With Ultraman: Rising,” animator-turned-director Shannon Tindle combined his love of the superhero anime franchise with a parenting drama wrapped around ILM’s dazzling 2D animated look drawn from manga and anime.
It all comes together in an epic water battle involving Ultraman (Christopher Sean), Ultradad (Gedde Watanabe), and baby Kaiju, Emi. First Ultraman and Emi fight Mecha Gigangtron, only to discover that the real Gigantron (Emi’s mom) is still alive underneath. She then joins Ultradad as part of a foursome to fight Dr. Onda, head of the Kaiju Defense Force, who commands the robotic Destroyer.
Tindle, who participated in a recent press confab at Skywalker Ranch and ILM in San Francisco, told IndieWire that his choice of water for the climactic battle was purely economical. He couldn’t afford to destroy a city and crowds. “I knew that I could make it on the water, and it would allow me to have other important things in the film,” he said. “And we were making sure that we approach this cautiously, that there’s no action fatigue. And we had a lot of beats in there to progress the story and the [hero’s] journey.”
This is where Ken Sato truly becomes Ultraman, his dad redeems himself, Emi evolves into a fighting force, Gigantron escapes from Onda to become a mother, and Onda totally succumbs to the dark side after losing his family to Gigantron.
“Family looking out for family and healing those old wounds,” added Tindle (“Lost Ollie”). “And the discovery that it’s not just a mech, it’s the real mom underneath there. That changed the dynamic. It’s the mother of your adopted child. And now you have to do everything to save her. Now you’ve taken on what your father’s philosophy was, trying to protect the Kaiju.”
Tindle played with Ultraman action figures to work out choreography and scale. He was joined by co-director John Aoshima (his CalArts buddy) and members of ILM. They leaned into Guillermo del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” (which ILM also worked on) for its camera work and created their own virtual crane shots.
Visually, Tindle adopted a rich color palette with production designer Marcos Mateu-Mestre (“How to Train Your Dragon”) and wanted to emulate marker renderings from manga covers and camera moves from anime, where you track in and follow an Ultraman punch running toward Mecha Gigantron. “That’s when the background turns into speed lines, where you have your impact frames,” Tindle said. “I love impact frames where the whole screen goes black-and-white into an illustration for a second. Those are the kinds of things that we wanted to make sure we put in. Distorting the background and that heightened moment emotionally. It all had to lean into the emotion of it.”
ILM, which hadn’t done an animated feature since the Oscar-winning “Rango,” was all in on the director’s 2D stylization. Led by VFX supervisor Hayden Jones (“Lost Ollie”), they created new tools to handle the melding of illustrative-looking animation with dynamic camera and lighting. This covered line work, compositing, marker watercoloring, and a filtering system.
“You’ve got all of the Ultras, Kaiju, and the Destroyer robot that transforms halfway through the sequence, and they all end up in a roiling ocean on a stormy night with lightning in the sky,” Jones told IndieWire. “And we were sitting there thinking, ‘OK, how do we bring this together to an amazing end?’”
It began with the art department providing small sketches of color across the sequence, which gave ILM a foundation for lighting it and expressing emotion throughout. “Even though it was set at night, we had acid green-colored skies with purple lightning,” Jones said. “And it was really vibrant. What you do is start breaking it down, trying to understand the story and the emotion and how the visual effects can go hand in hand to really push it forward and make it feel like this absolutely epic end battle.”
The ocean, of course, was the biggest element, and ILM went back and forth between stylization and realism, settling on the former. They wanted a 2D water look with slower timing, similar to the splashes in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Porco Rosso,” where you see the details of the water coming off a body during an impact. It could be a mist or actual droplets, but then it changes perspective with the fighting combatants.
“We started putting in stylized white water breaks on the top of each piece of breaking wave,” Jones continued. “And then behind it, we had textural elements that were procedurally generated that really had this feeling of a hand-drawn pattern that gave the foam that sits on the top of the surface a kind of anime/manga feel. So we put all those together and we started to get the size and the scale of the ocean that we were after, but also the style of the ocean that we were after.”
But, in anime, splashes don’t obey the rules of physics. They erupt out of the ocean and hang for a while. And then, at the right moment, they dramatically fall. “So we came up with a system where we could either procedurally or hand place the splashes as animatable elements,” added Jones. “And we could time those splashes out on an individual basis, if we needed to, and only use simulation to add in the details.”
Throughout Ultraman’s fighting, ILM relied heavily on the impact frame. There’s a great moment when Ultraman runs forward and throws a punch, which comes straight into the camera and flares out of frame. Then, when he connects, ILM flashes several frames in shocking fashion.
“It’s a technique that’s been used in 2D animation for years,” Jones said. “A lot of that influence came from Katsushiro Otomo, who did ‘Akira.’ And we wanted to take that from anime and bring it into the ‘Ultraman: Rising’ style. And so we put a lot of care and attention into the lighting and compositing of individual frames that impact. So we inverted the image and we flashed the image and we changed the contrast.
“We also changed the styling for how it’s shaded for just a few frames. So you’ve got every punch landing. It worked really well in that end battle because you’ve got these huge Ultras vs. Kaijus, and every punch had to land really hard. We always went with a muted tone. So even when we were using color, we were desaturating quite a lot. But what we’d do is invert the color as well. If you’ve got an orange fiery light, then the impact range would probably have a bluish/cyanish hue to it to give you a visual kick.”
There were also “Ultraman” tropes that ILM adopted into this animation style, such as the Ultra Slash (energy buzzsaw) and Ultra Spacium Beam (energy projectile). The speed lines were particularly important, but they avoided motion blur. Instead, they used smearing effects over the frame to provide a sense of motion. But to give it a twist, the lighters and compositors smeared the light, which emboldened light coming through it.
“These are all mainstays of ‘Ultraman,’ and they’ve been around in all of the series in all different guises,” added Jones. “And we really wanted to pay homage to them, really understanding how they’ve always looked, but then move it into how we thought it would feel in our style.”
“Ultraman: Rising” is now streaming on Netflix.