Executive producers Zack Snyder, Deborah Snyder, and Wesley Coller discuss their all-new 2D adult animated series about an iron-willed warrior’s vow of vengeance on the Thunder God, now streaming on Netflix.
To be clear, Thor and Loki do in fact appear in Zack Snyder’s visionary new Netflix series, Twilight of the Gods, but so too do the mortal king Leif, the iron-willed warrior Sigrid, and a large cohort of other gods, demons, and adventurers, whose quests and conflicts expand upon the familiar environs of the Marvel universe. Featuring the voices of Stuart Martin, Sylvia Hoeks, Rahul Kohli, Paterson Joseph, Jamie Clayton, Pilou Asbæk, and Peter Stormare, among others, the series was created by Snyder (who also directs the first and final episodes), Jay Oliva, and Eric Carrasco. Animation was produced at Xilam Animation.
In a mythical world of great battles, great deeds and great despair, Leif is saved on the battlefield by Sigrid, with whom he falls in love. However, their wedding ends in tragedy when Thor unleashes his wrath on the ceremony, sparking Sigrid to vow vengeance on the Thunder God. Led by Sigrid and Leif, a crew of crusaders undertakes a mission that will lead them to Hell and beyond, and shake Asgard to its foundations.
For Zack and Deborah Snyder, Twilight of the Gods represents their first animated project since Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole in 2010. We spoke with them, and fellow executive producer Wesley Coller, about what it was like to return to animation and how they approached the challenge of bringing a new perspective to Norse mythology.
But first, enjoy the trailer:
Dan Sarto: Was Twilight of the Gods always conceived as a 2D animation project, or did you ever consider doing it as live-action or even 3DCG?
Zack Snyder: It was always going to be an animated project. There was some discussion about it being 3D, but we really, really wanted it to be 2D in the end, and that was the most important thing.
Deborah Snyder: I'd say the biggest challenge was figuring out what our style was. Unlike Legend of the Guardians, when we worked exclusively with [Australian digital studio] Animal Logic, this time we hired a bunch of artists, and we did all the R&D and all the assets in house.
So, when you have a blank palette, what do you do? You just start exploring. Zack is really great because he pulls a lot of references at the beginning of every project, whether it's animated or live-action. He was like, I like this from this and this from this. And he just literally has a whole file.
And then we started hiring artists whose work we liked, and we went down a bunch of different paths until we narrowed it down. It took about four months before we came up with the direction we wanted to go, and we maintained a consistency because the team that did the initial work worked on everything, and we oversaw all of that.
So that was, I think, the most daunting, yet exciting, part of the whole process.
Dan: From a design standpoint, one of the things I noticed is that everything fit so well together, from the characters to the environments to the effects.
ZS: One of the main things [that helped] was getting our character designers to draw the backgrounds as well, because sometimes you can get a disconnect between the style of the world and the style of the characters. And it was really fortunate that we had our own in-house team, so I could be like, okay, you did a great job on the characters. Now draw me a landscape that looks like those people could fit in.
Dan: What does animation provide you as visual storytellers that live-action doesn't?
Wesley Coller: No guardrails in terms of what can be accomplished because budget isn’t a factor – it can be a simple scene, or it can be the most bombastic battle scene. Obviously, there were some constraints, but it allowed Zack to tell the story in as visually dynamic and large-scale a way as he wanted. You can introduce dragons and giants and humans next to gods, and there are very few things to be sorted out, compared to live-action production. Zack could doodle a storyboard and say, it's this, and we can render that. So, in a lot of ways, it's the purest path from his initial doodle to a final frame, because there are very few things that stand in the way as obstacles, in terms of methodology.
DS: You can put the sun exactly where you want it. It can snow at the exact time you want it to. In terms of weather atmospherics, you create whatever you want it to be. So whatever Zack wanted, it could be perfectly done in that way.
Dan: Zack, which of your live-action skills do you feel served you best on this project?
ZS: I would say probably my storyboarding skill is my biggest asset when I go to animation. But lighting, of course, is a big part of it, and composition is a big part of it, and action design. The cool thing about it is that, in the live-action film, you're an editor in a lot of ways – like, I don't want to show that, show this. Here's the part of the performance I want to show.
Whereas, in animation, you're not an editor because you're actually creating the moments. And so, it's a slightly different skill set, but you have to really know what you want. That's the difference. When you make an animated film, you have to be super-decisive and know exactly what you want because you will not get the opportunity to observe something and say, "Oh, that's kind of cool," and then have people do it again and show you something else. It doesn't really work that way. You have to really know how you want to see things.
Dan: Do you think that audiences are becoming more accepting of animation as a medium to tell adult stories, rather than just seeing it as cartoons? Did you consider that for this project?
ZS: Yeah, I did. There's really some great work that's starting to be done in adult animation, and I really feel like we need to start piling on to make it cultural, to make it a thing that people automatically assume can be for adults. And that real stories can be told, and real emotion can be rendered, and real journeys can be gone on. And I think that's what we were going for.
Dan: Apart from considerations of scale or spectacle, do you feel that animation allowed you to include things in your story that you couldn't necessarily do in live-action?
ZS: I do. I think that when we pushed the sexuality and the violence in this, weirdly, it's strangely less shocking than it would be in live-action. So, I think a larger audience can enjoy it without it being just so over the top that they can't handle it.
Dan: For most audiences, I think their ideas about Norse mythology come from Thor and Loki in the Marvel universe. Are you excited about bringing a different perspective to audiences?
ZS: Absolutely. I think what we’ve done is closer to the actual Norse myths than the pop culture version that people are used to seeing. It’s like they've had their primer and now it's time for a deeper dive. And I hope that they find that fun and exciting.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
