The Bad Guys (2022)/Production

On July 22, 2017, Australia's The Daily Telegraph reported that several studios had expressed interest in adapting Aaron Blabey's book series The Bad Guys into a feature film. In March 2018, DreamWorks Animation announced the development of a film based on the book series, with Etan Cohen writing the screenplay. The following year, in October, it was reported that the film would be directed by Pierre Perifel in his feature directorial debut, with Cohen and Hilary Winston set to co-write the film's script. Throughout the development of the film, the crew worked remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The film was described as having "a similar twist on the heist genre that Shrek did on fairy tales, and what Kung Fu Panda did for the kung fu genre". Winston was only credited for Additional screenplay material with Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs writer Yoni Brenner while the film was executive produced by Cohen, Blabey, and Foundation Media's Patrick Hughes. The cast was announced on July 28, 2021.
The film's design was inspired by Sony Pictures Animation's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, with DreamWorks adopting a more illustrative and stylized aesthetic than their previous films. Character designs took inspiration from a mix of styles from directors such as Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, Michael Mann’s Heat, Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction. The film was also inspired by anime and manga series such as Sherlock Hound and Lupin III as well as the French-Belgian animated film Ernest & Celestine, due to how it influenced the approach to the characters.
While most of the animation for the film was provided by DWA Glendale, Jellyfish Pictures, who previously worked with DreamWorks on How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming, Spirit Untamed and The Boss Baby: Family Business, handled the additional asset production services using proprietary softwares like Premo and Moonray, along with a new tool called Doodle – created for the 2D effects and for allowing the animators to move the lines around the character rigs. The film's opening diner scene, inspired by the similar opening scene from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, is the longest one-shot in DreamWorks Animation history, lasting two minutes, 25 seconds and seven frames.
Category:Production
Category:The Bad Guys (2022)