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Detective Pikachu's VFX supervisor on the challenge of adapting Mr. Mime and Mewtwo for the movie, and why Alakazam didn't make the cut
There are plenty of Pokemon in Detective Pikachu, but none provided more of a challenge than Mr. Mime or Mewtwo. In an interview with io9, VFX supervisor Pete Dionne talked about the unique struggles Mr. Mime presented.
“Mr. Mime was one where, when we were designing him, it was a bit ambiguous in terms of, ‘What is Mr. Mime?’ And what material do we think he’s surfaced in, anatomically? What is he? And so, when we were developing him, a lot of our initial biases were ‘Well, he’s the Pokémon who’s humanoid with cartoony proportions...’ But then as we were developing him, it became clear about two steps into it that it was going to turn into the creepiest, most kind of odd-looking human/Pokémon hybrid. We landed in Uncanny Valley. So, we kind of changed gears on that one and tried to figure out, instead of—where we looked for all the other characters, to nature, to try and bring realism to the characters—that was one character where we did the complete opposite.
Our biggest design challenge with Mr. Mime is, ‘How do we not make him look human?’ And how do we make him look real without looking humanoid?’ So, that’s where we had a little bit of fun with it. His shoulders, for example, big red balls—so, what’s the realest big red balls you can think of? We sourced those rubber kickballs that we’re all familiar with, and the texture on top of those. And the same things for his blue horns and white torso, he’s squishing around, and there’s no getting around these proportions, so we embraced it and treat them as foam, but like, a Nerf football you leave outside for the winter and all the paint crackles up on it.
In his face, we tried to make it as unfleshy as possible. When we were doing special effects make-up and trying to do prosthetic effects [with the Pokémon], instead of flesh it looked like silicone or latex—so we said, ‘Let’s embrace that, don’t try to cover it up. Just make him a thick wad of silicone and latex and all this’ in the scanning, shading, and the light interplay. [He] was one character that answered some questions we didn’t realize existed.”
One Pokemon that didn't make the cut was Alakazam, who presented too much of a struggle to adapt.
“The one thing we just couldn’t get past on that one was he has his—he’s wearing his traditional gi or, whatever his outfit is called, and the Pokémon Company interpreted that as not being cloth, but his skin. There was no way we could get around that one.”