“The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse” Art Director Mike McCain On Emphasizing Mackesy’s “Fluid And Gesture” Art Style

When the animation team came together to adapt Charlie Mackesy’s 2019 book The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse, art director Mick McCain’s challenge was to get Mackesy’s artistic style going. The animated short follows a boy looking for a home. Along the way he meets three animals who are also looking for a place where they belong and begin to bond. Although McCain did not have much experience with inking and watercolor when the project began, he enlisted Mackesy to help direct the animation to capture his “fluid and gestural” style. By the end of the project, McCain and the animators had created hundreds of backgrounds for animation.

DEADLINE: How did your involvement with the The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse?

MIKE MCCAIN: Kara [Speller, producer] I reached out after seeing some of the painting studies I did on Instagram and ArtStation. For the first few months of this year, I’ve been doing these Google Street View studies in various locations around the world. So I think this one caught her eye and she reached out. I’ve never seen the book so I looked it up and Charlie’s art is so fluid and gestural and beautiful in the book. My first reaction was that I’m not very good with ink lines and don’t have much experience with this type of watercolor, but my wife saw the book and was struck by how cute the mole is and how thoughtful and heartfelt the stories are. . So I said yes, I’ll give it a try. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what a film rendition of Charlie’s work might look like.

DEADLINE: What was the process of animating those inklines and watercolors?

MCCAIN: When I came, the animation team was pretty advanced with character design. Peter [Baynton], the director worked with Charlie and the animation team to model and design the characters and see how they would move with this soft gradient. When I got there, the task before me was: How do we bring the rest of this world to life? How do we complement the fluidity of these characters? How do we design the color and light approach to the overall picture? As for the ink and watercolor I was talking about, that was still a big part of exploring the environment. How much of this slope do we absorb? How do we render these environments? How can we evoke Charlie’s real gestures and minimalist watercolor feel while presenting the world in a more cinematic way? It was mostly my part of the exploration, and then the characters were with Peter and many other talented artists and animators.

DEADLINE: What was it like working with Charlie? Was he very handy with the animation?

MCCAIN: Yes, Charlie was very active from start to finish. He’ll be the first to admit animation was new to him, so he had a lot to digest and was trying to get comfortable with the process. But his creative instinct was very strong and he had a very clear picture of how this world should feel and how this experience should be for the viewer. It often doesn’t exist or it’s a long process to find it, and it changes a lot during the course of a production. In this case, there’s all that animation knowledge or design talk between what goes on in Charlie’s head and what we bring to the screen. How do we pull it off?

DEADLINE: What were some of the highlights of your time on the project?

MCCAIN: Well the challenge is to find a style, master it yourself and then teach others and get them to master it so you can produce it. I think we had 250 backgrounds in the film. Some are simpler, others are much more extensive and complicated. We also created the color script of the entire film and the color and lighting design for the characters and how they would integrate into those environments. There was a week or two when I realized we had finally made it. I have this team of six other background painters and everyone gets the style.

We now have a job that Charlie is very happy with. We had art reviews a few times a week and every time we had a review I had this exciting directory of new art to show that six months ago I couldn’t imagine painting one of these paintings . We haven’t figured out what to go in and what they should look like, and suddenly every few days I have a dozen new paintings or running versions of them in the works. This discovery is really exciting for me.