From Little Dog-Snake and Shark-Cat to Pixar's New Film's Furry Designs! Why Does Every Cute Creature She Draws Become a Hit?
This article is authorized for reprint from "Animation Academic趴".
Author / Qingzhou
Layout / Rinz
Following Inside Out 2 and Earthbound, Pixar's latest offering, "The Beaver Transformation Plan", hits Chinese theaters on March 20.
The protagonist, Mabel, is a female college student who loves nature. To stop humans from destroying animal habitats, she uses the latest technology to "spirit-jump" into a realistic beaver, unlocking the ability to talk to animals and successfully infiltrating their community.
One of the film's biggest highlights is this group of furry, round, and goofy-looking animals. Especially Mabel, with her big tail and short legs, who wouldn't want to scoop her up and give her a good squeeze!
The person who designed these incredibly adorable characters is Chinese animator and illustrator Yao Le Ge Jing.
You might not know, but the endlessly circulating "annoying bird Didi-chan", the abstract and cute "shark cat", and the puppy snake Diandian, who gained countless fans with one animation, are also her creations.
How were these creative and cute images born? What is it like working for Pixar? What new works will Yao Le Ge Jing bring in the future? This time, Animation Academic趴 has invited Yao Le Ge Jing and her friends to share her creative story with everyone.
01
An Invitation from Pixar
One day in 2020, Yo, who was just a sophomore in college, received a new email in her inbox. The sender was Pixar Animation.
This was Yao Le Ge Jing's first invitation from Pixar. Pixar animation directors noticed the cartoon characters and animated shorts she had created and expressed interest in collaborating with her. Director Daniel Chong, who had directed "We Bare Bears", invited Yao Le Ge Jing to do character design, drawing the character images for the upcoming "The Beaver Transformation Plan".
Inviting external artists to collaborate is a Pixar tradition. To inspire more ideas, directors of Pixar feature films often hire freelance artists outside the studio to create uniquely stylized character and scene designs for their projects. Many famous core visual designs were born this way, such as for Finding Nemo and Ratatouille.
Although she had created many animal characters, being a contractor for a famous industry giant like Pixar was a first for Yao Le Ge Jing, who was still a college student at the time. Pixar provided the species, gender, personality, and basic information for the characters, leaving the rest up to Yao Le Ge Jing's creative freedom.
This was quite different from her usual independent creative process. When starting to draw, Yao Le Ge Jing wasn't sure if the design direction was right, so she could only produce multiple drafts for them to choose from. Furthermore, her past designs were mostly based on things she was familiar with, but the main character's prototype this time was a North American animal. Having never seen one in real life, she didn't know much about beavers beforehand.
To better design the character, Yao Le Ge Jing found many reference materials and deeply pondered the character's temperament: "I learned that she (it) is a girl named Mabel. Intuitively, I felt it should be a wild yet slightly cute image."
Yao Le Ge Jing followed the line of thinking that the character "should look like in its natural state" and drew a few versions of the design for the director to choose from. Without much trouble, the beaver in the film, with its reddish-brown fur, big buck teeth, and mischievous big eyes, was born!
Besides the protagonist Mabel, Yao Le Ge Jing also designed other small animal characters in the film, such as the Beaver King, the Snake Sisters, the scientist disguised as a little rabbit... Most of the main small animal characters, including all the kings, were created by her.
The email mentioned earlier was Pixar's invitation for Yao Le Ge Jing to work offline in North America. Although it didn't happen because she was still in university, the collaboration was still very rewarding for her.
"The experience of working at Pixar is: everyone seems to be very happy, working as if in a playful state," Yao Le Ge Jing said. "Of course, there are tough parts too, but at least it seems like everyone loves this job."
When "The Beaver Transformation Plan" was first released in North America, Daniel Chong wrote: "Producing We Bare Bears took six years, and making The Beaver Transformation Plan also took six years. Creating these works has occupied a large part of my life, but I love this job, I love animation, and I like conveying my message to the world through these adorable characters."
In Yao Le Ge Jing's view, director Daniel Chong is a humorous and interesting senior. When communicating about work, Daniel Chong would leave some comments on the files she submitted, write "good", or draw a little red flower, "like a teacher grading papers, it was fun."
02
Go with the Flow, Draw Whatever Comes to Mind
"Diandian~ you are a..."
"Poo!"
(Kettle boiling)
Almost every fan of the puppy snake Diandian can recite this dialogue backwards.
Puppy snake Diandian is one of the most famous fantasy creatures created by Yao Le Ge Jing. It looks like both a dog and a snake, with a snake's body but two little puppy paws and a pair of small dog ears. Its personality is as warm and outgoing as a dog's. In the story, it is a therapy dog at a snake-run hospital.
Diandian's prototype is Yao Le Ge Jing's pet snake. After keeping it for a year or two, she had the idea to turn it into a cartoon character.
"Initially, I considered drawing it as a little dragon," Yao Le Ge Jing said with a smile. "But after interacting with it, I felt its personality was more like a dog, and the name Diandian also sounds more like a dog's name. Since it resembled a dog more than a dragon in many ways, I just went with the flow."
When creating, Yao Le Ge Jing likes to start from things around her and respects their "original nature" during the process. She feels that if you base a drawing on something but end up making it completely different from the prototype, it feels like wearing shoes that don't fit – very awkward. "Drawing naturally is smoother and more comfortable."
