is a main character. There’s no main character with a bunch of sidekicks. Each one is elevated with a level of importance in the story. I wanted to use some of those filmmaking techniques in “400 Boys,” because this was very much a short that featured a lot of different characters. Obviously, you have your leader Slash, and Hilo is another main character. But I didn’t want all the other characters to come across like a bunch of sidekicks.

With Hilo’s introduction sequence, he’s an exposition character providing the Brothers and the audience some context for what he’s experienced that we have no frame of reference for yet. The sequence, from how you block it to the reflection in his glasses, there’s such specificity to it that makes it memorable. What’s your process for boarding?

As we started to get into the story and figuring out the characters, Hilo was shaping up to be the most dynamic character. Slash is the main character, but he remains Slash throughout. I was looking at this Hilo part, thinking, Man, he’s a little bit like Robert Shaw in Jaws, because there’s the scene where they’re in the boat and he launches into the story where he was on the U.S.S. Indianapolis battleship. He witnessed all this carnage and you could tell from his performance that he was a disturbed individual and that he also had a death wish as a result. He’s going to take it right to the end and that’s what makes that character so cool. So, that’s how I wanted to play Hilo in this. When I mentioned that to Jen, she’s like, “Yeah, but it’s more like Tom Hanks playing Sully because the carnage that he witnessed wasn’t 40 years ago. It was that afternoon and we want this character to be right in the immediate aftermath of this traumatic event.” This is how we asked Ed Skrein to play this role. I said, “I want Hilo to be a little crazy. Can you give us crazy and triggered?” He gave it to us! We leaned into that as a result, so everything started to go off in that kind of direction.

There’s a really subtle but effective integration of 2d and 3d animation throughout the short. As this is a technique you’ve used going back to the Gorillaz music videos, how intuitive is that process now?

Passion [Pictures] perfected that technique. Even from a script stage, we look at it. Our technical director’s name is Christian Mills and he’ll look at the script, and he’ll identify all the scenes which are earmarked for 3d. But there’s a trick to that. We work with a guy called Martial Coulon, a French fellow, and he uses After Effects, a 2d software program, to achieve this 3d look. He has all these tricks but the end result is that we get a 3d effect that integrates perfectly with the 2d. What we don’t want is to have a 2d film with a scene that’s sort of easily recognizable as a 3d element so it feels like it’s not part of the world.

In that Hilo sequence against the 400 Boys, was there anything you wanted to achieve that was out of the ordinary and that you were particularly pleased with in the end?

Well, this is Hilo at his craziest. He gets on that car and he starts to holler. He starts to rant and rave like a mad man would, which is real fun performance stuff. Then there’s a lull for a moment as it’s building, the tension before the reveal of the 400 Boys. We had created this moment early on in the storyboards that really was quite a pregnant pause before all the chaos starts to ensue. We couldn’t make that long enough. We just like that space where there’s nothing, and there’s always this tendency to try to fill empty spaces. It’s just a natural tendency, right across the board with animation, effects, music, sound effects compositing. So, it was an exercise in restraint to try to maintain that. Then things start to erupt, and lead to that first reveal shot and and then you’re off and running from there. It’s a story about two films: the preamble where you’re establishing the characters and then they make their way to the battlefront, and the confrontation happens, and then it breaks into a different kind of film.

Was it difficult to settle on your presentation of the 400 Boys?

All of that was dictated by the short story. When Marc Laidlaw was writing, you’re led along to believe that things are going to be a certain way. It’s presenting itself as a typical kind of a monster movie. And then when it reveals itself, you’re like, “What!” It’s a little bit like throwing the bridge at the moon; I wanted to maintain that level of riding that line of just being really cool and a little bit absurd. And so that was very much part of the performance. We were trying to find the right reference for the 400 Boys to make them come across a certain way.

Visually “Ice” and “400 Boys” couldn’t be more different in terms of their color palettes and the look of their landscapes.

This story was a hot planet, a lot different from “Ice.” The colors in “Ice” were very particular. It was challenging to make that look rich and cold at the same time. I had ventured into greens on “Ice,” which I rarely ever do. Green is a color that I haven’t really introduced into my palette yet. On this one, we ventured into some other colors that I’ve never really used before comfortably. All that comes from Patricio Betteo, who’s the art director. He’s a little bit more courageous when it comes to colors. He’ll give me these documents and I’ll look at them and go, “Really?” I gotta get my head around it. But once I start to play with it and use his color settings — because he’s got a very particular way of achieving these looks with a lot of subtlety in there — it’s just fun to play with it. I didn’t really want to introduce a lot of color into this particular one. It was very much about restraint.

​​