Bad Hair Days at Pixar

Alongside “Life of Pi” and “Game of Thrones,” “Brave” was a big winner at the Visual Effects Society’s VES Awards, held on Tuesday in Los Angeles and honoring yes, visual effects. Pixar’s story of the archery-loving reluctant princess earned four prizes, including best animated feature and best animated character, for its heroine, Merida. It should’ve really earned a prize for her hair.

Merida’s mass of red ringlets took even the geniuses at Pixar years to create, and challenged them daily, even as the movie neared completion. (See the clip above.)

“We didn’t finish making her hair really work well and look fantastic probably until the summer before the movie came out,” said Steve May, the supervising technical director on the film and the chief technology officer at Pixar. The process was so lengthy, he explained, because to make it look believable, “we actually model the individual strands of hair.”

Curls like Merida’s make that extra difficult. “Tight curls have these competing requirements,” said Mr. May, sounding more like Vidal Sassoon than someone holding a Ph.D. in computer science. “They maintain their shape. But curly hair is really nice and beautiful and soft. To keep the shape and make it nice and soft and springy, was a challenge.”

“And all those locks!” he added. “Sometimes we can get away with one hair not knowing about the other hairs. But with Merida, all the hairs have to know about the other hairs. That’s complicated.”

To aid in their design process, the research-loving animators at Pixar studied photos and film clips of similar tresses. “We sent out an email to the company that said, if you have a child with tight curly hair, we’d love to have her come in so we can study her,” Mr. May said. They spoke to hairdressers and had a Merida wig made which sat permanently outside the animators’ offices, “so they could try it on.”

In the end, Merida’s hair required its own technological advances.

“We developed a whole new system to compute the motion of the hair,” a simulator that uses Newtonian mechanics to determine the swinginess of her mane, Mr. May said. (Insert your own joke about putting bad hair days in perspective here.)

Katherine Sarafian, a producer of “Brave” who worked on it since its inception, added that the first Pixar film centered around female characters – Merida, played by Kelly McDonald; and her mother Elinor, voiced by Emma Thompson — was actually harder to digitally animate in general, especially with its forest setting.

“The computer really likes right angles and straight lines; the computer hates anything organic and soft,” she said. “The computer would love a movie about cubes. We give it a movie about rough dense foliage and organic rivers – it’s very, very hard for the computer to do.”

And unlike, say, the angular King Fergus, the female characters were designed with soft lines, she said. “The softness of that face and the roundness of it was sort of unforgiving – one false move and you’re off-mode,” animator-speak for off-image. “In this film, those characters were literally more delicate. They had to be handled with a different kind of care.”

But, Ms. Sarafian added, the Pixar team did not dwell on the extra stakes of its first lead female character.

“In the midst of it, I think we would drive ourselves crazy if we had thought about her as a heroine,” she said. “During the film we tried to shut the femaleness out of minds. Our fear was, if we thought of her as a girl, the first heroine or worse yet, as a princess, we would get trapped in conventions, of either the fairy tale genre or the princess or what people expect of a girl.”

“We wanted to attempt to create pure character,” Ms. Sarafian said, “a character that could work as a boy or a girl and then say, ‘oh yeah she’s a girl.’ Character first, and gender and princess and all that stuff after.”

Merida’s personality was based on the co-writer and co-director Brenda Chapman’s own daughter, and the story was inspired by their relationship as well as other filmmakers’ teenage children.

“She’s called a tomboy and she’s really not a tomboy – she’s not ashamed of her girlhood, she likes to wear dresses,” Ms. Sarafian said. “She just doesn’t want to rule the kingdom in her mom’s way.”