Kung Fu Panda's vfx supervisor and production designer worked closely to bring an exceptional richness of detail to the screen. All images © DreamWorks Animation LLC.

"This film is the most ambitious project our studio has ever tried. The running joke was that it would almost be impossible to create.

"It got me pumped, so to speak."

That's Markus Manninen talking. The DreamWorks veteran is visual effects supervisor for Kung Fu Panda, the studio's newest film. Without taking anything away from directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne, Manninen describes his role as "working with the production designer to really create the imagery of the movie. We're responsible from the very beginning for the actual production imagery and computer graphics, all the way to putting it on film and digital projection."

The production designer he mentions is Raymond Zibach. Panda is his first CGI project and his second as production designer after DreamWorks' final 2D effort, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. Previously, Zibach had toiled in the world of episodic television as a background artist on shows ranging from Alvin and the Chipmunks to Star Wars: Clone Wars before moving up to features and DreamWorks.

"Raymond and I were very much on the same page as to what was important for the show," Manninen relates. "He had great design ideas for the show in terms of the characters' shape language and the textural detail we wanted to achieve. There was a certain amount of complexity in that in the baseline. We spent a lot of time evaluating and deciding how to get that richness onscreen while making smart choices about what big complicated systems we needed to develop."

More about those complicated systems later. Zibach's onscreen richness is evident throughout the film, particularly (as befits a former background artist) in vistas of bottomless chasms and star-filled skies that are almost hallucinatory in their otherworldly beauty and detail -- environments reminiscent of the classic 1960s album covers for the rock group Yes. If you assume those covers were his inspiration, however, you'd be wrong.

"Our original [concept] paintings of China were a big influence," Zibach says. "They were done in watercolor and ink wash, but the more modern colors we used came naturally to me from working in animation. I was more influenced by people like Mary Blair and classic animation art directors who always pushed the color emotionally. Our backgrounds have an electricity to them when they're lit in CG that might remind you of those covers.

"I was definitely more influenced by traditional animation, but also by movies like Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or House of Flying Daggers. They're kung fu movies, but they're so heavily art-directed and beautiful, with a great emotional tie between color and what's happening onscreen. I thought that came close to some of the great animated films like Bambi.

Kung Fu Panda’s look was influenced by Chinese art and architecture, and kung fu movies.

"We used tons of reference sources. I was on the film for five years, our art director Tang Heng for three. We looked at Chinese art and architecture, even temple carvings. We both immersed ourselves in the culture, but Tang knew a lot more about what things really meant and brought a lot of amazing talent to film. He came to the U.S. when he was eight, I think from Vietnam; his parents are Chinese. He kept me honest and helped me see the culture very well. Even though he grew up here, he wanted to depict China so everyone could see its beauty."

Unfortunately, Zibach missed out on seeing that beauty first-hand. "I haven't broken my string of not going to the places I get to depict. We almost went to Hong Kong to pitch to Stephen Chow [Kung Fu Hustle]. We were all ready to go, but the trip got cancelled two days before we were supposed to leave."

Both Zibach and Manninen agree that the film's story called out for it to be visually depicted on as broad a scale as possible. "We used techniques to make the world feel vast and airy," says Manninen, "and emulate the look of Chinese paintings -- but also to build a sense of peril: this is a big world and there's a lot at stake." (The pair had a big canvas to fill too: a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio and eventual IMAX projection.)

"Somewhere in the first year people asked me, when did the film take place -- what year, what dynasty?" Zibach adds. "I just said it was a 'legendary time' and started using that term in general. That led us to the idea that the story was so great it had to be retold, and usually when stories get retold, they get bigger and bigger. And that led us to an epic scale and level of detail. The ideas for what could happen in the film got bigger, like the showdown on the rope bridge or the villain's escape from prison.

"I'm proud my art and design ideas could enhance the drama. That's when I'm doing my job well. You don't always get an opportunity to enhance the story as much as I did on this film."