‘Bumblebee’ Through the Eyes of an Animator

One scene in the new Transformers movie “Bumblebee” finds the title character alone in a house. His teen caregiver (Hailee Steinfeld) has been hiding him in the garage, but he finds his way out, touching everything he shouldn’t and, because he’s giant and metal, causing a lot of inadvertent destruction. This bumbling, charming moment plays out as it might in a classic animated comedy, not in a high-stakes action movie.

A major departure from the Michael Bay-directed “Transformer” movies, this prequel has a lot of moments with an animated feel and a central character that has a different, more sensitive expressiveness than he’s shown before. That was the aim of the film’s director, Travis Knight, who has built his career on animation as the chief executive of the Oregon stop-motion studio Laika and the director of its lyrical film “Kubo and the Two Strings.”

“I’m a child of the ’80s,” Knight said in a phone interview, “and I wanted to try to rekindle that childhood sense of intrigue, wonder and discovery I felt when I found Transformers for the first time.”

Yes, there are still robot fights on the planet Cybertron, along with climactic action sequences with the fate of the world on the line. But in “Bumblebee,” Knight, with the screenwriter Christina Hodson, is aiming to tell a more personal, character-driven story of the sort that distinguishes his work at Laika. The film’s positive reviews have celebrated that shift. In The New York Times, Glenn Kenny wrote that it is “cleverly plotted, neatly allusive and has dialogue you can envision real people and, um, real Transformers speaking.”

The emotional center is the relationship between Steinfeld’s character, Charlie, and Bumblebee, whom she discovers after acquiring him, in Volkswagen Beetle form, from her uncle’s scrapyard.

Knight had a template of Bumblebee from the previous movies but was set on going a different way with him here. Since this was a prequel, he wanted to hark back to the ’80s design of the original Transformers cartoon. So he opted for a simpler look, one that focused more on the character’s emotional core than on his mechanical bells and whistles.

“When I first started talking to my designers about how I wanted Bumblebee to be very expressive, they started adding more and more detail to the face,” he said. “And when I saw the first pass of that, I was like, no, you guys are going in the wrong direction. It’s not about adding more detail, it’s about stripping detail away and making the detail that remains meaningful.”

Because Bumblebee isn’t able to speak (his voice box was removed by a Decepticon), Knight saw the eyes as the place where the character could be the most revealing. So they are larger and brighter and tell more of a story on their own than in the Michael Bay films. (Think Brad Bird’s animated fable “The Iron Giant” with a little “E.T.” mixed in.)

The mechanics of the character were streamlined as well, rounding his edges more and reducing the parts to fewer, but still transformable, segments.

“Instead of the upper arm being made out of 50 small pieces, it might be made out of three large panels supported by small parts,” said the visual effects supervisor, Jason Smith, of Industrial Light and Magic. He has worked on four “Transformers” films, beginning with the 2007 installment.

Did this simplification of the design make it easier for the artists? Not exactly.

“It’s not much of a savings in terms of effort,” Smith said. “Because when you replace these multiple pieces with a large panel, you have to make that panel really read as something physical and real.” So more effort is put into how the paint and the metal look and what it takes to make Bumblebee feel like he’s moving in more emotional ways.

In working through how he would shoot the film, particularly those tender moments between Charlie and Bumblebee, Knight felt that the best way to explain his vision to the crew was through storyboards. Rather than using designers who storyboard live-action films, he called on artists from Laika to help with his visualizations. “They know my approach and philosophy,” he said, mentioning that the storyboards he wanted didn’t show only camera placement but also aspects of the emotional performance.

To storyboard the moment in the garage when Charlie discovers her car is actually Bumblebee, Knight used the artist Emanuela Cozzi. “The scene is more or less the heart and soul of the movie,” he said. “And it’s mostly done through facial expressions, gestures and body language.”

For lighter moments that involve sight gags and a more comedic performance from Bumblebee, Knight employed Julián Nariño, who drew storyboards for the coming stop-motion Laika comedy “Missing Link.” One of those moments is a beach scene in which Charlie teaches Bumblebee, with mixed results, how to hide from people who may do him harm.

And to help create a greater connection on the set between Charlie and Bumblebee, the props and special effects teams built part of a practical Bumblebee: head, chest and upper arms. “The paint was detailed, the eyes would light up,” Smith said. “It was a really faithful copy of Bumblebee at full size.” He said it was useful for all departments, but particularly for visual effects, because it could show computer animators how much light should be reflecting off the chrome, the shade of yellow the robot should be in a particular room, and so on.

All of these details were in an effort to create a Transformer that felt fresh onscreen. “I know I have exacting standards,” Knight said. “But we all had to work together to make this robot as expressive as it could be.”

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