PITTSBURGH — Christian Hoffman swears his trip to the San Francisco Zoo to hang out with a bunch of red pandas wasn't just for fun. Unlikely as it may seem, his story checks out.
Hoffman, a 47-year-old Shaler native, was chatting up zookeepers and feeding treats to red pandas as legitimate research for "Turning Red," Pixar's latest animated film that premiered Friday on Disney+. As its lead character supervisor, Hoffman decided to get up close and personal with the real-life creatures as inspiration for how his team could best render a 13-year-old girl who occasionally transforms into a giant anthropomorphic red panda when her emotions run wild.
"Turning Red" is just the latest Pixar film Hoffman has served as a character supervisor on during his almost 25 years at the studio. Still, figuring out the general look and subtle physical nuances for Mei Lee and her red panda alter ego was a challenge that got Hoffman excited.
"I knew she was going to be funny, but I really loved the fact they also play into how she's disgusted with herself as well," Hoffman told the Post-Gazette. "I felt like there was a lot of opportunity in there for comedy."
It will surprise no one to learn that Hoffman was the kind of kid who was always in front of the television when Saturday morning cartoons came on. Characters like Donald Duck and the Smurfs helped initially spark his passion for animation. Attending animation festivals in Oakland introduced him to Pixar's oeuvre of short films and solidified his lifelong love of the art form.
Though drawing didn't prove to be his forte, he did teach himself to code during his early teen years. He went on to study computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
"[I]t wasn't until I was in college and 'Toy Story' came out that I put all the pieces together and realized I'm taking computer graphics classes and I can marry my love of animation and computer science background," he said.
He was able to essentially jump straight from CMU to Pixar after the studio reached out to one of his professors looking for young talent. The first Pixar movie he worked on was 1998's "A Bug's Life" and he went on to supervise the creation of characters on films like 1999's "Toy Story 2," 2004's "The Incredibles," 2007's "Ratatouille," 2017's "Coco" 2020's "Soul."
As Hoffman laid out, a character supervisor's main responsibilities on an animated film include working with the art department to translate 2D drawings to 3D models; adding animation controls so characters can be posed in a process known as "articulation"; handling "shading," or characters' painting, texture and how they respond to light; and coming up with hairstyles — or, in the case of non-human characters, fur styling.
Hoffman said that it took about a year to get Mei's red panda form just right. As a formerly shy kid and now the father of two teenagers who has been "seeing the other side" of the parent-child relationship, he related to both Mei's identity crisis and her mother's domineering behavior intended to keep her safe and successful.
"I feel like I was the good kid, much like Mei," he said. "My parents weren't as overbearing with me. I had a lot more flexibility and freedom than Mei does, and that sort of allowed me to figure out how to be self-motivated and gave me the opportunities to make mistakes and learn from those and grow."
Eagle-eyed viewers will be able to track Mei's mood based on her clothing and hair because Hoffman and his team "used that throughout the film to help figure out where she was" emotionally. Mei begins "Turning Red" sporting a crisp, buttoned-up sweater and a tightly curated hairdo. As she becomes more relaxed throughout the film, the sweater comes off and her hair gets messier.
Mei's red panda form also uses physical details to visualize internal changes, Hoffman said. Mei is pretty unhappy when the red panda change first occurs, and thus her fur is matted and clumpy to reflect how grossed out she is by herself. Hoffman said his team also used the red panda's fur "as another opportunity to help her emote" by making its hair get spikier and longer when she was upset.
"Turning Red" is directed by Domee Shi, whose Chinese-Canadian background is evident throughout this Toronto-set film about a Chinese family who runs a local temple. Hoffman said that "making sure we're representing people correctly is also important for us," so a lot of effort was put into ensuring the character and temple designs rose to the occasion in terms of cultural sensitivity.
Another fun element that Hoffman and his team got to play with was the film's early 2000s setting. They tried to make the characters' clothing as period-accurate as possible and also enjoyed "building our own boy band" that Mei and her friends would be obsessed with.
"We didn't go as far as building JNCO jeans for anybody, even though art had drawn some for us," Hoffman said. "But there was a lot of excitement in terms of clothing and accessories."