Besides the puppy snake, Yao Le Ge Jing also created the annoying bird Didi-chan based on her pet bird at home, the shark cat by merging a shark and a cat, and the flamingo deer based on a sika deer and a flamingo... These imaginative animal characters also reflect Yao Le Ge Jing's "go-with-the-flow" creative preference.
"From the moment I started drawing, I was sure I liked drawing this, and that hasn't changed to this day," Yao Le Ge Jing stated. "When I draw, I usually don't think too much about the motive; I just draw whatever comes to mind."
Surprisingly, the creator of so many healing and cute creatures, Yao Le Ge Jing, says her favorite animated film is the stop-motion horror movie "Coraline".
During junior high school, Yao Le Ge Jing watched this classic stop-motion animation on a disc, which opened a new world for her. "It made me realize what I like—I also enjoy creating things with a touch of the grotesque, and it fit my preferences perfectly. I think animation should be both fun and thrilling!"
Privately, Yao Le Ge Jing also creates horror-themed works and enjoys watching urban legends and various horror films. The famous horror manga artist Junji Ito is one of her favorite authors.
"I've read his complete works. They're so intense! I love them!" Yao Le Ge Jing laughed. "Sometimes there's a disconnect between what I consume and what I create. Although I love Junji Ito's works, I lean more towards creating things that give people a sense of security and comfort. It's not about what I like to watch; what matters is my expression."
Because she doesn't want to scare visitors, Yao Le Ge Jing doesn't buy horror manga-related merchandise to display at home. She hopes people feel safe and warm when they come to her house.
This is also the expectation she infuses into her works—she might include thrilling and exciting elements in her stories, but ultimately, she wants to lead the audience back to a warm, comfortable, and peaceful nest, giving them a sense of security.
"During the journey, we might experience many exciting things, but at the end of the story, everyone wants to go home and get a good night's sleep," Yao Le Ge Jing said. "That's what I want to convey."
03
Yizhengjing Animation Studio: We're Serious About Creating
In 2023, Yao Le Ge Jing and a partner co-founded Yizhengjing Animation Studio. Yao Le Ge Jing is responsible for idea output and content creation, while others handle commercial development and IP operations.
When asked how she balances commercialization with personal creative expression, Yao Le Ge Jing stated that her creations are currently quite free. Basically, she doesn't consider commercialization during the creative phase. Moreover, she enjoys creating content that everyone likes.
"The operations team respects my creativity very much. If the created content is suitable for commercialization, we do it; if not, we don't."
Team members say that in their daily work, content creation and commercial development are two completely independent departments. The studio doesn't guide Yao Le Ge Jing towards anything for commercial purposes. This collaborative approach gives Yao Le Ge Jing a great deal of creative autonomy.
And Yao Le Ge Jing's versatile skills, like an octopus, indeed live up to the responsibility of the studio's content creation. She is not only responsible for character design and drawing animated shorts but also writes scripts and creates comics, a true all-rounder.
Wearing multiple hats also makes Yao Le Ge Jing's work very busy. She joked, "Currently, my workflow is a mess, with all sorts of things intertwined. I'm trying hard to balance these different aspects of creation."
The studio head explained that Yao Le Ge Jing used to do many things simultaneously, and the studio was simultaneously developing many directions, like making stickers, character illustrations, external animation projects, and original short animations. But over time, they started to streamline, focusing their work on experimental animation production and process structuring, preparing for future feature-length animation production.
Overall, drawing is a happy and natural thing for Yao Le Ge Jing. The new challenge she faces now is trying to collaborate with a team on group creation.
In the past, Yao Le Ge Jing's creations were primarily individual "hand-crafted" projects with little team collaboration. However, as the scale of the works increases, a feature-length animation requires the participation of more people, and the old production model needs to change.
"I've always done personal animation. If I have to switch to team collaboration, it takes a long time to adjust the state. I'm not very good at cooperating with people, so this is a challenge for me," Yao Le Ge Jing admitted.
The transition from personal animation to group creation is not simple and is even more challenging than the act of drawing itself. Currently, Yao Le Ge Jing and her studio teammates are still experimenting with their animation production pipeline.
"Yao Le Ge Jing's animation drawing style is quite unique. Our team is still in the process of building, experimenting, and running the pipeline. We've achieved some results," said a studio member. "But for a feature film, this pipeline isn't mature enough yet. We want to standardize the process through experimental animation first, which will make future production easier."
The studio partner revealed that maybe some animation production previews or news will be released gradually this year, but it's hard to say for sure; it's still in the early stages. When asked about the development progress of the feature animation, Yao Le Ge Jing said she prefers not to think about things too far ahead. It's more important to focus on the task at hand. "I don't want to speak too soon. I'd rather take it step by step steadily."
When fully immersed in creation, Yao Le Ge Jing usually doesn't look at comments or feedback on social media. She believes social media has a very fast pace. For immersive creation, social media can be very distracting, so she treats it cautiously, shielding herself from anything that affects her creation.
In response to fans joking about her "yearly-update channel", Yizhengjing Animation Studio decided to respond with action, keeping their heads down and creating under pressure, letting the work speak for itself.
Currently, "The Beaver Transformation Plan" is showing in theaters everywhere. We look forward to the day, in the not-too-distant future, when Yao Le Ge Jing's original characters can also grace the silver screen, telling their own unique stories.
