SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Mickey 17,” currently playing in theaters.
‘Mickey 17’ follows a group of people on a space mission to colonize Niflheim, an ice-covered planet that’s home to a set of crawling, roly-poly type creatures that also, as one character notes, look like croissants.
The leader of the mission, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), calls the inhabitants “Creepers.” When it came to designing them, visual effects supervisor Dan Glass told Variety they needed to feel both “horrific and terrifying.”
Director Bong Joon Ho and designer Hee Chul Jang conceptualized the Creepers, and Glass worked on bringing them to life. The designs had already progressed when Glass joined the film, but they didn’t have a sense of movement. “Part of what we did is take them into our systems, build them in a way that they could actually move and then we started to animate them,” Glass said.
The Creepers have several pairs of legs and span three types, starting with babies that can be held in a person’s arms, not unlike a pet cat. Juniors are a moderate size, around a meter in height. And then there’s the giant Mama Creeper, the lumbering head of the pack who hulks over the protagonist Mickey (Robert Pattinson) when the two are face to face.
Glass said the challenge with the Creepers, and with any fictional creature, was making them plausible. “You’ve got your back against the wall because anybody watching it knows they’re not real. So the best thing to do is to go to references of things that people do know,” he said.
He drew from different animals for particular features, assembling a “mood board.” They referenced sea lions and rhinoceroses for the outer components, as well as bison hair for the Mama Creeper, who has tufts of hair around her face. A mix of inspirations was utilized for the Mama Creeper’s eyes, including the eyes of horses, walruses and insects (“There’s a second eyelid that comes across horizontally,” according to Glass). For the Creepers’ wriggling insides, the team looked at underwater sea creatures, squid and even the deep sea variants.
Incorporating real creatures’ qualities contributed to making the made-up Creepers’ appearance feel believable.
Another significant step in adding a layer of reality to the Creepers was calibrating their weight. The Creepers were meant to be “insect-like” and “invertebrate” with no bones. “They’re essentially hollow was the idea, so they can actually open out and be completely flat with their legs around the edges, a bit like a skate fish or a bottom feeder fish at the bottom of the ocean, but they spend most of their time wrapped up,” Glass said.
The hollow quality fed into the original concept that the Creepers would be lightweight, but that created a problem for both the Mama Creeper and the juniors because of the difficulty of animating something large to be nearly weightless. “If they’re animated to be light, it doesn’t look very real. It quickly looks like bad animation,” Glass said.
The Creepers ended up with greater mass, which is particularly felt in the Mama Creeper’s movements. “It’s hard for her to go quickly. It’s hard for her to turn around even,” Glass said. “That ultimately played better.”
The Creepers scramble across the ice using their legs, which posed another challenge.
“It’s also very hard to animate creatures that have lots of legs. When you’re doing something quadrupedal or bipedal, there are a lot of things that you can run almost procedurally to do that. You cannot do that with a multi-limbed creature,” Glass said.
That’s where hand-drawn animation was needed.
Glass made sure the Creepers’ movements were varied and that the creatures weren’t becoming too repetitive.
“You can build some level of cycles, but I was also very keen to avoid the appearance of cycles when you have a repeated walk or a run cycle, especially if those creatures are seen on-screen for a long amount of time, which ours are,” Glass said.
The artisans worked on creating a balance between repeats and individuality. Individuality could be created by emphasizing particular creatures’ moves in a large crowd. There are moments in various shots “where one or more Creepers stops and looks up, looks around, and then drops down — each of those actions were hand done, so they have individuality to them, and then juveniles that are closer to a camera might stop and be a little curious as to what’s going on, and then run off on their way,” Glass said.
Overall, Glass and his team made one unique type of Mama Creeper. The team created two versions for the pair of baby Creepers that are important to the storyline and then made smaller variants of the babies for scenes that feature a large amount. For juniors, there were about six unique types and then variants of those that differed in size and proportions and skin texture and coloration.
On set, the actors were in good hands with puppeteers. A foam head was built to stand in for the Mama Creeper, providing an eye line for an actor and aiding camera framing. At some points, the puppeteers also coordinated a light plastic scaffold frame to represent the Mama Creeper’s physicality. “They could walk across our snow terrain or in the cave and you would understand spatially how big she was, which is more relevant, usually for camera or actors to know where they couldn’t walk,” Glass said.
For the juniors — which aren’t interacted with as much in the film besides “when the Mickeys are walking through the crowd” — the artisans used space hoppers and yoga balls, the latter of which ended up rolling through the terrain in a similar way that the actual Creepers would. The objects used for the babies were built to allow the artisans to add bags of weight so that when the actors carried one, “it jiggles and moves the way that it should,” Glass said. “I think even the best actor in the world, or actress in the world — it’s very challenging to act a weight that isn’t there, and so that kind of gave them a really natural feeling.”
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
There were other elements the artisans created practically for the production, like a Creeper tail that Ylfa (Toni Collette) slices up and blends. Collette used “basically a rubber version of a tail of the right proportions,” Glass said. “And our props team actually were able to put a tube so it had some red liquids and blood in it, so she could chop something real there, which we replaced, especially because after she chops it … it continues to wiggle, so that’s all added.”
“Even the blender, we built that so you could put it into the blender and blend it up and turn red. We enhanced that, but still, a lot of that was done with practical effects,” Glass added.
Other helpful on-set aspects helped shape the creatures, particularly the Mama Creeper.
Anna Mouglalis, the actor who voices the Mama Creeper, was present during the filming period with a megaphone or speaker and “delivering the lines when we were shooting those scenes so that already gave it a lot of that weight and character,” Glass said. “And then for us in post, we could obviously hear that in the edit. Sometimes those things are added very late, but in this case, it was right there at present. So we could react to that.”
Given that the Creepers don’t speak a human language, there is no lip sync, Glass pointed out. “That was definitely part of the way Director Bong saw it because it adds a level of mystery and disconnection,” Glass said.
Glass said his team collaborated closely with the sound effects team to create sounds for the Creeper that drew from “the designs and movement studies.”
“It really helps the creature feel like a whole. It’s not one thing’s done and then another,” Glass said. “You feel that the creature is emoting, or at least, you understand how the sounds are made to some degree, and how the sounds are created by the way it moves.”
The Creepers design (which genuinely were inspired by Bong’s idea of them being visually similar to croissants, according to Glass) remained mostly consistent throughout the process. The Mama Creeper initially had more legs but a large amount of legs “quickly get in the way of each other, and it can look a little comical as she’s trying to scurry around,” Glass said.
The Creepers, in both their frightening and cuddly characteristics, are important to exploring “this one undertone of how you come into a planet thinking that those [are] aliens and actually the reverse is true because it’s their planet,” Glass said.
“It’s really about, I guess, encouraging you to question your preconceptions and prejudice,” he added.
