6 - Character Design

Now that we had started working on the backgrounds, we needed to work on the Character Design. Of course we had references with the books. But Daniel Pennac invented a great number of characters in his script. That is when we asked Sei to work on those characters. 

Sei is a young talented artist coming from Les Gobelins a school of animation in France. Her talent is as huge as the sound level of her laughs.

Adapting the characters of Ernest and Célestine was not an easy thing. The first reason was that Gabrielle Vincent didn't always draw her the same way. Here is an example of the evolution of Célestine in time. The first drawing comes from the first book, the last comes from the last book.

After a while, we started creating our own Célestine. Of course she was at first inspired from the book, but we needed to change her on some details. Her nose was slightly shorter, her eyes bigger... She became more and more expressive under our pencils and she finally became the little mouse that you can see today in film.

Ernest was easier to work on, after a while we managed to create a nice design for him as well.

For each of these characters, we needed to give animators informations that they would use to draw Ernest and Célestine. Those informations were quite important, it helped the animators draw the little details that make Ernest or Celestine special. Here is a sample of the informations

After that Sei had to work on the supporting characters. We always tried finding references in the books. Here is a character in “Ernest and Celestine in the Museum“ he is the manager of a museum, he was used to create Georges, the manager of the shop “The House of Candy“

Here it is a photo of Ernest when he was young found in “Ernest and Célestine go to the photographer”. I helped us create Leon, Georges's son

Other characters were created that had to be fully imagined by Sei. She had to gets inspired by Daniel Pennac's writings and I was trying to sketch how I was imagining them. Here is a old rat called ”The Gray”, the manager of the Dentist Facility, and the Chief of the Bear Police

Sei work is one of the most important step of a film. The models need to be very charismatic and not too complicated so any animator can draw him or her. She worked maybe one complete year before we could have a completer lineup of all the characters. She designed more than 170 characters and she made an amazing job despite my worthless interventions...

 

 

So here we are with our character design. Now let's see more about the animation.