The head of the Kid Cosmo is huge. Just like the robot's head goes. Cosmo, the leading inhuman hero of the film The Electric State (Netflix March 14th), has a bright yellow sphere of heads of exercise ball size and shape, supported on an incongruous frame.
cute? yes. Can it be mechanically executed? not much.
The Cosmo character was inspired by Skip, a similarly Byed hero in Simon Starrenhag's graphic novel. The cult hit book, “The Electric State,” first published in 2018, is set in another universe of the 1990s after a mysterious war destroyed the California landscape, leaving behind a massive drone and robot shell.
“Simon Sterlenhag's work attracted me to the film in the first place,” said Matthew E. Butler, the film's visual effects supervisor. “But his designs are often aesthetically cool and engineeringly impossible.”
In the film, Cosmo and his young companion, Michelle, played by Milly Bobby Brown, head out on a journey through the American West to find Michelle's brother. Along the way, they meet many other robots, many designed like Cosmos.
Of course, Cosmo doesn't need to make mechanical meanings in either graphic novels or feature films, given the flight of physics that was regularly found in both media. But film directors Anthony and Joe Russo wanted to actually ground the film, taking into account the story setting of the 1990s (think Orange Julius and MTV News with sci-fi enhancements) and the fantastical robots of the film, including the mid-century post-al carrier (voiced by Jenny Slate) and Mr. Peanut (Woody Harreleson).
“We're creating a fantasy world, but it's based on the world you perceived and perhaps lived on,” Anthony said. “Part of providing that recognizable world is making everything feel real.”
With Cosmo, filmmakers had to create robots that viewers believed could work.
“We've done a lot of research with real robot designers and they want to keep the robotic chunks at the core,” Butler said. “As the limbs come out, you want to get down the mass, so you can see that a typical robot has a small, small appendage at the end.”
The stakes were expensive. Not only did viewers have to believe that Cosmo was authentic, but they also had to feel that for him. The book version has a static, painted face, and is a tall order considering that it is not possible to give a speech. “We loved the idea that this girl would go on a very emotional cross-country journey and find a brother on a robot with very limited communication skills,” Joe said.
One of the first things Russo Brothers did was create a bot backstory. In the film's Alternative Reality Timeline, Walt Disney created a series of robots in 1955 to promote the opening of Disneyland. However, the robots worked very well and soon began to replace human workers with all sorts of unpleasant work.
Cosmo was one of these robots, a promotional model based on popular animated children's television shows (such as Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, as well as unlikely hairstyles). “You can rent him for the kids' parties,” Joe said.
In the film, Cosmo's face has the old fashioned look of a tin toy from the 1950s. “It was all Simon,” said production designer Dennis Gusner (Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner). “We tried different smiles, and it was something Simon created.”
One challenge said Gasner, who has various tin toys in his home collection, was nodding someone or something inside, retaining the static look of those antique collectibles.
Butler also expressed this dilemma, saying, “We're conveying a lot of information to our faces, so when you suddenly have this inert object, you've starved animators of many of their tools.”
Animators can do a lot without moving faces. Butler points out Pixar's animated desk lamp mascot Luxo Jr. as proof, but that's difficult. “There was a knee response to try and add some animations to his face, but thankfully we didn't go there,” he said.
“We wanted the characters to be difficult to access and decipher,” Anthony said. “But we had to be able to convey our intentions and emotions to the robot.” Solution: We stimulated our eyes, but added a camera lens set deep inside the robot's painted eye hole.
The filmmaker is also working to help the body believe in the unlikely structure of the Cosmos (his big head, spinning legs and oversized boots). “We spent a lot of time focusing on subtle, secret design ideas that our audience could believe are mechanized to achieve this,” Butler said.
The designer strengthened the Cosmo's neck with mechanical muscles, lifting its oversized head and adding twisted coils to its legs. “His silhouette in the distance is very similar to Simon's design, but when you get in close, you can see the pistons and push rods,” Butler said. “You go, OK, that's how he moves his body.” The sound designer then added moving servo hiss and screams to complete the effects.
The robot movements were created by combining animation and motion capture. Actress, stunt woman and motion capture performer (“War for the Planet of the Apes”) Devin Dalton was asked to play Cosmo.
A proxy head was created to give the actress a sense of how big the Cosmo Noggin would become. The design crew then considered having Dalton Don Big Cranky shoes to help her get into the character, but ultimately did that. After all, most of the props were unnecessary.
“She's a great actress,” Joe said.
In the film, Cosmos are strictly computer-generated creations, but for a press conference, the filmmakers created an actual physical robot at the Institute of Robotics and Mechanisms (Romera) at the University of California in Los Angeles. Last October, New York Comic-Con featured a life-size cosmo alongside Brown, her co-stars Chris Pratt and the director, waving at the attendees and chatting with the crowd.
That was especially meta's idea. Create promotional robots to promote movies about promo robots and build for films set in alternative hellish landscapes in the US West at West Coast University.
“Essentially, we told them to breathe him the best life possible. They exceeded all expectations,” Joe said.
It took the UCLA team a year to create a practical bot. In the case of Russo Brothers, similar attention was paid to the creation of CG One. “One of the greatest production designers of all time, how does his team build this in the factory?” Joe said. “What is it made of? Was it those rivet shoes? Is there a camera behind the eyeball? I asked thousands of questions.”
