As the Annecy Festival has grown in scale so has the lavishness of the presentations, with so many streamers taking to the Bonlieu’s biggest stage to show off their entire slate of upcoming animation work. This year, Warner Bros. seemed to have one of the farthest-reaching lineup (even as their commissioning and general support of animation on Max has cratered, not long ago deleting entire shows). Here are the highlights of what we saw from Warner Bros. Animation’s Annecy line-up.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
By far the highest profile presentation on the slate — perhaps throughout the festival — was the new look at Kenji Kamiyama’s anime feature film Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The panel itself — featuring Kamiyama, producers Joseph Chou, Jason DeMarco and Phillipa Boyens and moderated by Andy Serkis (who, along with Peter Jackson, has since been confirmed to be an executive producer) — circled a lot of the same talking points as the presentation from the 2023 Annecy presentation.
The team as a whole underlined both how Lord of the Rings was a perfect fit for anime, but also the idiosyncrasies of the project – “we didn’t want to make an animated Peter Jackson film, we wanted a Kenji Kamiyama film,” says DeMarco.This time the team had some (somewhat rough) footage to show, with 20 minutes from what seems to be the opening of the film. The clip, with opening narration from Éowyn (Miranda Otto, reprising her role from the live action film trilogy), talks of a figure that means something to her own character arc, Hera, daughter of Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. “Don’t look for her in the old tales,” the character warns with some familiar melancholy around Middle Earth’s patriarchal warrior culture.
The footage was dotted with familiar in-world texts such as an old Rohan poem being performed as a tavern song, or Hera recounting the same story of shieldmaidens that Éowyn would also tell later. The imagery itself, perhaps simply due to it being unfinished, could be a little awkward: such as its incorporation of 3D environments that felt separated from the characters or some repetitive and stiff acting in scenes of quieter drama and courtroom tension — though a fight later in the scene showed a lot more polish and precision. But engaging voice performances, particularly from Brian Cox as Helm, felt captivating, with the right kind of sincere high fantasy speak that turned a little Shakespearean with Cox’s line readings. After political negotiations collapse thanks to Helm killing Freca, a rival house member, with a single punch (something you can find in Tolkien’s appendices), a sizzle reel teased events to come after the banishment of Freca’s son, Wulf: large scale horse battles, villages burning, general chaos befitting a political tale about a nation of warriors.
The Amazing World of Gumball
In the festival’s Making Of strand, typically hosted out of the Bonlieu’s Petite Salle rather than the Grande, the more intimate setting for The Amazing World of Gumball preview session didn’t belie a more contained tone. If anything it was one of the funniest and most raucous presentations of the week, befitting the series’ chaotic tone and visual construction.
It opened, of course, with a little catchup video on what the crew had been doing since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown; the video itself consisted of screaming and warping faces interspersed throughout apocalyptic news blasts, though ended with the title card: “… but we survived.” The panel consisted of executive producers and showrunners Ben Bocquelet and Matthew Layzell, series producer Emma Fernando, the show’s new composer Xav Clarke, and the SVP of Series at Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe, Sarah Fell. Together they ran through each component of the new series, explaining their methods and ethos along the way. First the team talked through their sitcom-inspired writing, where Gumball’s specialty is taking mundane plots from the creators’ lives and finding the absurd in them, with a writers room populated with talent found from places like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The used example was “The Burger”, the main episode shown off at the panel and one based on Bocquelet and Layzell’s experiences with trying to eat healthy. Layzell continued into a hilarious run-through of the storyboards, where he did the voices (and SFX!) for each cut, as the scene of Gumball and Darwin trying to turn down a burger escalates into an actual car crash.
The plot of the episode follows the two as they try to source ethical food, and find that there are no good options, in part because everything in their area goes back to a billionaire called Mr Bilderburger. The design segment of the panel showed that Bilderburger went from resembling the Monopoly man, to a caricature of Elon Musk’s face on a burger bun, to being a literal burger, made to look like a hand puppet (thanks to a 3D model from French studio Bobbypills).
