The Uncanny Valley was deliberately avoided in the human characters, like Susan (pictured with The Missing Link), who was stylized but had a level of detail approaching photoreal.

"We worked very hard in developing the translucency of the skin. With Susan and the President and Monger, we added wrinkle controls to their brows and to their noses. We could move the skin a little before but now more than ever. One of my pet peeves with CG humans is having too much dead space between the nose and eyelids. There's this little rectangle that is hard to move around. A lot of it was directorial choice. We wanted to have more of a living, breathing presence, and with all the surfacing and other stuff, it blended together really well. We had more bendy arms to break the bones between the wrist and elbow. We could actually bend that into a curve, if we wanted for in-betweens."

Meanwhile, the gelatinous B.O.B. (voiced by Seth Rogen) posed the biggest character technical challenge. "We spent at least a year in development on him," Burgess continues. "Initially, it was a mystery whether he would be an effect or a character rig. And we ended up with a hybrid: a basic character rig with blobby effects on top when rendered. When we worked on him in our animation software (EMO), we didn't see the goop at the base, his translucency or the bubbles until we got renders back from the farm, where all that was generated."

B.O.B. took a year of development, and ended up as a hybrid character rig with blobby effects. Here, he charms the pants off some Jell-O.

The Missing Link (voiced by Will Arnett) and Insectosaurus were unique-looking but not different in terms of rigging. But Burgess had a mandate for the TDs to get a tail system that dragged, more in keeping with the Japanese monster movies they were referencing. "Insecto is 350 feet tall and when we were working in stand-in modes in EMO, we didn't see that fur thickness," Burgess explains. "For instance, there's one place where Susan backs up into him and touches him with her hands. By the time that we got the fur turned on in that shot, you couldn't even see Susan, she was so deep into the fur, so we had to cheat visually for stuff like that on a shot-by-shot basis."

Dr. Cockroach Ph.D. (voiced by Hugh Laurie in his more natural English accent but with a touch of House by way of Dragnet) was an exercise in contrast as the mad scientist. But temperamental alien Gallaxhar (voiced by Rainn Wilson) was more of a challenge once they got into the facial and tentacle work. "Adding two more eyes to the face was a pipeline adjustment," Burgess offers. "The tentacle thing was a rebuild. Instead of having him walk like a big spider, we had him walk like a stalk of string cheese that has a bit of the cheese shredded at the bottom. It was another instance of a Chuck Jones-like feel to the movement. I did a rough 2D test for all of the monster characters early on to help the riggers, and the directors [especially] liked what I did for Gallaxhar."

Evil alien invader Gallaxhar was animated to look like a piece of string cheese shredded at the bottom, instead of going the spider route.

Of course, it helped getting a huge bump half-way through production with an improved EMO. "They sped up geometry caching so you could turn on a lot more geometry in your camera view and spin it around and see it move in space," Burgess explains. "When doing blocking, there's a way to render it around eight times as fast. We also got webcams to all the animators [for the first time] to better shoot video reference at their desks."

And when it came time to executing the bravura chase in San Francisco and subsequent confrontation on the Golden Gate Bridge, Digital Effects Supervisor Mahesh Ramasubramanian (Bee Movie, Madagascar, Shrek) was well armed. In fact, MVA was so grand in scale that there were two teams supervising lighting while he separately supervised the chase and Golden Gate Bridge sequences.