MakingOf recently paid a visit to Industrial Light and Magic in San Francsico, CA. We sat down with Animation Supervisor Tim Harrington, whose previous credits include "Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," as he described some of the creatures of “The Last Airbender.”
“When we start designing creatures here at ILM, we throw out a wide variety of different options for the director,” says Harrington, “and we might have something that’s completely different than from what’s in the show. In the beginning, maybe we went too far off the model from the show and the creators of the show did have a say in guiding us into something that was a little more recognizable as being from the cartoon.”
Harrington went on to describe the different creatures taken from the original show and how they were recreated for the film.
For the character of Momo, Harrington said, “He’s basically a lemur and the design of Momo’s body was basically that of a Black and White Lemur and the Ringtail Lemur of Madagascar. Whenever we start creating these creatures, we always look at nature first. One of the coolest things about Momo is that he’s a bat hybrid and his wings and how he flies are based on the movements of the Giant Fruit Bat…Even though the movement of Momo is based on real lemurs, Night (Shyamalan) had a bunch of ideas about his personality and he thought of the character as a street kid, someone who is kind of an opportunist.”
On the character of Appa: “The cool thing about Appa is that I kind of thought of him as a combination of the Millennium Falcon and Chewbacca. He’s a sidekick character, but he’s also the ride; He gets the kids from location to location. It was difficult to imagine how a six-legged mammal would move in nature. When we were researching this character, we looked at a wide variety of animals: polar bears, bison, elephants to get the physics and the weight right, and we also looked at beavers, oddly enough, just to figure out the movement of the tail…Night thought of this character as the big, quiet kid in the class. He’s really quiet and calm and has it together, he’s a sort of gentle giant.”
Some of the more dangerous shots required the creation of a digital rendering of the main character, Aang: “One thing we had to do with our digital Aang was something we call ‘head-replacement shots.’ So, originally, we were just going to use animated Aang for wide shots where he’s really small and you could get away with making him animated. But at the last minute, they were shooting this shot, and Noah Ringer, who is actually a really good martial artist, but this shot was deemed just a little too dangerous for a child actor to do. So they shot it with his stunt double but we couldn’t use it because you knew right away that it wasn’t Noah, it’s obviously a stunt double, so we had to replace the head with a digital Aang”
On the Spirit Dragon: “Night didn’t want a typical medieval dragon, he wanted something with a more Eastern flair, something we’ve never seen in movies before. The dragon represents the sort of ‘wise old man’ archetype in the film and he ended up being one of the most complex creatures that we worked on.”
On the Komodo Rhino: “This is a hybrid of a Komodo Dragon and a rhinoceros and basically the Fire Benders ride these things into battle. Night envisioned these things as unruly creatures, that if they weren’t being controlled by their riders, they would just run off and eat somebody.
