Today a new animated film is being released in theaters across the United States called Norm of the North. I was one of the character designers.
I worked for several months on Norm back in 2014. At that time, Stephen Silver and I designed most of the main characters and some incidentals, while some other designs came from a studio in Ireland.
Two of my favorite creations for the film are these two caribou brothers seen below. I never did get a script to read, so I’m not sure what their function is in the movie other than what I saw in the trailer, but they sure were fun to draw.
I also came up with the look for a crotchety old seagull character named Socrates (voiced by Bill Nighy) that in early designs was based on Michael Caine from the 1960s, then later became more John Gielgud with Caine’s old glasses. His CG interpretation in the trailer looked pretty close to my 2D drawings.
Other characters from my pen for the movie were some incidental humans, along with finessing designs by others, and breaking down attitudes and movement for Norm (voiced by Rob Schneider), Mr. Green (voiced by Ken Jeong), and the lemmings. It is always fun working on characters, and the ones for this film were especially fun to draw because director Trevor Wall was interested in being really cartoony with them. You don’t have to twist a cartoonist’s arm very hard to get him to draw in a cartoony way.
