![\"STRANGE](\"http:\/\/behindthelensonline.net\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/strange-magic-3.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhile infused with Shakespearean notes harkening to \u201cA Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream\u201d, noteworthy is that the core ethos, messaging and story design of STRANGE MAGIC, is easily analogized and paralleled to the constructs of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d franchise; Luke Skywalker walking into the cantina with Obi Wan, or saw the strength in Marianne that mirrors that of Princess Leia, or the dark side of Darth Vader as here seen in the Bog King.\u00a0 There is no doubt that the origins of STRANGE MAGIC lie within George Lucas.<\/p>\n
Music is key and calling on songs spanning the past 60 years, Marius De Vries, the same music supervisor Baz Luhrmann looked to for “Moulin Rouge!”, STRANGE MAGIC director Gary Rydstrom now turns to and as a result, achieves the same joyous musical experience.\u00a0\u00a0 Written by David Berenbaum, Irene Mecchi and Rydstrom from a story by George Lucas, story and animation bloom from the music and the songs.<\/p>\n
Technically, the animation is glorious, particularly the use of color.\u00a0 And when it comes to cinematography and lighting for creating mood and texture, as well as providing its own layers of storytelling, the work is meticulously designed and executed, in many cases harkening back to the styling of Old Hollywood and the days of film noir.<\/p>\n While outwardly surprising, the voice casting and its diversity hits all the right notes both in musicality and character personality.\u00a0 Key is that all the singing is done by the actors cast, among them, Alan Cumming, Evan Rachel Wood, Kristin Chenoweth, Alfred Molina, Maya Rudolph, Elijah Kelley, Sam Palladio and Peter Stormare.<\/p>\n Although not for everyone, STRANGE MAGIC is, again, very much akin to an animated “Moulin Rouge!” with its construct.\u00a0 It’s fun.\u00a0 It’s whimsical.\u00a0 It screams George Lucas with the subtext, symbolism and messaging.\u00a0 It\u2019s a joyous movie-going experience. Sometimes you just need flights of fancy to remind us of the hidden joy and beauty of the world of wonder.<\/p>\n I had a chance to speak exclusively about STRANGE MAGIC with Gary Rydstrom, who is currently in Singapore, and understandably excited about the release of STRANGE MAGIC this weekend.\u00a0 Rydstrom, seven time Academy Award winner for Best Sound and\/or Best Sound Effects Editing, while having previously directed the English dub of \u201cThe Secret of Arrietty\u201d, had yet to actually direct a film from inception to fruition, now marks STRANGE MAGIC as not only his first feature direction, but first ANIMATED feature direction, and a MUSICAL at that.\u00a0 Excited, enthusiastic, candid and sounding as gleeful as a kid on Christmas morning, Rydstrom talked with me about STRANGE MAGIC which presented lots of new experiences and challenges on a myriad of fronts, starting with the music.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When it comes to the musical construct and working with Marius De Vries, there is a cohesiveness with the song selections and their appropriateness for emotion and character which is then mirrored by the visual animation and tonal bandwidth.<\/strong><\/p>\n The musical part was new to me and I was a little scared going into.\u00a0 It was scary enough to direct an animated film but I\u2019m competent at it.\u00a0 But with a musical?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know a thing about a musical.\u00a0 It was fun to learn and Marius has a great sense of musical structure.\u00a0 I especially loved how to figure out how to get in and out of songs and structure it so they don\u2019t slam in and surprise you in a way that sometimes you can do in musicals.\u00a0 \u201cWhoa!\u00a0 We\u2019re singing!!\u201d\u00a0 That was a fun thing to try to figure out how to weave the singing of the dialogue from head to tail.<\/p>\n What was that learning curve for you?\u00a0 You have a very seamless flow and you have always have a haunting undercurrent of a song leading up to a full on song.<\/strong><\/p>\n And that undercurrent is key.\u00a0 There\u2019s an especially sneaky one before we hit the song \u201cStrange Magic\u201d, that comes out of score.\u00a0 The score starts to have that \u201cda da da da dum\u201d, the little falling notes of\u00a0 \u201cStrange Magic\u201d, but I love doing that because it helps gently lead you in the song.\u00a0 Marius is doing that in score throughout, anticipating something or reminding us of a song that we heard earlier and using it in score.\u00a0 My learning curve was, first, leaning on Marius as the music supervisor in picking the songs and arranging the songs and then editing the songs into the reels. . .I was using myself as a guinea pig.\u00a0 If I didn\u2019t go, \u201cWhoa!