Now that we had started working on the backgrounds, we needed to work on the Character Design. Of course, we had references with the books. But Daniel Pennac had invented a great number of characters in his script. That is when we asked Sei to work on those characters.
Sei was a young talented artist coming from Les Gobelins, an animation school in France. Her talent is as huge as the sound level of her laughs.
Adapting the characters of Ernest and Célestine was not an easy thing. The first reason was that Gabrielle Vincent didn’t always draw them in the same way. Here is an example of the evolution of Célestine over time. The first drawing comes from the first book, the last comes from the last book.
After a while, we started creating our own Célestine. Of course she was at first inspired by the book, but we needed to change some details. Her nose was slightly shorter, her eyes bigger… She became more and more expressive under our pencils until she finally became the little mouse that you can see today in the film.
Ernest was easier to work on. After a while we managed to create a nice design for him as well.
For each of these characters, we needed to give animators information that they would use to draw Ernest and Célestine. That information was quite important, as it helped the animators draw the little details that make Ernest or Celestine special.
After that, Sei had to work on the supporting characters. We always tried to find references in the books. Here is a character in “Ernest and Celestine in the Museum.” He is the manager of a museum, and was used to create George, the manager of the shop “Le Roi du Sucre” in the film.
Here is a photo of Ernest when he was young, found in “Ernest and Célestine go to the photographer.” It helped us create Leon, Georges’s son.
Other characters were created that had to be fully imagined by Sei. She took inspiration from Daniel Pennac’s writing and I tried to sketch how I was imagining them. Here are sketches of an old rat called The Grey One, the Head Dentist, and the Bear Police Chief.
Sei’s work is one of the most important steps of a film. The models need to be very charismatic and not too complicated so any animator can draw him or her. She worked about one complete year before we had a complete lineup of all the characters. She designed more than 170 characters and did an amazing job despite my worthless interventions…
So here we are with our character designs. Now let’s see more about the animation…
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