Pete Dionne is the VFX supervisor who worked on
Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. He recently did an interview with
DigitalArtsOnline wherein he discussed how him and his team brought Mr. Mime into live-action. Dionne explains that, unlike their aim with the other Pokémon, their goal with Mr. Mime was to make him very obviously unreal.
The character design of Mr. Mime from the anime (above) is very simplistic compared to the other Pokémon we worked with. He’s got a humanoid form but with super 'cartoony' proportions and face. Honestly he’s creepy, and us imagining him into life as a human would have fueled nightmares without a doubt.
Had they have given the character realistic skin and muscles, it would've proven creepy to viewers as our brains would be confused as to whether he was a living thing or not. "Early on we decided that the only way to pull off this character was to try and not make him look like an organic, breathing creature but go in the opposite connection, making him look as synthetic as possible."
"Instead of trying to make Mr. Mime's arms and face look like flesh with anatomically-correct muscle structure, we built and shaded him as if he’s just a huge blob of silicone. The lights then shine on him and make his whole head and arms glow from that synthetic, latex-like material."
By giving Mr. Mime's body the texture of rubber and latex, it allows our brains to know with utmost certainty that he isn't real and thus we have nothing to be creeped out over (they were really pushing it with those faint hairs on top of his head though).
His skin looks very recognizable as being real-world materials but it’s clearly not organic. The same thing with his red shoulder pads. We looked at those from the cartoon and decided to make them red rubber kick-balls with that same kind of textured surface. And for his torso we based the whole thing upon foam.
"It's like when you have a Nerf football and you squeeze it and it just has those little micro-wrinkles in there and you can see every pore tightened up loosen as you let go of it." Dionne concludes:
We built that same thing into his body so that it explicitly felt like foam. He wasn't a living, breathing human, so we were really able to have a lot of fun because of the forms, especially his facial performance. We could really push it without it looking creepy, as if it was a real human falling into the 'uncanny valley.' And because he had so many of these recognizable photo-realistic shading features on him plus lighting features, he also never really felt too cartoony, despite him having the most cartoonish performance in the whole film.
Synopsis: Ace detective Harry Goodman goes mysteriously missing, prompting his 21-year-old son, Tim, to find out what happened. Aiding in the investigation is Harry's former Pokémon partner, wise-cracking, adorable super-sleuth Detective Pikachu. Finding that they are uniquely equipped to work together, as Tim is the only human who can talk with Pikachu, they join forces to unravel the tangled mystery.