The Technical Artistry of MOANA 

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The Technical Artistry of MOANA — A Conversation with the Effects Team of Disney’s 56th Animated Classic

Michael John Lee on Nov 02, 2016. Posted in Editorials, Featured, Movies

Leading animation studios like Disney and their subsidiary Pixar have traditionally pushed the boundaries of the genre’s technical achievements with each entry in their storied collections, and that advancement can be readily seen in

Moana, the 56th feature in the Walt Disney Animation Studios canon. When Toy Story was released in 1995, catapulting computer-generated animation into the limelight and positioning it to overtake traditional hand-drawn animation in popularity, some of the most difficult things to properly render were fire and water, due to their random and dynamic nature. Finding Nemo first addressed the challenge of water in a serious way, but fire was typically a scarcer element over the ensuing years, though it did eventually make huge strides, going from tiny campfires as seen in the Ice Age franchise to full blown forest fires in Planes 2: Fire and Rescue.

Moana–by virtue of its tropical, oceanic setting and its villainous fire demon with a physical form of living lava–tackles both of these traditional challenges. In a set visit to Disney Animation Studios earlier this year, we had the chance to meet four of the technical wizards who had a major hand in bringing Moana and her world to life: digital effects supervisor Kyle Odermatt, technical supervisor Hank Driskill, and co-heads of effects animation Dale Mayeda and Marlon West. Their production office was filled with machines busy rendering the frames of what would eventually become the final film. Even older computers that should have been retired were contributing to the Herculean effort, churning out images in silent corners of the building around the clock.

MOANA effects progression image, featuring Animation (top), Simulation (middle), and Render (bottom) passes.

Kyle Odermatt was rightly proud of the work of the effects team, observing, “This story could not be told without stellar work by this group…This film had challenge after challenge after challenge, both creative and what became technical challenges for us to achieve.” He noted three key obstacles: handling the sheer amount of water, animating water as a character, and bringing the antagonistic lava guardian to life.

Hank Driskill addressed the first challenge: “Water is pervasive in this movie. We knew that Moana and Maui were going to spend a lot of time on the water in their journey. We knew that water was an important part of every aspect of the film. It’s also an important part of the culture–it’s important that it binds these islands together. It’s an important part of the mythology as well, so we really wanted to be ambitious in our reach–we wanted to do something new and interesting with water.”

Armed with a long history of animation techniques both in-house and amongst colleagues at Disney subsidiaries, the

Moana team had a considerable amount of expert knowledge at its disposal. Driskill continued, “It’s really great, one of the perks of Disney is we have these two great sister companies with Industrial Light and Magic and Pixar. And whenever any of us embark on films, we often start, as our teams are first starting to come together, with some early conversations about the challenges, and just sort of defining between the three places what is state of the art, what are the upper boundaries, and then can we pass them? It’s kind of this fun, creative one-upmanship that we do, and then get excited when they do it, too. So for water, it was really, really important to be beautiful, it was really, really important that we were going to be doing this through the whole movie. So to that end, we actually built a whole new way of solving water that we called Splash.”

Splash was a point of conversation at SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics conference in Anaheim, California that coincided with our interviews, and offered the animators a new way to crack the problems presented by their liquid movie star. With its naturalistic settings, it’s easy to forget that Moana was heavily dependent on technical innovation, even compared to past animated features with a more science fiction bent. “This movie has 80% effects shots, and a lot of those are water shots,” Driskill noted. “Just by way of context, Kyle and I supervised Big Hero 6 before this. Big Hero 6–big ambitious film, superheroes clashing, lots of effects–is 46% effects.” The daunting magnitude of the undertaking would require division of labor when it came to computing power: “Even with water as an environment, we had some bigger ambitious things we wanted to do, like large cresting waves. We built this new solver [that] solves for a hundred million particles, but we knew we wanted to do things like this with hundreds and hundreds of millions of particles. And so we actually did a lot of research into distributing computing, which allowed our new solver to run on multiple machines at once and have them all be talking to each other as they’re solving this water problem as if it’s being solved on one giant machine. And that enabled us to go after the bigger waters, the more interesting things, where we have maybe a billion particles being solved at once.”

Driskill explained that that allowed for more compelling interactions, such as the manner in which Moana and Maui’s boat floats upon the water in their immediate vicinity. “The larger ocean waters are a reasonably well understood series of mathematical equations, and so those we can solve for. The boat interacting with the water is where things get interesting, and the water does much more interesting things. So we effectively slice out a chunk of water around the boat to do the more interesting solve, and that’s where Splash kicks in and does the more interesting effects. Then we integrate that back into the larger body of water–the boat is interacting with the ocean and it’s causing a wake behind it, and splash and spray, and yet it still feels like it’s part of this larger integrated whole.”

To give us an idea of the disparate pieces that combine to form the big picture, Driskill offered an easily understood example: “Beaches have a lot of interesting parts to them. You’ve got the ocean water up in the distance, the lagoon water in the foreground that’s shallower with coral underneath, you’ve got the interaction of the water as it crashes up on the rocks on the beach, and you’ve got the water washing up onto the shoreline itself, making the sand wet, and then as it recedes, the sand drying. There’s a lot of pieces to this, a lot of people involved among our crew in nuancing each of those to make those as beautiful as they can be to really achieve the artistic direction that we’re after.”

