THERE'S THREE REALLY

There's three really interesting details about the LillyPad character from Toy Story 5. The way the character's mouth appears rendered on this lily pad, that it's a 2D mouth shape that they are manipulating to stay on the actual geometry of the lilypad. This is similar technique to how the Lego movie animates Lego characters, where the actual head is moving up and down. On a 3D rig, you usually have the controls to animate this in your animation software without having to do it in a separate program. It's a whole. I've noticed that they're animating the Lilypad's hands is really unique. Limitations can actually enhance your creativity. What Pixar could have done with this character is put arms of it this, you know, standard animated character. We have this, and here's the arms here, and, got this sassy pose on it. They could have done this for the character, but instead, they took the more creative approach and limited the movement of the hands to be just circling around this point. The fingers extended this way, and they're actually just able to spin around clockwise or counter clockwise. When the hand moves, the fingers are able to crunch up like this, just rotating around this pivot point for the hand. And then the character's going to almost do one of these, but it's just around that pivot point like we said here. So the fingers of the lily pad just slightly like this, but it's still limited to the central point where the hand is pinned onto of the character. Even this movement where the character's hand would have to move like this and then hit the front of her screen, instead of having the hand move off of the body like this, they're actually cheating this a little bit and having the hand swing around on one frame. But because they have the fingers dragging, it looks like to us that she's slapping the screen, but it's actually still just rotating around. And if we play that at speed, it looks flawless. The third thing I really like about the character design is the way they're handling the eyes. They have this sort of pixelation effect on it, where you can see the actual pixels of this little low quality animation that they have for the lily pad itself. It easier on the character's eyelids where it has this pixelation effect. Like the slight chromatic aberration we see with the left side being slightly warmer than the right side of the eye. It really does feel like the camera that is, capturing this whole is actually doing the same effect that a camera would be doing that's slightly pixelated.