\u00a0 This is making me laugh in a bad way to start the singing here\u201d or it feels wrong, [it was okay].\u00a0 So I was using myself as the audience guinea pig.\u00a0 But I leaned on Marius.\u00a0 And Irene Mecchi was one of our writers.\u00a0 She did \u201cThe Lion King\u201d and she knows musical structure.\u00a0 I tell them half-jokingly that from now on any movie I make has to be a musical because it\u2019s just too much fun!<\/p>\n Speaking of the music, the number of songs, the titles of songs, how was there any money leftover to do anything else after you got through the licensing fees.\u00a0 The licensing fees for the songs in STRANGE MAGIC are not cheap.<\/strong><\/p>\n Steve Gizicki, that\u2019s his job to negotiate with all the people about these songs.\u00a0 Everyone he talked to were happy to help.\u00a0 It\u2019s certainly a big part of a fairly big music budget, I\u2019m sure, but it\u2019s also kind of the backbone of the movie.\u00a0\u00a0 There is no other way to do it.\u00a0 Going back to George Lucas\u2019 initial idea, he wanted to tell a love story-fairy tale through songs.\u00a0 That\u2019s what we did.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember ever throwing out a song or changing a song on the basis of money.\u00a0 I know there are sometimes I\u2019m probably not getting my money\u2019s worth; for example, there\u2019s a snippet of \u201cPeople Are Strange\u201d, The Doors song, with the mushroom shot. . .And then we have \u201cBarracuda\u201d in there in the score and in some ways it anticipates the Heart song straight on as it\u2019s such a central cong later in the movie.\u00a0 Something about using \u201cBarracuda\u201d as score with that distinctive guitar rift is good.\u00a0 And that\u2019s a lot of what Marius brought to it, and that is, connecting things.\u00a0 The most obvious thing is using songs like \u201cCan\u2019t Help Falling In Love\u201d in different ways throughout the movie.\u00a0 And \u201cThree Little Birds\u201d. . .[T]he original concept for this, too, was certainly to have songs that kids and people will recognize but also have great songs that you might not know that kids and others get introduced to. [laughing]\u00a0 The challenge is, you have pretty much every song ever written to choose from, so what do you choose.<\/p>\n So, what came first?\u00a0 The animation or the music?<\/strong><\/p>\n The music.\u00a0 Every scene that we would go into with animation, if it was a musical scene, we had to have the music locked down.\u00a0 Music, just like the dialogue, came first.\u00a0 Before we\u2019d go into animation we had storyboard reels with the music.\u00a0 Marius was always good at mocking up, even before we might have recorded the actors to get the song in good shape so we knew what we were going through.\u00a0 You can imagine the timing is pretty tight.\u00a0 Once we go into animation we\u2019re locked for timing pretty much.\u00a0 Music came first.<\/p>\n The visuals are a beautiful blend of styles and types of animation.\u00a0 You\u2019ve got a lot of photorealism with both forests which just leap off the page almost with a three-dimensional element to them.\u00a0 Then you add the whimsy and fantasy through the creatures themselves and how they\u2019re created.\u00a0 But they are two very distinct looks, yet they marry beautifully.\u00a0 Much like the fairy forest and the dark forest.\u00a0 You\u2019ve got that typical George Lucas, black & white, good & evil, going on.<\/strong><\/p>\n That\u2019s true.\u00a0 The look of it is something I\u2019m really proud of. . .A lot of the work was done at Lucasfilm Singapore.\u00a0 They did the lighting and animation to a degree. . . they did amazing work.\u00a0 In my mind, we\u2019re a studio that doesn\u2019t just do animation.\u00a0 It has this live action DNA to it.\u00a0 The richness and the detail and the grittiness of it comes from a live action sensibility and then we do animation within it which is really nice to do.\u00a0 If you think that the theme of the movie is to find beauty in unexpected places, in things that might seem strange or ugly on the outside, you need that level of detail and grittiness and organic natural feel to it.\u00a0 The world is full of great little details but so are the characters.\u00a0 The characters fit their worlds and they\u2019re full of great little details in their clothing and their faces and the hair.\u00a0 They are wonderfully detailed.<\/p>\n I\u2019m looking at Roland and the animation and detail is so beautiful in his green armor, it looks like a piece of cloisonne jewelry with the enameled finish on it.\u00a0 Absolutely stunning!<\/strong><\/p>\n I told the lighter to light him like you were a studio photographer in 1940 for Barbara Stanwyck.\u00a0 So the film is lit in this classic Hollywood back-lit, rim, gauzy look that helps them look even more perfect.<\/p>\n What is also beautiful is the color palette itself.