I love learning about the behind-the-scenes stories of the movies I watch. It gives you a deeper appreciation. And that’s just as true for animated films! Every movie has a bit of truth, and Tinkerbell and the Legend of the NeverBeast is no exception.
We got the chance to chat with director Steve Loter and producer Makul Wigert about the film, and it was such an eye-opening conversation. It always amazes me how much work goes into making these movies just right!
Keep reading for my interview.
- Director Steve Loter
- Producer Makul Wigert
What was your favorite part of the animation process?
My favorite part of the animation process is the collaboration and seeing an idea come to life through the work of a fantastic team of artists. It’s been an absolute joy seeing Steve’s idea, which started 4½ years ago, and through story boarding and design into animations, to see that coming to life through the, the artistry with some amazing people was absolutely a joy.
For me, it was a story. You get to this really sweet spot when you’ve got a script and then you’ve got Storyboard Artists visualizing the script. There’s something magical that happens there because the Storyboard Artist is a new voice. They look at the written word, and they say, “Oh I can add a joke here. I can put the camera here that’s going to emphasize this moment or emotion.” For me, that’s when things really turn, and things really elevate. That’s magic time for me.
How did Tinkerbell And The Legend Of The Neverbeast come about?
The movie was inspired by my daughter. I grew up in a household with no pets of any kind, –no dogs, no cats, nothing — and because of having no pets around, I have a fear of very large dogs like Irish Wolf Hound dogs, Horse Line dogs.
My daughter loves one thing above all else, very large dogs, and our neighborhood just has a ton of dogs. She’ll see a neighbor walking a dog down the street and she’ll run up to the dog and she’ll throw her arms the dog in a big loving hug. Right, yeah I see it on your face. That’s exactly how I felt. It was like, “UUUHHHH” so you get that kind of reaction, and, “Okay the dog is okay to pet, whew.”
It showed me something you know once the fear subsided, something very important, that my daughter has a huge open heart. I had to sit her down and we had to talk about this encounter we just had with the dog. She would say, “Well all animals are my friends. Why wouldn’t they be? In fact, the bigger they are the bigger the love they have to give.”
I thought that’s the story. Fawn, the animal town fairy loves animals unconditionally. She takes care of animals, and she encounters a creature that can be perceived of as a monster and her open heart’s going to be put to the test.
I thought, “Okay this is a message, this is a good message for Fawn, the character to have and for my daughter to learn too.” It’s beautiful to think with an open heart and to see the world through that prism. That perspective is a wonderful thing, but you also have to think with your head. You need the balance to have a happy life, and I thought that’s exactly the story that I wanted to tell.
Has your daughter seen the film yet?
My daughter loved the movie. My daughter was not just the inspiration for the initial idea through. She basically became Fawn. I looked to her for acting and for moments. There was one time when she was supposed to clean her room because friends were coming over and she just hid everything under the bed and I caught her. There was a whole lot of “Yeeaahhh I should have done that and I did know, but I didn’t.” I was just watching the way she would twist her hand, the way she would move her shoulders up, and I thought that’s Fawn. I literally took that scene and I worked it right in the film.
When I realized that’s the connection, she is Fawn, I just kept looking to her for dialogue, for moments, for movement. She just became infused into the film, and on top of that, she is also Calista the Bunny in the film. There is one Bunny that refuses to hop. That’s my daughter, written just for her.
The film, though it’s about fairies and monsters, honestly is really about my family. I knew I needed to pull this story from a personal place. Nyx the Scout Fairy, the over protective Scout Fairy, is me. She was a very easy character to write for because that’s the helicopter parent that I am. I am the parent that you go to the park, and you’re on the monkey bars and I’m concerned not only about falling off the money bars but that germs are on the monkey bars. I’m that parent. I realized that’s my perspective on the world that maybe I’m thinking with my head too much and maybe I need to relax and think a little more with my heart. My daughter’s the opposite of that. I realized there’s my antagonist and protagonist.
