The Art of Megamind by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub

“We felt that in order to do the story justice, we were going to have to see the city. We were going to have to have a sense of the city as a place they were fighting over. And we'd never built a whole city before.” —JONATHAN GIBBS, CITY DEVELOPMENT SUPERVISOR (top) LOOKING AT REAL OBSERVATORY © Erwin Madrid; (opposite, left) DOWN CITY VIEW © Erwin Madrid; (opposite, right) STREET SCENE © Erwin Madrid Se 88 THE ART OF MEGAMIND Just that kind of division runs through Megamind: Metro Man pronounces his hometown’s name traditionally, while Megamind changes the emphasis to make the name rhyme with atrocity. “Same difference,” he jokes—and jokes with a purpose. The center of Metro City is a cluster of office spires curving around the oversized axis of the Metro Man Museum, with its park and reflecting pool. These neoclassical monuments, David James notes, are meant to have similar statures to those found on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The visual-development art sometimes makes use of strangely familiar cityscapes. Is that Barcelona’s harbor, which has suddenly grown a 1930sera observatory? Or maybe it’s a bit of San Diego? Exact references aside, it’s clear that Metro City is a coastal city within the palm belt, with billowy, red-tinged subtropical clouds as a backdrop to the superhero battles. Clearly, there’s something of Los Angeles in it, and something of San Francisco in the compact city limits of about seven miles square. In early versions, it was a futuristic sci-fi paradise. In later views, Metro City became a more realistic, everyday place of the slightly near future. The final version has a little of both. “The cities designed in early iterations were exactly what the script was calling for,” James says of the artistic development process that led to the ultimate synthesis. “They were excellent interpretations of what the story was at the time. A lot of the designs early on had these truly fantastic cities—a lot of stuff that was really otherworldly and could be on another planet. “Brilliant as those designs were, they tended to upstage the characters themselves,” James adds. “T wanted to let the visuals and the camerawork to be as spectacular as they could be. But the design itself shouldn’t be so over the top that we have to start explaining it. It needs to be grounded so that the characters can stand in front of it. Otherwise, it starts to fight them. I’m a firm believer that in this case the location needed to be the straight man.” In James’s view, Metro City needed to be something like Springfield in The Simpsons—a vast everycity, dense with neighborhoods: some homey and handsome, and some depressingly shabby, with oversized freeways rammed through. Skyways are part of it: at best, they’re like Seattle’s Monorail, curving gently at a reasonable height over pedestrian walkways; at worst, they’re freeways, shoved in brutally. Most importantly, there’s a bit of Vegas in the architecture of Metro City. The rollout of

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