By [ad_1]
Eternals VFX supervisors reveal director Chloé Zhao added Starfox’s sidekick Pip the Troll late in the game, to lighten up the film’s ending.
Eternals introduces several new faces to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, one character only just made it into the film: Pip the Troll, Starfox’s all-CG comedy sidekick voiced by Patton Oswalt.
WETA Digital VFX Supervisors Stephane Ceretti and Matt Aitken revealed that director Chloé Zhao added Pip to inject some comedy into Eternals‘ original ending, which was reportedly far too grim. In an interview with The Wrap, they said, “[The ending] was still with Harry Styles actually, but it was in the spaceship with all the other Eternals,” said Ceretti. “It was a little bit more sad, and not as exciting in a way, so it didn’t kind of resonate. Chloé had that idea of bringing Pip, the troll, as his sidekick for the end of the movie. We did that pretty quick at the end.”
Aitken agreed that the turnaround time for adding Pip the Troll into Eternals was tight, recalling, “I might have said to [Stephane] at one point, Steph, we’re getting close to our hard out. We need this much time. If we’re going to change the design again, and build the facial rig, and get all the nuances of the facial performance, we’re going to need to have that approval of the design right here. And then I think we went way past that.”
“We were way past that,” said Ceretti. “I was like, ‘Guys, we got to go. We really got to go. But what if we try this. We got to go. Try this. Okay, we’ll try this.’ We’ve all been there, but I mean, in the end you’re putting, for the first time, a CG character next to Harry Styles. And you’re thinking, ‘Hmm, Harry Styles is going to be hard to beat.’ It is what it is. I still think it’s a fun moment.”
Chloé Zhao has previously spoken about a test audience’s negative reaction to Eternals’ original, Pip the Troll-free ending, noting, “[W]e actually had another ending that is really bleak. Bleak. I didn’t hate it, because I’m used to films that are more melancholy. But I don’t think it went down well with audiences.”
Even with the new ending, Eternals still received a lukewarm response from critics. The first MCU outing to land a “Rotten” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Eternals currently has a 48 percent critic score on the review aggregator website. By contrast, audiences were kinder to the film; its audience score currently sits at a more respectable 78 percent.
Eternals is now streaming on Disney+.
Source: The Wrap
About The Author
[ad_2]
