THE SMURFS

When a band of tiny blue friends are transported from their magical cartoon village to real life New York City, they are menaced by the evil wizard Gargamel (Hank Azaria) and his feline sidekick, Azrael.

Tippett Studio collaborated with Sony Imageworks to create a photorealistic Azrael cat that could act. On set, four trained cats were used for live action scenes involving simple movements. For more complex performances, Tippett’s team executed face replacements and fully CG doubles for the feline actors. Leveraging experience from the Cats & Dogs movies, animation supervisor Will Groebe and his team integrated advancements in wrinkling and our proprietary fur system with a face rig that enabled dynamic expressions and eye movement.