This lead into another key component of the session as a whole. “Gumball uses a lot of different styles and methods and it’s a ball-ache to put all together,” said Bocquelet. The team ran through their layout stages and toying with the timing of visual gags and blocking composition, before going into how they built backgrounds with CG and creating depth through different elements in the foreground and background. Following a clip of some rough animation, Xav Clarke stepped forward to discuss his part: the music. Taking over from Ben Locket (who once “had to set a violin on fire to get the right sound”), Clarke spoke on how the music compliments the shows madness, either accentuating the outrageous gags or bringing the show back down to earth. It eventually lead into a little song performance from the whole panel as a sort of apology for not having more material to show than what they had, itself a funny encapsulation of the whimsical and anarchic spirit of Gumball. And yes, they’re still working on the movie (this was the first thing asked in the audience Q&A).
Creature Commandos
The profile of French animation house Bobbypills has accelerated in recent years — now to the point that they are producing “the vanguard” of DC Studios’ entire new narrative universe with Creature Commandos, the first project to be released under the studio’s new directive under James Gunn. The presentation had something of an ominous start however, in the form of a long and arduous message from Gunn himself, which gradually transformed from a harmless audience greeting into a wearying speech full of corporate buzzwords, which began to beg the question: can Bobbypills’ idiosyncacies thrive while catering to the requirements of a ‘cinematic universe’? Thankfully the rest of the presentation assuaged those fears. While light on finished animation, the designs shown off by producer Rick Morales of Warner Brothers Animation and creative director Yves “Balak” Bigerel of French animation studio Bobbypills, looked very promising.
Perhaps Gunn’s video should have focused more on his brief that he sent to the two, which they showed on screen — speaking about the tone of Creature Commandos and its aesthetic routes — citing Golgo 13, classic Universal horror films and 1960s war movies for visual reference. Morales elaborated on who the Commandos were in the comics, a macabre spin on military action film ensembles like The Dirty Dozen or The A Team.
The designs themselves were wonderful, in some cases a blend of ’80s comic book vividness and murkier, Mike Mignola-adjacent pulpiness, along with Bobbypills’ pet visual interests. Morales and Balak explained that the designs began while the scripts were still being written, the two teams influencing each other’s work. The voice performers themselves had an impact on the design work — the two cited the early line readings of Stranger Things star David Harbour on his character Frankenstein changing the look from “mono-expressive” to something more complex, also resulting in a slightly softer silhouette befitting the character’s temperament.
Bobbypills and Warner Bros. Animation both had their own iterations of every character, taking different swings on the eclectic group. One such character, The Bride (Balak claims she’s his favorite), cycled through an incredible range of interpretations, from what they called “Italo Pulp” to a more punkish look to the more streamlined but vivid result. GI Robot, a bot who only exists to kill Nazis (and does so with a smile, according to the team), went through some amusing tests — one resembling a trash can and another more of a boxy, ’50s sci-fi robot before landing on the friendlier, wide-eyed result. Dr Phosphorus (was also a fascinating, challenging character — requiring a number of VFX tests due to his flaming skin, the team incorporating Jack Kirby’s ‘Kirby Krackle’ effect while considering how he would work in other mediums.
This is where the apparent limitations of the work crept in. Some of the designs — character and location alike, had to look like live-action counterparts. Of the backgrounds that they showed, a more expressive take on DC’s Belle Reve facility, bathed in spooky green light on a hill, was substituted for a plainer, more synergetic version that appeared like it does in the movies, a decidedly less interesting change. But thankfully in the other locations core to the show, there was more freedom to play — the “failed fairytale city” of Poko Castle and the dingy environs of Frankenstein’s Lab had more distinct ideas behind them.
Balak spoke of utilizing CG to help with the more complex environments, and later in the layout stage to test composition, spacing and timing, but switching to 2D when CG became “a pain in the ass” and less expressive than 2D. A rough scene with a fight between Dr. Phosphorus and Rick Flag Sr. did well to offset my concerns about the show’s position in this “unified” DC slate — the sequence looks to be both playful and exciting, while Morales and Balak also highlighted that they wanted a lot of downtime to explore the characters, rather than just knock them together like action figures. Hopefully their wants will be what define Creature Commandos more than the requirements of it to work within a bigger plan, especially in a story about misfits.
Kambole Campbell is a freelance writer and critic based in London, whose work has appeared in Empire Magazine, Sight & Sound, The Independent, The Guardian and Polygon.
