the electric state

The directors adopted more of a colorful 1990s aesthetic than the haunting art that originally inspired their film. While some fans of Stålenhag’s work expressed disappointment at this artistic choice, the artist himself had nothing but praise. “When you paint or draw something, you can do anything,” Stålenhag has said. ‘There are no constraints other than the time you spend painting. To see a live action movie make something I painted and to see it so truthfully translated impressed me on all levels.”

Bringing a vision to life

The task of bringing that aesthetic to the screen fell to people like Oscar-winning production designer Dennis Gassner, whose many credits include Barton Fink, Bugsy, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Truman Show, Blade Runner 2049, Skyfall, Quantum of Solace, Spectre, Into the Woods, and Big Fish. (In fact, there’s a carousel featured in the design of the Happyland amusement park that Gassner first used in Big Fish.) He and Richard L. Johnson (Pacific Rim, The Avengers) led a team that not only designed and constructed more than 100 sets for the film, but also created a host of original robot characters to augment the ones featured in Stålenhag’s book.

All the robots featured in the film have their own stories, “distinct personalities and emotional arcs,” per Anthony Russo. The directors wanted the robots to “feel authentic to the alternate 1990s but still had roots in recognizable designs,” according to Joe Russo—the kinds of things one would see in vintage commercials, shopping malls, corporate branding, and so forth. “Everything is story,” Gassner told Ars. “Story is paramount. What story are you telling? Who are the characters in this story? What are their environments? How do they feel within the environments?”

Gassner’s team designed about 175 robots all told, selecting their favorites to be featured in the final film. “It’s like a great casting call,” Gassner said. “So we played a lot, there was a long time of development in the art department between myself and a vast team of artists. We worked very closely with the visual effects department, but what the characters look like are part of the art department, and our collaboration with Joe and Anthony Russo on the study of characters. That was the fun part, getting the shape right, the character right, the color right, the clothing right.”