\u00a0 You stretched the typical color palette.\u00a0 I saw Bob Stromberg do that with \u201cMaleficent\u201d.\u00a0 I saw James Gunn start doing that with \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy\u201d.\u00a0 Getting more into the purple-fuchsia blending and some of the jewel tone pop art colors of the Peter Max era.\u00a0 It\u2019s not something we\u2019re used to seeing in animation.<\/strong><\/p>\n Again, I think the color palette follows the same idea.\u00a0 There\u2019s a richness and a depth to it that is not so simple as you might have us do in a more stylized animated film.\u00a0 That purple color you talked about is really key to Marianne\u2019s wings which are based on butterfly wings, the colors that those have.\u00a0 We used a lot of this lavender pink colors, just beautiful rich, almost royal colors.\u00a0 She is a princess after all and they feel very royal.\u00a0 But like you said, this is a George Lucas story of two different worlds – of dark and light – so we got to do real fun contrast in the color palette of the Fairy Kingdom and the color palette of the Dark Forest where we sucked [the color] out.\u00a0\u00a0 There were no happy greens in the Dark Forest.\u00a0 It was almost a blue haze over it, a cool, very very cool tone.\u00a0 The Fairy Kingdom was very very warm.\u00a0 We put varied characters, like Marianne, into the Dark Forest which is nice so now we have those warm colors from the fairy world invading the cool desaturated colors of the Dark Forest.\u00a0 I love contrast.\u00a0 I love contrast in all things.\u00a0 So we built on the contrast.<\/p>\n The cinematography and the lighting, as the fairies start infusing the Dark Forest and you start to see the backlight start to come up and the inkier, suedey blue kind of disappear and lighten up, is so beautiful.\u00a0 It appears a gradual progression.<\/strong><\/p>\n It is.\u00a0 And it takes place at night.\u00a0 One of the challenges we had was how many different ways can you light a full moon evening depending on the mood of it.\u00a0 I have to say, I enjoy lighting a daytime happy forest, but lighting a dark forest at night is a lot of fun.<\/p>\n So, how many different ways are there to light a dark forest at night, Gary?<\/strong><\/p>\n [laughing] There are approximately six!\u00a0 It turns night and there are some moments – there\u2019s a shot or a scene where the Imp is being chased by Sunny and that\u2019s the Fairy Kingdom at night, so it has a little more saturated colors.\u00a0 We see some blue, happy blue, in the sky even though it\u2019s nighttime.\u00a0 The skin tone on the characters is still warm, as much as we can get away with.\u00a0 You still see the colors of the flowers around it.\u00a0 More of a high key look.\u00a0 And then the Dark Forest is a lot of uplighting, sort of bouncing light off of a creek below us.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always talked about \u201cBoris Karloff shots\u201d so we would have the light for some reason, probably unexplained, come from below.\u00a0 But it depends on the mood of the scene in the dark forest.\u00a0 When we get to the \u201cStrange Magic\u201d part, now we\u2019re not scary so much anymore.\u00a0 Now we\u2019re dealing with making the nighttime really beautiful in that same Dark Forest.\u00a0 Now we do these firefly glowing warm colors and things like that to make it rich.\u00a0 Same place that you saw earlier that was scary but now it\u2019s supposed to be incredibly beautiful.<\/p>\n You mentioned the fireflies and that leads me into the ever present movement.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s rare that we see Marianne ever stop moving, or, other than when sitting on his throne, the Bog King.\u00a0 Wings are always moving, wings are always fluttering.\u00a0 The little feet are even fluttering in the air.\u00a0 How challenging is that when you\u2019re animating to create that and then to create a believable flutter and motion?<\/strong><\/p>\n It was a big challenge.\u00a0 The animators did a lot of studies of how butterflies and other creatures flew.\u00a0 To look at them in reality, they\u2019re very stiff, the wings are very stiff.\u00a0 We ended up loosening our fairy wings to have the softer look to it.\u00a0 But we wanted it to be believable, we wanted you to believe that they were flying.\u00a0 Part of the coolness of a character like Marianne is that she can fly, and that\u2019s amazing!\u00a0 The very first shot of her in the movie is the long shot of her flying through her world.\u00a0 The wings became part of the animation – when does she flap them, when does she get nervous and flap them quicker, when does she slow down without losing altitude.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of times where she kind of slows down her wing flaps to think about something and you\u2019ll see her lose altitude a little bit and she has to get a little more airborne. [laughing] I thought it was like an animator having a dog tail to animate to.