How the D&D movie directors designed Neverwinter, and their ‘cursed’ Tabaxi puppet

polygon.com:

Over the past couple of months, fans of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieveshave had a lot of chances to peek behind the scenes, particularly at the practical technology that went into the movie’s characters. For better or worse, it was often obvious in the movie that writer-director team John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein prefered physical, on-set solutions for their non-human creatures. Some of them are more convincing than others — in particular, viewers have had a lot to say about a Tabaxi parent and child seen at a village, who look more like animatronic stuffed animals than real creatures. But Daley says even their jankiness is part of the movie’s charm.

“Some of these creatures are sillier-looking than others,” he tells Polygon in an interview shortly after the movie’s PVOD release. “That Tabaxi in particular — one person online described the Tabaxi baby as ‘cursed.’ But I think even when you have something that is so clearly animatronic, so clearly fake, it is still in many ways more real than it would be if [the actors] were holding a tennis ball embellished with CG.”

OH, JARNATHAN!<a href=«https://twitter.com/LegacyEffects?ref_src=» https:>@LegacyEffects

<a href=«https://twitter.com/hashtag/DungeonsAndDragonsMovie?src=hash&ref_src=» https:>#DungeonsAndDragonsMovie pic.twitter.com/1vhgczPdyN

Goldstein says that they tried to use physical puppets rather than CG effects whenever possible. “Basically, if we could build it, we would,” he says. “Anything that was humanoid-size and scale, we would try to build and then burnish with visual effects.”

One example was an Aarakocra character seen in the opening scenes, a humanoid bird-man named Jarnathan, who’s become a fan favorite from the film. “Jarnathan’s