The Big Picture

Collider’s Jason Gorber talks with
Ultraman: Rising
VFX Supervisor Hayden Jones.

Ultraman: Rising
showcases a new visual style evoking anime and manga elements with groundbreaking technology.
ILM animators, led by Jones, create unique character work paying tribute to the past while keeping a cinematic feel.

For more than half a century, the character Ultraman has taken many iterations, from a costumed hero on the screen, both big and small, to illustrations in manga and moving designs in anime. With Ultraman: Rising, the character is given a new look that draws upon the past, incorporating elements that use groundbreaking technology from the wizards at Industrial Light and Magic to help bring director Shannon Tindle’s concept of the character to the fore for a new generation.

In this, the second part of our conversations about Ultraman: Rising, we spoke with Industrial Light and Magic’s Hayden Jones about the work he and his international team crafted to showcase this new vision for the character. The VFX Supervisor has decades of experience in the industry, with credits ranging from Armageddon and Mission: Impossible II, right through to the likes of celebrated shows like The Black Mirror and The Mandalorian.

While ILM is renowned for its creature effects and photo-realistic environments, it’s been many years, dating back to 2011’s Rango, since the esteemed team of in-house animators were tasked with creating the kind of character work that the likes of Disney, Pixar and others are often celebrated for, flexing artistic muscles in different ways for a different purpose. Ultraman: Rising is a showcase not only for the remarkable technical achievements that are expected from such a group, but equally the more subtle performance elements that help bring both hero and Kaiju to the forefront in remarkable ways.

Collider spoke to Hayden Jones from within the walls of ILM’s Presidio campus about his role in helping bring the character of Ultraman to life for a new generation.

‘Ultraman: Rising’ Was ILM’s Greatest Challenge Since ‘Rango’

COLLIDER: Let’s talk about bringing Ultraman to life visually and with your animation team. This is obviously a unique look that you’re trying to pay tribute to what came before. This is also unique project compared to what Industrial Light and Magic has been doing over the years. Can we just talk about getting into character animation and just bringing this film to life.

HAYDEN JONES: Yeah, this was a real challenge! Industrial Light and Magic hasn’t done anything like this really since Rango, and we knew that [character animation] was really something we wanted to get back into, and Ultraman: Rising seemed like the perfect project.

We had worked with Shannon Tindle already on Lost Ollie for Netflix and as soon as he showed me the artwork for Utraman I knew this could be amazing and this could be just utterly beautiful. Everything starts with the artwork, yet you have to have a kind of ground truth that this is what we want the film to be like. Shannon was really great at steering the art team into creating this broad palette of concepts. We then just started dissecting each concept and working at how we created each individual piece and portion of it, and then bringing it together in this unique style that brought Ultraman: Rising to the screen.

ILM Animators Evoked the Style of Anime and Manga
Image via Netflix 

One of the things your visual style does is to subtly evoke anime and manga, such as with the use of “speed lines”. Could talk about those specific elements that you incorporated that echo the culture from which it came, but not to be overwhelmed by that, not to be so faithful to representation that you missed out on telling something stylistically unique?

JONES: With every step of the way we really wanted to understand where the heritage had come from and try and predict where it was going. Speed lines is really great example — We could just do it as it is in anime and put them in like ink lines, and they would go straight on dark over the top. But we thought that didn’t quite fit with the kind of cinematic feel that we wanted for Ultraman: Rising, so we came up with this technique of we still put them on in the same way, and we kind of drew lines in 2D, and thought, what if we smeared the background? What if we blew out the light through the speed lines, you have these kind of glowing speed lines now? Just as soon as, as soon as the compositor had shown them to me, I knew it was fantastic.

Industrial Light and Magic has a pretty effective history of putting glows around lines.

JONES: [Laughs] They do indeed! We have a lot of history and a lot of tools based around that. But this was pushing it into something that was unique. We have such a great team of artists, and they were all shooting ideas out to Shannon and seeing how well the directors reacted to it, and then binding it up into tool sets that we could kind spread out across the entire movie.

Ultraman’s Kaiju Baby Evokes the Earliest CGI Success of George Lucas’ Computer Division
Image via Netflix

This entire computer graphics thing in part started as part of this company with Tin Toy which involved the baby. And now we have another errant infant you’re animating. The tools have changed, and now there are seemingly infinite elements that you can actually draw upon. For you, as the tools have changed, has your animation been able to change because of the lack of limitations, or is the lack of limitations sometimes actually helps with the story?

JONES: Everything comes down to story. At Industrial Light and Magic, we want to partner with the filmmakers to just make sure their story is on screen. It’s about giving animators performance tools, which in turn give them the ability to kind of like make subtle nuances. It’s about just listening to the storytellers and understanding the kind of dynamics of a scene so that we can kind of light it and compose it to perfection. Everything comes from story, and everything has to flow to the story, because that is the core of everything we do.

But regarding you eliciting a specific performance. How much has that changed over the last few decades?

JONES: I think I think from a performance standpoint it probably hasn’t changed as much as some of the tools. But I think what’s happened is it gives you more time to iterate. When the animators have more time to iterate you can get like a more nuanced performance and you just get more and more beauty in that final performance

Because you’re not waiting three weeks for a render.

Jones: Yeah, exactly.

What the Future of Animation Holds for the Gurus at ILM
Image via Netflix

What is not available for you as an animator that you would love to see. What. Where do you see this art form going in five years? In ten years? Considering how much has changed in the last decade, where do you see it a decade from now?

Jones: I hope that people still take chances in animation. I think one of the things that’s been really interesting over the last, 6 or 7 years in animation is it’s been the one place in filmmaking where people have actually really tried to push style and kind of break boundaries. And you can still see this now with Ultraman: Rising, with other films coming out where they’re willing to try different styles and different, different techniques of filmmaking.

I really hope that animation keeps pushing those boundaries, because that’s exciting to me as a filmmaker. I also think it’s exciting for the audiences who are really kind of craving something new and something iconic from their cinema going experience.

Is there tiny thing in this film, a little Easter egg that you put in that you think audiences should be looking out for?

JONES: There is a little tiny Easter egg where somebody from another Shannon Tindle project turns up in the movie. And if you pay very close attention to one shot, maybe he’s not the stuffed toy you think he is all along.

Very cryptic! Thank you so much. Congratulations to you and the entire team, the army of people all over the world that brought this film to life.

JONES: Oh, thank you so much.

Release Date June 14, 2024 Director Shannon Tindle , John Aoshima Cast Christopher Sean , Gedde Watanabe , Tamlyn Tomita , Keone Young , Julia Harriman Runtime 117 minutes Writers Shannon Tindle , Marc Haimes Studio(s) Netflix Animation , Tsuburaya Productions , Industrial Light & Magic Distributor(s) Netflix Franchise(s) Ultraman Expand