See How The Multi-Limbed Cast Of ‘Inspector Sun And The Curse Of The Black Widow’ Came Together
Viva Kids will bring the Spanish animated feature Inspector Sun and the Curse of the Black Widow to U.S. theaters this weekend, so we caught up with the film’s director Julio Soto and character designer Max Kostenko who talked us through the character design process.
Inspired by Agatha Christie-style murder mysteries, Inspector Sun unfolds on a seaplane journey from Shanghai to San Francisco in the 1930s. There, ruined millionaires, black widow spiders, hired killers, and smugglers come together for a noir story in which insects of various species, with spiders at the helm, have created their own unique universe.
The film’s screenplay by Rocco Pucillo won the prestigious students-only Samuel Goldwyn Award in 2013. Inspector Sun is a co-production between The Thinklab Media and Gordon Box in association with 3 Doubles. It also received funding in the form of an Epic Megagrant.
The below artwork was created by Kostenko, Sylvain Deboissy, Victor López, and Óscar Vargas.
Julio Soto: Inspector Sun’s design is loosely based on a huntsman Spider (Sparassidae micropoda). The brief was: “Think Hercule Poirot mixed with Frank Drebin of Naked Gun, a 1930s detective who has been sold to the public as a ‘detective genius’ to cover up his messy mistakes, and he’s started to believe his own hype.” The biggest challenge in designing this character, as with all other spiders in the movie, was to make him look appealing, funny, and expressive, as opposed to creepy or scary. The character should also reflect the elegance and glamour of the 1930s, with his suit, bowtie, hairdo, and mustache. The original concept had four eyes, but two were removed for the sake of clarity.
Soto: Arabella is a prototypical 1920s pulp fiction femme fatale. She started her career as a cabaret singer and maybe something more before she married for the 11th time to millionaire tycoon Dr. Spindlethorp. She’s a beautiful creature but also so dangerous that her kiss will surely be your last. She is loosely based on Eva Green or Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.
Soto: Janey’s lovable and naïve, funny, and punctures the seriousness of scenes when she needs to. She is, in other words, the sidekick every detective needs. She is a bit like Judy Hopps in Zootopia. Her concepts were initially based on the jumping spider genus, the largest family of spiders in the arachnid world, endowed with superb sight and jumping skills.
Max Kostenko: First, I worked on a fly. It was quite difficult since a fly has huge eyes and neither a nose nor a mouth, so it was necessary to come up with something to make the hero look cute but not lose the appearance of a fly. While studying photographs of flies, I noticed that instead of a nose, they have a certain feature resembling a nose in shape, so I decided to simplify this structure and transform it into a nose more like the nose of an animal (I hope entomologists will forgive me).
Kostenko: The praying mantis was another character that I was very interested in working with because this insect has always fascinated me. Analyzing the shape of the mantis’s head, I decided that I would play with the diamond and try to find an opportunity to apply this shape to other parts of its body. Something wide is combined with something very narrow. This is why the yellow jacket has wide shoulders and a thin waist.
Kostenko: The rhinoceros beetle was probably the most difficult character because his nose did not want to combine with human facial expressions. I also tried different variations of the body shape and found an interesting transition with almost no neck, which creates a feeling of a strong and solid type, just what we needed. The nose eventually attached itself, and the extra pair of hands made it funnier. I imagined how convenient it would be to drink tea with one pair of hands and play the Playstation with the other!
