Page 35 - 3D Artist 110 - 2017 UK

BEING A
REAL BRATT

Playing upon childhood nostalgia served as
the basis for Eighties villain Balthazar Bratt,
who was voiced by trey Parker

along with using bubble gum as his weapon
of choice, Balthazar Bratt is adorned with the
wardrobe and attitude of michael Jackson
and Prince. “We were trying to avoid a
straightforward bad guy who twists his
moustache and does bad things,” states
Despicable Me 3 director Kyle Balda when
discussing the former child television star
seeking revenge for his show being cancelled.
“[Instead we gave] true motivation as to what
is making him do these things, but also with a
little bit of ridiculousness to it. Balthazar Bratt
is such an icon of the Eighties and has a lot of
these cheesy Eighties references. He’s stuck in
the past and has this mullet haircut.
“Pierre Cofin, Eric guillon and I are children
from the Eighties so these were nostalgic
references for us… His key power weapon is a
keytar which was [commonly found in]
Eighties pop bands, but then how do you
weaponise it for an Eighties-style villain? We
had all of those signatures around but also
needed for them to feel like they’re all coming
from one spirit and motivation.” music and all images: Illumination and universal Pictures
dancing plays a big role in the performance of
Balthazar Bratt who likes to play and move to
the classic songs from the Eighties as he ights.
“What we did in animation preproduction was
to look for the character’s way of moving,”
states animation director Julien Soret. “at the
end of that exploration, we found out that in
order to anchor Bratt in the Eighties, we had to
make him do his actions and dancing like [he
was] in the Eighties. that helped us a lot in
deining his way of moving.”
there were a couple of songs that the team
knew they wanted to use, “Bad [by michael
Balthazar uses the
power of ginormous Jackson], because he is a villain and it’s such a
balls of pink bubble great song,” states Balda. “that was one of the
gum in his city-
takeover plans irst things that we tried as a temp song. We
laid Bad up against that scene and built the
scene towards the song. another one is take
On me by a-ha and that comes from the fact
that at the studio we’re all animators, and if
you’re 12 years old in the Eighties that was the
irst music video which had any kind of
animation or rotoscoping in it, so that made a
big impression on me. the song is a wink to
the inspiration that it gave us back then.”

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