A Spaniard amongst ‘Las guerreras k-pop’: “Animation comes from soul; we give soul to the characters” | Culture | EUROtoday

Like many mother and father world wide, Martín Tintxo Esnaola, 43 years previous, made a dressing up for the youngest of her three kids on the finish of October. The k-pop warriors. The most watched film in Netflix historical past was additionally the star of this Halloween. Girls, and never so women, dressed as Rumi, Zoey and Mira, the heroines who crush demons whereas singing catchy Korean pop songs. But Esnaola’s was not simply any costume. He put “lights and everything” on the sword and, above all, along with being the daddy of a fan, this man from Madrid born in Argentina labored as an animation supervisor on the Sony superhit.

Esnaola takes the video name within the basement of his home in Vancouver, the place he has “the whole setup” (5 screens) arrange for when he teleworks. Behind, a cloth printed with La ola de Kanagawa It covers washing machines and testifies to his fascination with Japanese aesthetics. He fell in love along with his livelihood with Miyazaki’s movies at Studio Ghibli (his favourite, Porco Rosso): “With them I understood that animation conveys fantasy and emotion in another way.” Classic anime fan Ghost within the shellthe visible spectacle of Arcane or the uncooked intimacy of I misplaced my physique, studied animation in Madrid and on-line “when there were many fewer options for training than now,” he says.

His first job was at Real Madrid TV: “I had an ideal schedule and they paid well, but I wanted to entertain.” He labored in Los Angeles, London or Paris, till 2012 when he ended up at Imageworks, Sony Pictures’ animation and particular results studio in Canada. “When I joined we were a satellite of the headquarters in Los Angeles, but we have become the spearhead,” he says of Imageworks, the place between 500 and 700 professionals work, however they will attain greater than a thousand when, like now, it produces as much as six or seven tasks on the similar time: “It’s crazy, but Canada has many incentives and we come out cheap.”

On his resume there are movies as numerous as Hotel Transylvania (2012 y 2015), Emoji (2017), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), The sea monster (2022) o in goals (2025), which occurred earlier than The k-pop warriors however it premieres, additionally on Netflix, on November 14. “When I interview people who want to work here, I explain to them that what I like most is that each film seems to be from a different studio; Disney or Illumination have great quality and great animations, but it gives the impression that they always make the same film. Our style is that we don’t have our own style and that allows you to innovate more.”

With the standard secrecy within the business, the sequel to The k-pop warriorswhich Sony and Netflix are already negotiating, is aware of nothing. And the movie he’s engaged on, “an untitled project that is not yet announced for Netflix,” both. There he works as animation director (Head of Character Animation). What does the place entail? “In live-action cinema, the actors provide the appearance, the voice and the performance. On the other hand, in animation there are a lot of people involved in that interpretation. The characters are built in parts: actors who dub the voice, people who design the appearance, the riggers, who build the skeleton, the modelers… And at the end we enter the animators. Animating comes from anima: we are the ones who give soul to the characters, we fill them with life.” In that respiration of life we ​​resolve how the character strikes, what gestures she or he makes, how the character is interpreted… Just as when in a set conventional yelling ‘Action!’ and magic occurs, however in a for much longer and extra tedious course of (an animator works on every movie for round a 12 months and a half).

The most tough a part of his job, says the top animator, is combining his imaginative and prescient (“what I would like to do”) with the imaginative and prescient of the movie’s administrators (“what they want to do”) and the producers (“what can be done”). “There are many meetings, many ideas back and forth, and also a lot of bureaucracy, because each step has to be approved.” All this with budgets that attain 100 million {dollars} (about 86 million euros) and templates as intensive because the credit of the movies. Those of The k-pop warriors They final 14 minutes. “Tintxo Esnaola Scotta” seems after a minute and a half together with a model chibi (large eyes and child our bodies) of the protagonists. In that first a part of the credit “when it is still fun to stay and watch them because it is not just a succession of names,” he celebrates.

With so many individuals and so many phases, is there the environment of a conventional shoot? “It’s a mix between that and an office job, you share space with people who are making other films, each one doing their own thing, there is no set…Although in more passionate projects, such as The k-pop warriors, Yes, a strong team feeling is generated,” says Esnaola, who admits that the story created and directed by Maggie Kang (who was, like him, an entertainer in the house) dazzled him from the beginning: “I started watching k-dramas and listening to a lot of k-pop, I wanted to absorb the culture so that everything would be very authentic.” He is “very proud” of the result: a film that was born small and has been embraced by the general public and praised by connoisseurs of the genre, precisely for its authenticity.

The scene that feels most appropriate in such a collective work is the last musical number by the Saja Boys. The group of boys, already transformed into demons, sing Your Idol in front of a dedicated stadium: “We reinvented part of the choreography and the camera shots, what we received was more traditional and we gave it the push to make it much more dynamic, more K-pop,” explains the entertainer, who delved into hundreds of video clips looking for movements and attitudes and adapting them so that the animation worked to the rhythm of the music, one of the stylistic keys of the film.

Esnaola, who among his work abroad included the Spanish co-production Planet 51 (2009), does not believe that he will return home soon. “That film was the first one with which we all thought, the industry was finally going to take off in Spain!… but it wasn’t entirely like that.” Lately he has obtained many resumes from Spaniards searching for work, he laments.

Around the world another danger lurks in the sector: artificial intelligence. “Is he matter proper now, the discuss…”, says Esnaola. “We do not know if it will likely be a software that helps us or one which replaces us. The benefit is that the massive studios are as afraid as we’re, it’s straightforward for it to get out of hand: now they’re the one ones who could make movies of a sure stage, but when AI democratizes manufacturing, they run a giant danger. They are the primary taken with controlling it.”