“Ah, the smell of adventure in the morning!” — Asterix and the Big Fight (first published in Pilote magazine, 1964)
If René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s iconic characters, Asterix and Obelix, were to settle anywhere, it would be Toulouse. The duo has found a new home at TAT Productions Studio, located in the south of France’s “Pink City.” The region’s distinctly bohemian atmosphere is reflected in what the area has inspired artistically over the years, including as host to many animation-related events such as Cartoon Forum and Cartoon Movie every year. Therefore, it’s no surprise that everyone’s energy and love for Asterix is so immediately apparent.
Produced by Alain Goldman, Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight (Le Combat des Chefs) is a true legacy project, with TAT setting out to deliver a wealth of tools and resources guided by co-directors Alain Chabat and Fabrice Joubert. With the help of production designer Aurélien Predal, the miniseries aims to bring the property to a wider audience. Predal previously provided art direction for the 2014 CGI movie Across the Spider-Verse and Ron’s Gone Wrong, bringing both familiarity and innovation to the world.
Here, Chabat and Joubert faced the challenge of making a new animated Asterix for a modern audience. Predal says he was more than aware of the tricky balance in making it timeless yet contemporary. “We’ve had to respect the original material but also define our own universe with an objective to push the talent and knowledge of the team at TAT,” he says as he presents examples of his Saul Bass-inspired color bible, which became a visual blueprint for everyone involved.
Having worked on character designs at Aardman, Predal brought the influence of stop-motion, not just with the distinctive movement but also in capturing the warmth and charm of the medium. “With Aurélien Predal’s understanding of these aesthetics, we wanted to explore a more tactile look that would bring a warmer and more tangible aspect to the CG and lean much closer to stop-motion animation,” says Chabat. “The idea was to feel that we could almost touch these characters. The same went for the sets, which had to work in harmony with the characters while also remaining as faithful as possible to Uderzo’s drawings.”
In terms of a graphical style, Chabat and Joubert wanted to pay homage to the golden age of Asterix, which, for them, is situated between Asterix the Gladiator (1964) and Asterix at the Olympic Games (1968). Joubert explains: “It was during this period that the characters really took on their definitive form (even if they continued to evolve afterward), and Uderzo, graphically, dared to experiment further, such as [by] eliminating the background to keep only a colored card behind the characters. So, we decided to emulate this idea in some sequences of the series, as well as integrating splashes of onomatopoeia.”
And it works… as the typography and sound effects POP! and the action explodes — Tchrââââc! — the flourishes immediately add those familiar imperfections we have become used to via the Spider-Verse movies that Predal did design work on. It’s all there, even down to As Joubert explains, “Aurélien was intrigued by a printing flaw in the first editions of the albums where the primary printing colors (cyan, magenta and yellow) were not perfectly aligned and so became the basis of the look for the magic potion as well as the visual effect surrounding the characters when they drink it.”
“We wanted to explore a more tactile look that would bring a warmer and more tangible aspect to the CG and lean much closer to stop-motion animation … The same went for the sets, which had to work in harmony with the characters while also remaining as faithful as possible to Uderzo’s drawings.”
— Co-director Alain Chabat
Model Behavior
The characters are built as 3D models in ZBrush. With constant reference via an overlay for accuracy, the original character designers help set the volume while keyframe moments from the original scripts are also used to test the range of movement, matching specific angles from a library of poses. Once the models are built, they are sent to rigging and tested for any imperfections that may arise, specifically where the limbs are bent and may reveal holes or bumps.
A toing and froing occurs between 3D modelers and riggers (who literally sit next to each other), a process that can take several months for a main character, with Asterix alone going through over 100 variations. Adobe Substance is used to digitally paint the 3D models — each texture created by a separate artist who uses material references — which can take another three weeks to two months per character. It is here where you can see the detail of the leather and fabrics along with a fuzziness to the skin.
Of course, all of this comes to life once it is lit (shot by shot) in 3D Studio Max, the software that is also used to animate the series. Out of complete darkness, the lighting and rendering are set up as multiple sources, starting with the sun and then tweaking with digital reflectors before rendering in Chaos V-Ray for the art directors to check over.
Setting up the lighting on a single shot — depending on the decor and amount of characters in the scene — can take anywhere from an afternoon to two days, and it is constantly tested alongside the texture artists who have built a library of materials, such as every leaf in the village for each season that passes. All the while the color bible is still followed closely, with everything matched by eye as the textures change color once a scene is fully lit. Finally, compositors add subtle camera effects for a more cinematic feel.
Legacy and Lineage
Another individual crucial to the production is animation director and supervisor Kristof Serrand, an animation veteran who has worked on practically all of DreamWorks’ animated output since the 2D-animated Asterix movies, which includes the original Asterix and the Big Fight adaptation released in 1989. This lineage with both the characters and major studios not only runs through Serrand and Predal but also through the directors themselves, with Chabat having worked on the live-action Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002), while Joubert — having worked as a stop-motion animator on Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) — also worked as an animator at DreamWorks since its earliest movies.
As TAT’s co-CEO David Alaux mentions, “Everyone stepped up, learning from the best in town … In some ways, it was like going back to school.”
The project came about when Chabat wrote a treatment of The Big Fight for fun. “Writing around the Asterix universe is always a pleasure for me. The publishers, Hachette, heard about the treatment and asked if they could read it, and they loved it.”
Having already written and directed a live-action Asterix movie, he was reluctant to repeat himself, so he discussed the possibility of producing an animated movie. “Dominique Bazay, director for original animation at Netflix, suggested that it absolutely could be [animated], but if the story needed another format, it was totally OK to expand into a miniseries. And here we have it,” Chabat concludes.
The Gauls were known to have faced numerous obstacles, and at TAT the close-knit army of artisans managed to not only deliver a beautifully animated series but also, through a crucial sense of humor — and the source’s satire conveying these all-important life lessons — guide Netflix’s Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight to victory.
Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight will premiere on Netflix on Wednesday, April 30.
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