Animation for Winnie The Pooh Blood and Honey
Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey is a horror film based on the classic book series, Winnie the Pooh. In January 2022, Winnie the Pooh’s original works entered the public domain, and creativity ensued. After seeing my animation work in' Are We Monsters', Rhys Frake-Waterfield reached out to me to create the animated sequences in this highly anticipated movie.
Designing Classic Characters but Horror
We wanted to design a style that showed homage to the original storybooks and took them and twisted them into something more sinister.
It was no easy task, working on unique character designs that resembled characters we know and love but were different from existing renditions in a short turnaround.
The main section of animation that I’d be working on would be the introduction of the movie that introduced the characters and the premise of the story. For this reason, I had to design multiple versions of the beloved characters, one when we first meet them and another when they have turned evil and hungry for murder.
It was a lot of fun working on these designs to give them a warm welcoming design at first and work out how to have them deteriorate into something of nightmares.
To give the classic characters their horrifying new design, I focused on the techniques I’d implemented for the creature designs in ‘Are We Monsters’ while exaggerating their hunger. I mostly focused on the tightness of the skin and the roughness of the line work. I wanted the crevasse of their eyes to feel like they had sunken in and the skin tightly pulled to the bone.
Balancing Tone
To enhance this look, I added more layers of shading and a rougher illustrative movement to heighten the change of tone in line strokes. To add to the severity of the situation, I made the environment of the characters reflect the change of tone. I changed the colour of the paper to dark grey and used flashes of white to simulate lightning. This allowed me to concentrate on extreme lighting with momentary reveals to heighten the terrifying features of the characters.
To finish the opening animation I wanted to slow the pace of the sequence down before being introduced to the new tale that was about to be told by the rest of the Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey team in the live-action section. To do this, I went back to a lighter-coloured paper. This time a cleaner white like turning a new page on the classic tale. To simulate the closure of the old books and opening of the unknown, I had the characters stand around the grave of their victim, Eeyore, with an iconic part of them, their tail, flapping in the wind.
The slowness of the ending helped to bring the tone back down with a sad and somber quality before starting the live-action part of the film.
Original Art
Working on the film inspired me to make my own version of the iconic characters, again with a horror theme. I made unique illustrations and 3D models of the characters with a horror theme and I am so proud of these designs.
Overall, working on a classic story and adapting it into horror was fun. It’s nice to play with a medium like this while keeping the original works close in my heart as they feel like entirely different works. I adore the originals, having visited Ashdown Forest and played pooh sticks, there is still a beautiful quality and purity of childhood in the original that I will never be tainted by anything else that people make with the new public domain quality of the classic stories. To me, they are completely different and I have a lot of respect for them all.