I wanna point out that Nyx is not a villain. Nyx has a point of view. She’s right about it. She’s trying to protect Nixie Hollow. She believes in this strongly. It was really important for me that it was a point of view that was real, believable, and realistic.
If she came off as a villain, then I would have come off as a bad parent. That was really important to me, but it is my family life with some names changed to protect the innocent.
We were actually incredibly fortunate in that the initial pitch that Steve did to John 4½ years ago is the film that we ended up making. For the most part, the introduction of Fawn, Fawn discovering Gruff, the, the Nyx, Tinkerbell, all of that interaction all remains true to the goodbye at the very end. That was the entire story. That was the pitch, and John fell in love with it. He was like, “I know exactly where you’re going. That’s the film we’re going to make.”
We were very fortunate in that, in that respect it was relatively smooth. Now Gruff, Gruff proved to be a little bit of a challenge because making this giant 6 ft. character act and play against this little 5 inch fairy that was a little bit more difficult.
How were Nyx and the Scout Fairies created?
My daughter is in a gymnastics team. We would go to a gymnastics meet, and her team would run up to me and say, “We heard you’re working on a fairy movie.” She goes, “Can you make fairies like us?” “Like what?” “We’re physical. We run, we jump. We, we do all these things. There’s no fairies like us in the movie. Can you make fairies like us?” I thought, “That’s right. There isn’t. Where’s the physical fairy? Where’s the action hero? Where is that character” and the Scouts came from that.
For me, that’s who the Scouts are. They’re physical. They’re very able. They’re very athletic and there’s a Pixie Hollow for them. That action scene of where she’s saving the Sparrow Men in the tower and stuff like that I love.
We did some reference on Par Core, and we said that’s a pretty amazing thing and it’s real. You can do it. People do it. It’s not a trick of the camera. It actually happens. I thought well Nyx is so skilled, she would be able to do that. The drive is there, because she is there to protect and nothing– crumbling towers, falling rock will prevent her from saving a fellow fairy.
Did you have an idea who you wanted to cast in the various roles or was it more of an audition process?
Well we knew Ginnifer Goodwin. We loved Ginnifer Goodwin and her voice we knew was going to be Fawn. That was easy for us. We had a conversation about then who would be playing against her, and we wanted somebody who could contrast the joyful bubbly nature that was Fawn. For Nyxz, we then discovered Rosario. When we brought Rosario up, she just has this cool voice. You can hear her passion and her belief in what she feels is right, and that contrast, we thought was really beautiful and really nice. Working with both of them was just an absolute joy.
What type of music were you listening to while shaping the story for Tinkerbell And The Legend Of The Neverbeast?
It’s really interesting because music does shape your mood. I am a huge music nerd. I have a pretty long drive to and from the studio. It’s about an hour and a half, two hours sometimes and so there’s a lot of opportunity to listen to music. At the time of coming up with the story, I was listening to Bleu who is a power pop singer/songwriter. I emotionally connected to the music. I connected to the lyrics, I connected to the sound, and I knew this guy was a kindred spirit. I needed him on the project. He would understand the emotion I’m trying to go through, because I connected to this. It absolutely does influence the work 100%. The soundtrack was actually very important to me because being I’m such a music nerd.
We brought on Joel McNeely who has done all the other fairy films and has done this beautiful score. Bleu as a featured instrumentalist brings the sound of Gruff – this tribal earthy sound that you haven’t heard before. He used these found instruments to create this texture that you’ve never heard.
It was really important for me because I wanted to listen to the CD of the sound track in my car. It entertains me.
How was the Neverbeast created?
The Neverbeast came very quickly. Initially, I hired a few designers to work with me to do some drawings from a verbal idea. Pretty quickly I realized that I had this character in my head, so I knew what I wanted. I did a drawing very early in the process, and we did a painting of it. We showed it to John Lasseter and John said, “That’s it, done, there’s your character.”
