With Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, director Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) does a mash-up of videogames and anime, but with a firmer grounding in reality and photography than, say, Speed Racer.

Based on the cult comic book by Bryan Lee O'Malley, the film follows Toronto-based hipster Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), his band Sex bob-omb, and charts his efforts to win the heart of the elusive girl of his dreams Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). But to win Ramona's heart, Scott he must defeat her seven evil-ex boyfriends in combat, with each fight more spectacular than the last.

"The best way to describe the world of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it's a normal world of a normal young man filtered through his overactive imagination," Wright suggests. "Bryan Lee O'Malley describes Scott as the hero of the movie in his own head. My goal is to make that very movie. The emotions and interactions throughout the film are infused with the mass media that this generation has grown up with; not just in music, film and animation, but in over 30 years of video games. Our characters' life experience is completely governed by the ridiculous amount of time they've spent with their Nintendo consoles. For the twentysomething characters in the film, the incidental music for Zelda is as resonant as nursery rhymes.

Wright's ambitious vision proved to be quite the vfx challenge for Double Negative in London and Mr. X in Toronto, resulting in 1,200 shots. Dneg's Frazer Churchill served as overall visual effects supervisor, Andrew Whitehurst was Dneg's CG supervisor and Rupert Porter was vfx producer. Aaron Weintraub served as visual effects supervisor for Mr. X.

"It's got this unique look and this design proposition, which is, how to translate O' Malley's artwork with Edgar's sensibility onto film," says Churchill. " The trick was to fuse the notion of the '80s Nintendo console and other graphical ideas. We would have to make his graphics photographic and visualize the extremely stylized fight sequences, all of which were based in a hyper-real altered reality. The big design question was how to keep the spirit of the comic while working with live-action photography.

"During the story, Scott battles a Bevy of winged demon hipster chicks, has a "bass off" with a levitating vegan, battles the Katanyagi Twins and their double headed snow dragon by creating a green-eyed Sound Yeti from his amplifiers," Churchill continues. "Peoples' sentences are punctuated by on-screen comic book text boxes; peoples' actions have visible sound effects graphics, which obey photographic depth of field. Musical sound waves are visible and sometimes turn into creatures and people have a habit of bursting into showers of coins."

In other words, it's about the wildest cinematic ride since Speed Racer.