How a Puppet Master Brings Life to the Comically Dead

By CHARLES SOLOMON
From The New York Times August 14, 2005

CASUAL viewers may find little to connect the egotistical lion and hip-hop zebra of the DreamWorks computer-animated "Madagascar" with the macabre stop-motion puppets of "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride," to be released next month by Warner Brothers. But animation aficionados will see in both the fine hand of Carlos Grangel, a Spanish artist whose designs are coming to define the cutting edge of big-studio animation.

Virtually unknown to the public, Mr. Grangel, 41, is a highly respected artist among animation professionals. While still a teenager, he worked on comic strips for Disney, and got a job at Steven Spielberg's Amblimation studio in London in 1989, working on "We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story" (1993) and "Balto" (1995). When Amblimation closed, Mr. Grangel (pronounced grahn-JELL) came to the newly established DreamWorks SKG as a designer for its animated features, beginning with "The Prince of Egypt" (1998).

"I've never met a designer who thought more like an animator than Carlos," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation. "He's always thinking not just 'how will this look,' but 'how will it move.' That may seem like the obvious aim of designing for animation, but very few people have that gift."

Mr. Grangel typically divides his time between the Glendale, Calif., campus of DreamWorks and the small studio he and his brother, Jordi, run in Barcelona. But he has devoted much of the last two and a half years to "Corpse Bride," Mr. Burton's mock-Victorian tale of a romantic misunderstanding between a fishmonger's son and the cadaver he accidentally jilts.

Mr. Burton first saw Mr. Grangel's work at the model-making studio Mackinnon & Saunders Ltd. in Manchester, England. He was working on his 1996 film "Mars Attacks!" and noticed drawings Mr. Grangel had done for the puppets in Steffen Schäffler's stop-motion short "The Periwig-Maker," which would be nominated for an Oscar in 2001.

"When I saw Carlos's drawings, they reminded me a little of the way I draw," Mr. Burton said in a telephone interview from London. "They showed that you could make appealing human characters."

"I felt quite connected with Carlos before I met him," Mr. Burton said.

Speaking by telephone from Spain, Mr. Grangel recalled a first meeting with Mr. Burton in London in 2003, at which he was handed a script for "Corpse Bride" and "a bunch of drawings that were loose, but lovely," he said.

" 'Here are my sketches,' " Mr. Grangel remembered Mr. Burton saying. " 'I want you to push them and explore every character.' 'Nightmare Before Christmas' is one of my favorite films; now Tim Burton was handing me sketches, and saying 'See what you can do!' I wanted to kill myself because I know it just doesn't get any better."

Mr. Grangel soon discovered that Mr. Burton's approach to design was radically different from the DreamWorks process. "At DreamWorks, each artist may present 20 or 25 versions of a character," he said. "We didn't design one lion for 'Madagascar'; we made hundreds of lions. We got used to that way of doing things, then one day Tim said, 'Why are you making so many drawings - which one do you like?' "

Once the designs were approved by Mr. Burton and his co-director, Mike Johnson, Mr. Grangel worked with crews at Mackinnon & Saunders, who built the puppets. The main characters are about 18 inches tall - half again the size of a Barbie doll. Stop-motion puppets are more than interesting-looking sculptures: they need armatures, jointed steel skeletons that enable the animators to adjust their positions in minute increments, and the "Corpse Bride" puppets had devices to adjust their expressions.

"The ones for 'Corpse Bride' represent a new generation of puppet that is so expressive," Mr. Grangel said, "they may change people's thinking about the possibilities of stop-motion animation." When asked why he chose stop motion over the currently popular computer animation, Mr. Burton replied: "The beauty of stop motion - and why I love the medium - is that it feels handmade. It's like 'Pinocchio' or 'Frankenstein'; it's breathing life into an inanimate object, and the joy for me is to see the artist's hand on the screen."

The designs for the puppets combine Mr. Burton's gothic personal style with elements from other illustrators, including Edward Gorey and Ronald Searle. There's a skeleton band that recalls the 19th-century Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada's Day of the Dead engravings, led by what could be the ghost of Bob Fosse: a singing, dancing skeleton in a bowler hat, voiced by the composer Danny Elfman.

The living characters look as bizarre as the specters. Victor, the reluctant groom, has the long, skinny legs of Jack Skellington in "Nightmare Before Christmas." But his expressive eyes and prominent chin resemble those of Johnny Depp, who supplies his voice. The character's physical appearance blends with the vocal performance to create a gentle, befuddled, yet curiously endearing young man. "The eyebrows and eyes, and the very shy mouth make the character sympathetic," Mr. Grangel said. "You care about him because he looks vulnerable."

Reflecting on his work for "Corpse Bride," Mr. Grangel said: "We created 82 characters, although some of them didn't make it to the final film because of story changes. They're all constructed of simple shapes: one thing I've learned over the years is that simple works best. A character's shape has to be recognizable, even when he's seen from far away."

Mr. Grangel said he and his fellow artists resisted the temptation to devote less care to the design of the minor characters. "We wanted every character to incorporate shapes that were interesting and would attract the eyes of the audience," he said. "I know there is an artist inside every member of the audience: if the designs are good, people will respond to them."