That was a wonderful thing to have approval and understand and visualize the character very early on. The challenge was following up on that because you have a beautiful 2-D painted imagine and now you have to realize that in a CG world, in a dimensional world. John kept going back to us, “Keep the appeal, keep the appeal. Look at those eyes. Go back to that drawing, go back to that drawing.” It was an interesting process. He did come early, and I’m very thankful for that, but it was still a challenge.
The thing the thing about Gruff is he’s a bunch of different animals, because I wanted elements to be recognizable by a child… “Oh my Dog does that, my cat does that. I’ve seen that creature in a zoo.” He has the walk of a hippo or a rhino. He has horse fur like a yack, and it’s white. He has these floppy dog ears. He has an armadillo tail that he can hang on stuff, but it also acts like a cat. You could tell his mood by the swinging of the tail, and these big beautiful green cow eyes that you see you’re reflection in. Fawn sees a reflection in that.
There was a moment I had where I was on a farm once and I was looking at a cow because I was trying to draw a cow just for some practice. It was intriguing to me that I was looking directly into the cow eye and all I can was my own reflection. I was projecting what I thought the cow was thinking. The cow was thinking, “That drawing is not good, that does not look like me” or whatever the cow could have possibly been thinking. What I wanted to do is take all those elements and just kind of put them together. It draws you in. “My dog does that. Oh my does doesn’t do that.” That’s interesting. I want to see more. That was the pivotal kind of mix of what we were looking for in Gruff. Familiar, yet different.
What can you tell us about the designs on the Neverbeast?
They’re intended to be tribal and earthy. I looked at a lot of ancient literature. A lot of wood cut drawings you’d find these really old tones. I also looked at some of the more modern comic book graphic novels. I wanted to find something that looked so old world. Something familiar, but very old. It was from imagination but definitely rooted in a lot of truth and material research.
What was the most challenging part of Tinkerbell And The Legend Of The Neverbeast?
Animating Gruff was definitely a challenge and bringing to life because his scale is so much larger than the other characters. 6’ character interacting with a 5” fairy. That proved to be very difficult because even just the choices in camera lengths you have to do something drastically different.
We would have scenes where the background is being fisheyed warped because we’re trying to fit the characters in to the scene. It was all with the goal of making the relationship between Fawn and Gruff to be believable. If the performance didn’t land, if you didn’t believe in the relationship then the end of the movie, that whole journey wouldn’t have been as strong as it would have been. Coming up with a character who could deliver that type of performance was incredibly hard for us.
I can say this. What I thought was going be a challenge was the ending honestly. In speaking of real life events, the ending was a real life event when we had to put the family pet down. A lot of dialogue spoken by the Fawn is actual dialogue my wife said to our dog. It was one of those moments where I felt like I’m really capturing the emotion here. I’m capturing the moment in time. It actually happened to me and I’m probably going to be very particular about how I want this scene to feel.
When Ginnifer Goodwin came in to record, she did it in one take. She got it down in one take because she channeled — she says, “I know what you’re going for. I’ve been there, I can do this.” And she did it.
It was beautiful, but it was very hard to witness. I mean she definitely got into that moment and she was very choked up. I think everybody was. Everybody had to take a few minutes after that, and it was amazing to witness. We knew we had something very beautiful.
What’s next?
S&M: Vacation!
After 4 1/2 years, I can see why they both need a break!
In conclusion, talking with director Steve Loter and producer Makul Wigert gave us an incredible look into the heart and soul of Tinkerbell and the Legend of the NeverBeast. It’s incredible to see just how much passion, creativity, and attention to detail go into bringing these stories to life. Whether you’re a longtime Tinkerbell fan or discovering this magical world for the first time, this film offers a touching story, breathtaking animation, and a more profound message that resonates with audiences of all ages. Next time you watch, you’ll have an even greater appreciation for the magic behind the scenes!