Anthony and Joe Russo’s new sci-fi adventure film, The Electric State, is adapted from the graphic novel by Swedish artist/designer Simon Stålenhag. So naturally the directors wanted to create their own distinctive look and tone—complete with a colorful array of quirky misfit robots who team up with their human counterparts to take down an evil corporation.
(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)
The Electric State is Stålenhag’s third book, published in 2018. Like much of work, it’s set in a dystopian, ravaged landscape: a reimagined America in an alternate 1990s where a war between robots and humans has devastated the country. Paragraphs of text, accompanied by larger artworks, tell the story of a teen girl named Michelle (Milly Bobby Brown) who must travel across the country with her robot companion, Cosmo (Alan Tudyk), to find her long-lost genius brother, Christopher (Woody Norman), while being pursued by a federal agent (Giancarlo Esposito).
Screenwriter Christopher Markus introduced the Russo brothers the book, which they felt “encapsulated the zeitgeist in terms of what’s happening in this moment between humans and our connection to technology,” Anthony Russo said. Tonally, they were inspired by 1980s Amblin Entertainment movies, albeit with a darker tinge. And film is a different medium than a book, so the brothers made several changes to the source material.
In the movie, Michelle and Cosmo reluctantly join forces with a smuggler named Keats (Chris Pratt) and his wisecracking robot sidekick, Herman (Anthony Mackie). Eventually they find themselves in the Exclusion Zone, a walled-off corner in the desert where robots now exist on their own. There they find additional allies in Dr. Amherst (Ke Huy Quan) and a colorful assortment of robots: Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson), Popfly (Brian Cox), Penny Pal (Jenny Slate) Perplex (Hank Azaria), Garbage Bot (Billy Gardell), and Mrs. Scissors (Susan Leslie), among others. Stanley Tucci plays chief villain Ethan Skate, the man behind Christopher’s disappearance whose plans are far more diabolical than Michelle ever imagined.
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.”
Gassner’s personal favorites were the giant rubber ducky robots. “My wife has a lot of rubber duckies in the bath, and I was going, ‘Got to have the rubber duckies in the movie because it’ll make her laugh,'” he said.
The design of Cosmo proved to be uniquely challenging because he’s portrayed in the book as having a gigantic head—yet if one were to design an actual robot with those proportions, the robot would topple over. “That was constant, it’s always about proportion,” said Gassner. “Proportion and color and shape and little nuances as you got into the development of the characters. It’s like making anything live, it’s a constant flow of creative talent to bring them to life.”
Ultimately, the team made Cosmo’s head a little smaller and added piston armatures to the joints to support the head. Cosmo’s design also received the Stålenhag seal of approval; he declared, “the way Cosmo moves is very close to what I had in mind.”
Bonus: roboticist Dennis Hong of the University of California, Los Angeles, one of the film’s science consultants, built an actual working version of Cosmo for the premiere and similar promotional events that can walk and wave its head. Once again, the concept art for Cosmo—the huge head, the huge boots—proved difficult, as did the necessity of packing the battery, computer, sensors, actuators and other components into a relatively small body. Among other innovations, Hong’s team developed a new type of actuator that functions like artificial muscles to give their robot the desired lifelike motion.
The sets also had their own distinctive aesthetics, such as the grimly sterile brutalist look of Sentre Technologies HQ, or the kitschy relics from the 1980s and 1990s that litter Keats’ base of operations in an abandoned mine. The most serendipitous find was the abandoned Blue Sky Acres Mall just outside of Atlanta, with a hub-and-spoke layout that made it ideal as a sanctuary set for the misfit robots.
“We could have never afforded to build something that massive,” said Gassner. “It was a magical place to us.” The production was able to retrofit many of the original mall storefronts and kiosks, imagining how a misfit band of robots might use the space. So a pizza oven became a metal recycling center; a noodle bar was festooned wth colorful fiber-optic cables; a sunglasses kiosk became a rewiring station, while a juice bar became a charging station. Mr. Peanut lives in the NUTmobile, a peanut-shaped van lent to the film by Planters.
“I’ve done 40 films in my day, and every film has a particular quality to it,” said Gassner. “I have one fallback position: when in doubt, make it beautiful. That always seems to work. Make them look cool, make them look interesting, make them exciting, give them character, have fun with them. What are they going to do? Make them scary, make them weird, make them all those things.”
The Electric State is now streaming on Netflix.