Co-directors Rodrigo Perez-Castro and Ricardo Curtis’ all-new family friendly film, from the mind of Clive Barker no less, involves a rogue meteor… a mysterious virus… and one very bad night at the zoo… in a hilarious, wildly colored, gummy candy-infused 3DCG horror comedy; hits theaters March 7.
When describing Rodrigo Perez-Castro and Ricardo Curtis’ new family-friendly horror film, , actor and comedian Scott Thompson says the movie “looks like a bruise came to life.”
And he means that as a compliment.
“The color scheme is amazing,” notes Thompson, who voices the neurotic ostrich Ash in the film about an alien virus that turns a bunch of zoo animals into zombies made of goo.“It's not all primary colors like you see in a lot of kids’ movies.
It’s a more sophisticated palette.It’s gritty.And it's kind of gutsy.” Guts-y indeed.
There’s plenty of gooey gore in , inspired by Clive Barker’s short story and releasing in theaters today, March 7.There’s rolling heads, grotesquely mutated monkeys, torn limbs, jawless chicks, and lots of goo oozing from every crevice of the zombified zoo creatures.If that all doesn’t sound frightening enough, imagine it all amidst fog and ominous glowing purple, red and green lights. “This movie takes place over the course of just one night so we couldn’t have it all be dull monochromatic blues and dark colors,” says Perez-Castro.
“We talked about things like Dario Argento’s horror film, the comic strip and this idea of a very colorful noir.We began to develop what we called a ‘color nightmare’ where we were pushing the saturation, the vibrancy, but also the tension that you had to feel at certain moments.” In the movie, directed by Perez-Castro and Curtis, a meteor crashes into Colepepper Zoo, and a virus that transforms the animals into slobbering zombie-like mutants is unleashed.Gracie (Gabbi Kosmidis), a young quirky wolf, teams up with a gruff mountain lion named Dan (David Harbour) to find a way back to her pack.
As the zoo is overrun, they must come up with a plan to get all the animals back to normal.Together with the help of a motley crew of survivors – Xavier (Pierre Simpson) the movie-obsessed lemur, Frida (Heather Loreto) the fiery capybara, Ash (Thompson) the sarcastic, fabulous ostrich and Felix (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) the treacherous monkey – they embark on a perilous mission to rescue the zoo and defeat Bunny Zero, the deranged mutant-king determined to spread the virus beyond the zoo walls. The film was produced at Mac Guff () and L’Atelier Animation (, ).Hoban and Mark Smith of Academy Award-winning Canadian production company Copperheart Entertainment (, , ), produce, with Charades Productions, Umedia and IDL Films co-producing in association with House of Cool, Apollo Films, and Mac Guff.
Check out the trailer: Editor’s Note: You can watch 10 clips and trailers from the film here.“It’s somewhere between and ,” says Kosmidis of the film.“I grew up loving horror films, but I didn't have something like this to kind of introduce me to them.
I watched , ” Thompson adds, “Famous kids movies.” Kosmidis continues, “They were things that maybe I shouldn't have watched when I was 10.But this film was exciting.The writing was really awesome, the team was awesome, and the animation is super special.” While the color scheme choices were pretty straightforward, one of the big challenges Perez-Castro and Curtis ran into was designing characters who looked like they belonged in a horror film but would also deliver as many laughs as they did frights for children. “Our biggest challenge, from script all the way to final cut, was how we balanced the scares and comedy,” notes Curtis.
“The theory that we used was that for every jump scare, there had to be a laugh-out-loud moment.That allowed us to build up the tension, give you that scare and then allowed everyone a release.” Perez-Castro adds, “It’s like the old Walt Disney saying, ‘For every laugh, there should be a tear.’ We’ve just twisted it a little bit for horror.” When it came to the team finding a balance between scary and silly, they looked at the famously expressive – and sometimes frightening – characters from their own childhoods: The Muppets. “The characters’ popping eyes come from our love of the Muppets,” affirms Curtis.“We both love those characters and, if we weren't going to do actual Muppets, we were going to do our Muppet-inspired design.
Beyond that, we just wanted to do something that was really original, really unique and something that stood on its own.It took some time to find the designers and design team that could pull this off.Rodrigo ended up finding, as our lead character designer, Hadi Tabasi.” Tabasi is a 2D artist, animator and production designer from Istanbul, Türkiye.
He’s worked on a number of Iranian animations, Irish preschool series and many commercials… and spoke no English.Even though most of the communication between Tabasi and the rest of the team was done through Google Translate, the designs he produced were exactly what Perez-Castro and Curtis were looking for. “He had the strangest, weirdest design sense and proved the visual language goes beyond just [verbal] language,” shares Curtis.“At first, when we looked at the designs, we thought, ‘There’s no way that can be done in CG.’ But it was so appealing that we just had to do it.” Tabasi’s Muppet-adjacent designs also eliminated the need for the team to spend excessive time and money on fur rendering for the animals.
Instead, Perez-Castro and Curtis decided to give their animal characters matted fur that was designed in clumps with a felt-like texture and look. “We turned a limitation into a strength,” says Curtis.“One of the reasons that we're able to make choices like that is because we are an independent film.We got to make choices that a bigger studio film couldn’t make.
At least, not easily.As an independent film, we only have to please ourselves.That freedom was really amazing.
Of course, it comes with some limitations, especially on the budget side.But, as creatives trying to break ground, trying to do things that you've never seen before, taking the independent route ended up being fantastic for us.” That was especially true when it came to creating the zombie animals, running around like lunatics from or looking to bite and transform the next innocent creature into a mad alien invader. Normally, a zombie's defining characteristic is that its body is falling apart, blood and guts spilling this way and that.But, although they were an independent production, Perez-Castro and Curtis still couldn’t show blood on screen. “We wanted to include a lot of horror tropes like limbs falling off of bodies and heads rolling, but we obviously couldn’t make that too realistic,” notes Perez-Castro.
“We wanted to go very stylized, very cartoony.One day, I was eating gummy candy and thought, ‘Why don't we just make them gummies? Like gummy creatures?’ I pitched it to Ricardo and our producers and everyone went, ‘Yeah, let's do that.’” So, instead of blood, these gummy zombies slime up the screen whenever they get the chance.It’s gross but not traumatizing. “We were trying to channel things that we loved when we were growing up, like and and things that were a little edgy,” says Perez-Castro.
“We watched them as very young kids.And of course, we were a little scared, but we were also highly entertained.We wanted to give kids that experience.” It certainly sits well with Thompson and Kosmidis.
“Every Saturday morning, we watchedor or ,” remembers Thompson.“These movies were always horror and comedy.We would be genuinely scared.
And then we laughed our heads off.I'd love to see that come back.” Kosmidis adds, “Trust that kids want these things and trust that they actually will enjoy themselves.Honestly.
We’ve normalized and humanized ghosts too much.Let’s make things spooky again.” Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime.She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment.
Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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