MOANA – Hank Driskill (Technical Supervisor) presents at the Moana Long Lead Press Day on July 27, 2016 at Walt Disney Animation Studios – Tujunga Campus in North Hollywood, CA. Photo by Alex Kang. © 2016 Disney. All Rights Reserved.

When it came to the challenge of water being a character, the animators weren’t just being metaphoric in the way film critics often like to say that New York is a character in a Woody Allen film. In

Moana, water is literally a character in that it comes to shore, takes a vaguely anthropomorphic form, and interacts with our heroine. But simply having a piece of the ocean break off and move around the beach could have made it seem like a viscous blob if handled improperly. To get the right effect, careful attention had to be paid to both the physics of the liquid and the phenomena happening under its surface.

Dale Mayeda explains, “We wanted to make the interior of the surface feel believable and feel alive. And so if you can imagine taking, let’s say, a clear plastic bag and filling it with water and then kind of shaking it up, you’d have some churning bubbles swirling around on the inside. So we would do the same thing with this character, where we would run a fluid simulation on the interior. Once you take all of these pieces together and combine them, then you start to get a lot more of a believable water character.”

He continues, “In addition to having the water character feel like water, we also wanted it to feel very integrated as part of the ocean. We didn’t want it to feel like some sort of sea creature coming out of the water, we wanted it to feel like it was the water and the ocean.” Sci-fi fans can liken this to a far less sinister version of Locutus being part of the Borg collective in Star Trek: The Next Generation, simultaneously being an individual representative and yet tied to a greater, overarching whole.

MOANA – (L-R) Kyle Odermatt (Visual Effects Supervisor) and Hank Driskill (Technical Supervisor) present at the Moana Long Lead Press Day on July 27, 2016 at Walt Disney Animation Studios – Tujunga Campus in North Hollywood, CA. Photo by Alex Kang. © 2016 Disney. All Rights Reserved.

While Moana faces a variety of obstacles and adversaries on her journey, none are more singularly fearsome than the lava demon at the heart of her quest. This unique entity of living magma was an amalgam of several technical hurdles when it came to the physics of things, combining fire, steam, and molten earth–essentially rolling solids, liquids, and gasses all into one spectacular visual. It also had to convey a hugely rage-fueled personality. Marlon West describes it as “a very wrathful creature,” and jokes that on an emotional scale where 1 represents calm and 10 represents superlative anger, their creation would fall in the range of 8 to 11.

With all of its technical proficiency, it’s easy to forget that

Moana‘s breathtaking environments are still heavily stylized in their own way by the deft artistry of its animators. We’ve seen some of the pitfalls when productions attempt to max out photorealism, the obvious example being the Final Fantasy series of films: in Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, there are moments where the characters could be confused for living, breathing actors, and yet there’s something strangely stiff and unright about the world and its physics.

Specifically regarding the extent to which the imagery of Moana mimics real life, Kyle Odermatt says, “It’s interesting, because you think of it as photoreal, and yet if I showed you even a result that is straight out of our render, versus what our final frames are like, you would find out that they’re actually quite different. One of the things about an ocean surface is much of what you see is a reflection of the sky. We wanted very colorful water, we wanted to be able to see into the water quite a bit. We have backed off on the amount of specular reflection, that reflection off the surface, by a tremendous degree on almost all the water. It’s not something you realize until you see before and after. But it is a thing that is a pure artistic choice, because we want the water and our scenes with water to feel like that place you want to be. If you go to one of these islands, you come away and you’re like, ‘Wow, that lagoon was super colorful like that.’ They don’t tend to be quite as colorful as we make them. So we want aspirational imagery. It’s very, very controlled in a way to make it appealing, even though our technology certainly supports the ability to do something that is absolutely photoreal. We just choose to drive it in a slightly different direction.”

The prevailing trend has been that the technological advancements in computer-generated animation and the imaginative storytelling paired with it have both pushed each other to new heights in a symbiotic manner. Marlon West observes, “Our stories throw both a technical and creative gauntlet down for us. Dale and I worked on Frozen together, and we knew there was a big challenge for snow to behave in a way that we’d never done before, where characters would be pushed down and ankle deep and waist deep in snow. We knew we had a lava guardian [in Moana]. We didn’t know what he or she was going to be. We also knew there was going to be hundreds of water shots. Between the four of us, we’ve worked on several films here, both 2D and 3D, and usually there’s a handful of water shots, because they’re very complicated to do whether you’re drawing them or solving for them. And we knew we had hundreds of them to do, and some of them were epic, and some of them had to be matter-of-fact.”

The effects team predicts that there will indeed come a time when we look back on the techniques of Moana and consider them “quaint.” If so, that bodes well for the future of the industry, because in the present, Moana is an amazing technical achievement that brilliantly blends science with artistry.

MOANA – (L-R) Marlon West (Head of Effects), Dale Mayeda (Head of Effects), Hank Driskill (Technical Supervisor) and Kyle Odermatt (Visual Effects Supervisor) present at the Moana Long Lead Press Day on July 27, 2016 at Walt Disney Animation Studios – Tujunga Campus in North Hollywood, CA. Photo by Alex Kang. © 2016 Disney. All Rights Reserved.

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