Disney, Chouette Studios parts ‘Dragon Striker’ first look
Some of the most interesting moments at every edition of the Annecy Animation Festival come from cross-fertilization-the-tangible influences of international animation. An example of this is ‘Dragon Striker’, an upcoming series by Disney EMEA produced by Chouette Studios. In a studio focus session at MIFA, the creative team behind the series clearly spoke about the heavy anime influence of the show.
Co-maker and producer Sylvain Dos Santos stood in advance about this influence, not only on “Dragon Striker”, but also on Chouette’s work. He described the studio, with 200 artists, 75 of them animators, as founded by people who loved Japanese animation and comics and dreamed of making something in that style.
“Dragon Striker,” announced for the first time in 2022, is emblematically for that desire, a 2D -animated project born of a handle bag with influences. The series, set up for 22 episodes of 20 minutes, is essentially about football or at least a combat version of it. With only five players on each side, they use magical skills such as time -changing power fields, clones and spectral dragons to crush their opponents and score goals.
Variety Has gained exclusive access to an early view of one of the show teams, seen below.
Credit: Chouette Studios
In the world of the show it is a national pastime that takes place in extensive and tailor -made stadiums that reflect the nature of each home team. Much of “Dragon Striker” takes place in a prestigious school that focuses on training children in the skills needed to succeed. The two main characters are Ssyelle, a keeper and key, a striker. Ssyelle already understands her strength; Key doesn’t even know that he has one at the start of the series. His strength, or ‘Tama’ in the terminology of the show – connects to his deceased mother, a star player himself.
Some images from episode one depicted the hectic action of the game, which unfolded with the visual instructions that one would expect from Action Anime. Not only in the stylization of the characters, but also in the timing and the rhythm with which they moved and the corresponding effects on the screen. It is also not only the style: later in the session the team spoke about how their process was partially inspired by the Japanese animation pipeline, adapted to the process as carried out in France.
The other co-maker of the show, Charles Lefebvre, who was also co-founder of Chouet, after he was with his older La Chouette Co. Had worked, emphasized that part of the team had worked on anime such as “My Hero Academia” and “One Piece” while showing off a number of important poses and described how the animator was complete in the show.
The connections of the anime industry continue, while the team spoke about recruiting composer Kevin Penkin for the series. Penkin, known for work on anime such as ‘Made in Abyss’, worked with an 80-person orchestra in Japan to record music for ‘Dragon Striker’.
Before it shared a scene in which Ssyelle and Key meet for the first time, the team broke up the development process in segments. Dos Santos spoke about earlier iterations of the show. “It wasn’t even a football show,” he admitted when he was talking about the first core of the idea. The evolving of being a rugby show in an Arthurian setting called “Ovalon.” Gerardo Orlando, a producer in the Disney EMEA show, spoke about the changes. First it went from rugby to football, then they dropped the Arthurian legend part because he wanted the team to ‘build [their] Own myths. “
When creating those myths, the anime influences are clear in advance, the show comes complete with the rapid assembly of opening credits associated with the Japanese series. The influences naturally go beyond that medium. Lefebvre mentioned a few: a little bit of ‘The Vision of Escafowene’, ‘Final Fantasy IX’ and ‘Chrono Trigger’ accompanied the most important fictional setting of Kal Asterock as much as real cities such as Rio de Janeiro.
The visual composition of these environments was not only bound by referring to other beloved stories, but also connected to the philosophy of the team on visual stories. Concept artist Claire Sun said: “We often think of writing and visuals like different entities, but they are two sides of the same coin.” They kept underlining that in the hug of a goal to ‘show and not tell’, they put just as much of world construction directly into art when they could.
Writer Paul Mckeown focused on the concepts of the setting and emphasized the “sweeping character arches” provoked by a sport that has a lot of brutality and despair. “It’s a child’s show and it’s funny, but I think we really pushed the limits in some places,” said McKeown. When asked by the public whether the team had written after a first season, they said there was enough material to continue, and Dos Santos Chimde in with a quip that it was enough for “writing 15 seasons!”
In addition to writing the character, the cast itself is also drawn with a lot of width-a mixture of various styles, from costumes that mixed influences of old clothing and contemporary streetwear into a series of different hairstyles, all meant to create a world that felt lively and lived and lived in.
The players themselves showed a lot of enthusiasm for those small details, as far as their own fank art is already created by artists in their spare time, with embroidery, dolls and stickers. Concept Artist Sun was a joke entitled The “first president of the official Dragon Striker Fan Club” for the hundreds of pages with comics and art that she has already produced about side characters. You can only imagine how much there would be if the show got the 15 seasons that the fellow maker made jokes about.
