Belle
Concept Artist
Client : Studio Chizu, Cartoon Saloon
Director : Mamoru Hosoda
Role : Concept Artist
Awards : Annie Awards - Best Production Design: Feature, Nominee
In 2019, as part of a group of artists lead by Tomm More and Ross Stewart, we worked with director Mamoru Hosoda to create a dream sequence inside of the world of “U” in his feature film “Belle”. We created a unique and completely new style, designing a fantasy and a mirage in a virtual world.
I was in charge of creating the final style for the dream sequence and producing the final concepts that you can see here, which were beautifully animated at Studio Chizu afterwards. We were very humbled and thankful to see our work nominated for an Annie Award for "Best Production Design for Feature."
We tried to create how a machine would interpret the idea of a tree or a flower, in a very diagrammatic representation of nature.
For that we designed a very flat space, artificially arranged, very repetitive and restrictive, slightly oppressive in the forest area. And at the same time, a space that is boundless, that is not limited by the physical world, that is just a huge expanse, deep and infinite.
Color and light needed to follow this logic as well, so very inspired by different landscapes of Japan like Castle and Waterfall, we looked at inverted photography and how, even though you can still recognize reality and nature in them, all of the colours follow a very different logic, so we infused out world with that.
For the designs we tapped into Fauvism and Cubism, as well as Japonism. We looked at fractals, and microchips, designing endless roots with leaves branching off and breaking up into smaller and smaller shapes, like an eternal mathematical repetition of itself in a world made of data.
Credits
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Cartoon Saloon
Ross Stewart, Tomm More: Director
Alice Dieudonne, Maria Pareja, Almu Redondo : Concept Artist
Studio Chizu
Mamoru Hosoda: Director
Hiroyuki Ishiguro: Assistant Producer
More Projects
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