Building Animal Dolls

Building the dolls for animals was quite a bit simpler, partly due to the fact that I had already gone through the trial and error process of building human dolls, and also partly because four legs are more easily balanced than two.

For both dogs and cats, having a fifth limb with full mobility was important for the animation of tails.

The animation I had planned for several animals required extra features. For dogs with large, flappy ears, I made articulatable skeletons of the ears. For panting dogs, I made several sizes of interchangeable tongues and included a mobile jaw in the skeleton.

For Hugh, who would appear frequently thoughout the film, I made several dolls, some of which had better movement capabilities than others, and some of which were entirely plasticene.

Mark was both the simplest character to make and the character I made the most. He is pretty much 2D and has no skeleton. His animation on the outside of his fish bowl is just a 24-frame cycle of his back fin swimming with some extra eye animation.

In two different scenes, Mark exits his fish bowl – for these scenes I created a 3D Mark.