A Utah native describes how Pixar animates a sea creature trying to look human in ‘Luca’

Sea monsters don’t have hair like humans do.

“It’s kind of like cabbage,” said Emron Grover, one of the artists that worked on Pixar Animation Studios’ new computer-animated movie “Luca” — a story about young sea monsters finding their feet as humans on dry land. (It debuts Friday, June 18, on Disney+.)

For “Luca,” Grover — a native of Draper and a graduate of Brigham Young University — held the title of tailoring and simulation lead.

Using computer software, the tailoring team creates the clothing for each character. The people in the simulation team then take what the tailoring team does, Grover said, and works to “add all the clothing and the hair into each shot, and kind of perfect it.”

The simulation team also handles wind effects, like the motion of leaves and trees, and the underwater motion of seaweed.

“The underlying goal is always making it feel believable, transporting the audience into that world, and really making it immersive and believable,” Grover said. “It all goes back to the story. We wanted to transport the audience into this world, and kind of make them feel like a kid again.”

The story centers on Luca (voiced by “Room” star Jacob Tremblay), a young sea creature chafing at the restrictions placed by his protective parents (voiced by Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan) against visiting the surface world. But Luca does go to the surface — to a colorful village along the Italian Riviera, where he befriends Alberto (voiced by Jack Dylan Grazer), a fellow sea creature who has made a home for himself on dry land.

One of Luca’s first discoveries is that sea creatures, when dry, look just like humans — but when they get wet again, their skin reverts to their usual undersea colors. Luca also discovers that the humans fear the sea creatures, and would likely kill any that they discover — so keeping dry is key to keeping his secret.

Creating Luca’s and Alberto’s double lives was a major technical challenge for Grover’s simulation team.

“We knew very early that this was going to be, as far as the characters go, the most difficult, the most complex, the thing that we’ve never done before,” Grover said. “A lot of the transformations are pretty quick. You don’t realize that we have scales, and the scales animate out. But we also have this kind of octopus-type texture that runs through the skin to blend it all together and tie it all together.”

One example of the transformation process comes in an early scene, when Luca and Alberto are befriended by Giulia (voiced by Emma Berman), who takes the boys home to have dinner with her fisherman father, Massimo (voiced by Marco Barricelli).

In the scene (which appeared in the first teaser trailer for the film), the boys quickly learn that Massimo is an adept killer of seagoing life, and suspicious of strangers. Luca is drinking a glass of water when he’s shocked by Massimo’s knife skills. Luca does a spit take, getting water on Alberto’s face — which turns Alberto purple, his natural sea-creature color, and turns his hair back to cabbage-like fins.

Though the spit take flies by in seconds, evoking a quick laugh, Grover said it “was one of the most difficult shots in the film.”

“In most of the shots, we just transform top to bottom, or a little bit radially across his face,” Grover said. “This was half-and-half, and it had to stay that way. So we actually had to design where the splotches of water would hit as he spit, and have a nice design across [Alberto’s] face.”

That kind of precision takes a lot of coordination with other artists and technicians, who design the different elements of animating the characters.

The character riggers, who create the 3-D computer models of the characters, had set up controls to animate the color transformations for different segments of each character’s body. But, at first, no one had thought that a body segment would need to be part human skin tone and part sea creature colors, so they didn’t make controls that could do that, Grover said. His simulation crew had to figure out how to take apart the controls the riggers made, and put them back together to create a partial color transformation.

Also, the color transformations usually happen when a character is fully submerged in the sea — and when water is surrounding a character, the water doesn’t have to be animated. When it’s in a glass, or being spit out, those drops have to be animated. For the spit take, Grover said, the effects department had to animate the spray of water from Luca’s mouth as it hit Alberto’s face. Grover said it took one artist — called a “character shader” — “probably a good month” to figure out the placement of the water drops for that spit take.

“It requires so many departments, all at once, all at the same time, working together,” Grover said.

What’s more, Grover said, the Pixar employees were working from home, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Every single artist is in a different place — not just geographically, but do they have kids? Are they caregivers to their parents or elderly people? Or are they struggling with being home alone all day for a year?” he said. “We have this culture at Pixar of supporting each other, supporting our families, supporting everyone around us and everyone’s individual needs. … And this really just pushed that to a new level.”

Making movies are difficult, Grover said, “but in the grand scheme of things, you zoom out and realize that I am in a place where I can work from home, my company has the technology to get us through this. And we did our best with what we had. We feel fortunate that we have been able to finish and create this, and get it out to the world.”