\u00a0 It\u2019s another aspect to the personality to get across and how she is using her wings to tell us what she\u2019s thinking.\u00a0 Plus, it\u2019s just damn beautiful!\u00a0 And the lighting of it! You can backlight them, you can get a little bit of light through the wings.\u00a0 I start to see them like Tiffany windows.<\/p>\n You get this beautiful opalescence translucence.\u00a0 Some of those shots are just breathtaking.<\/strong><\/p>\n Thank you.\u00a0 It\u2019s important in this movie to have those breaths of classically breathtaking shots on the Fairy Kingdom side and beauty in the way that we\u2019re used to seeing it because the movie really is about them seeing beauty in everything in the Dark Forest and the Bog King himself, which is not classically beautiful, and make that look beautiful.\u00a0 Our biggest challenge was, with Bog King specifically, there were so many scenes where we had to like him more or got to know him more.\u00a0 The poor lighters were talking about how to give him a more romantic light.\u00a0 If you look at that character, he\u2019s so spiky, not a good looking guy, and how do you do that.\u00a0 They figured out ways to do it like an old Hollywood DP getting the ugliest actor in the studio.\u00a0 Like a Humphrey Bogart movie.\u00a0 How do you make him handsome?\u00a0 And they did it.<\/p>\n Bog King, who I have to say is my favorite character and performance in the film, I think Alan Cumming just knocked it out of the park, but very definitely had intonations of a noir lighting to him.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes.\u00a0 I\u2019m really happy – some people have said, I really like how you changed and took some of the moles and the scales and the creepy stuff off of him during the course of the movie – of course, we didn\u2019t!\u00a0 We did it strictly with animation and lighting and Alan Cumming\u2019s vocal performance.\u00a0 We have to have you fall in love with that character in a way by the end of the movie despite how he looks.<\/p>\n Even at his darkest, I was so drawn to him because of the layers and level vocal inflections.\u00a0 You knew there was more beneath the surface.\u00a0 It was wonderful to listen to watch the transformation of the Bog King.<\/strong><\/p>\n I don\u2019t know who else could have done it.\u00a0 Alan Cumming was essential.\u00a0 We needed a really great actor who could sing and be empathetic even when he\u2019s sounding evil.\u00a0 It\u2019s that indescribable thing with actors, especially with their voices.\u00a0 You hear Alan Cumming and you find him intriguing even as he\u2019s scaring you.\u00a0 That\u2019s part of the casting of an animated film – is finding that voice, that actor, that without looking at the real actor, you sense the depth to them just from hearing their voice. [Alan Cumming] is a talented guy, obviously.\u00a0 He can do different things.\u00a0 He puts on this bit of a bad guy voice in the beginning and it doesn\u2019t exactly go away;\u00a0 he\u2019s still the same character at the end, but now he sounds like a gentleman at the end; the softest kindest gentleman you can imagine, but it\u2019s the same voice.\u00a0 You recognize him as the same character who started the movie.<\/p>\n Because this is a musical, unless you\u2019re going to dub in voices for the voices already doing animation, you need to find actors who can sing.\u00a0 What was that search like to find the right voice for each character?\u00a0 These aren\u2019t cookie cutter characters.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yep.\u00a0 Well, we found \u2018em! [laughing]\u00a0 Evan Rachel Wood [voicing \u201cMarianne\u201d].\u00a0 I\u2019m really proud that we found her.\u00a0 We knew she was a great actress and she\u2019s got a great voice.\u00a0 We were looking for a range for that character to go from naive to tough girl to falling in love.\u00a0 She can do that but we first saw her online.\u00a0 And thank God for the Internet.\u00a0 There are all these videos of Evan singing and she can do anything!\u00a0 She can sing soft ballads all the way through hard rock, so that\u2019s what drew us to her.\u00a0 We needed that character to have a range for singing in a way that no other character in the movie had.<\/p>\n Of course, no surprise was Kristin Chenoweth.\u00a0 I was in the room when she was singing \u201cLove Is Strange\u201d and she had to hit these high notes.\u00a0 She is operatic!\u00a0 She\u2019s amazing to behold and I think my glasses cracked when she was hitting those high notes.\u00a0 She\u2019s so petite, but man, can she sing with gusto!\u00a0 And again, the combination.\u00a0 She\u2019s an amazing singer but she\u2019s really funny and that character [Sugar Plum Fairy] she kind of tore into it in terms of the craziness and fun of that character.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n