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According to Robbin Williams, the word "Jumanji" is a Zulu word that translated into English actually means "Many Effects", whether this is actually correct or not, we don't know. However what do know is that the movie Jumanji did indeed have, Many Effects.
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Pushing the limits of what was possible for special and visual effects at the time, not only did Jumanji have more puppets and animatronics than Jurassic Park, but it also had over double the computer effects, more than 12 minutes! and a much wider variety of style of effects.
So, in this video, we're going to explore...
Some of those detailed models and sets, like the overgrown vine set or the house splitting in two, complicated puppets, animatronics, and... well, I suppose you'd call this "Plantatronics" and incredible digital effects!
...For this warping effect, ILM didn't actually have any proper scans or measurements of the actor's hands so they got the production company to send them a Xerox of the actor putting his hands on the photocopier's glass.
ILM even spent 3 months developing two ground-breaking software programs,
one was called iSculpt and was used to create realistic facial expressions
and the other was for creating realistic digital hair and fur for the awesome CG lion and these ... Ummm... not-so-awesome monkeys.
Designing the look for all the animals took months of research, hundreds of photographs, and numerous sketches before they managed to find the correct balance between amusing and threatening which was both wild enough to scare the audience and still tame enough to achieve a family-friendly rating.
The mantra for every movie is "Get as much in camera as you can" so during the design process they also had to assess which animal could be a physical puppet and captured "in camera", and which had to be CGI.
For example, animals that didn't have to move around too much, like the plants and the crocodile could be 100% animatronics, animals that had to have a wide range of movement, like the mosquitoes and the monkeys were 100% CGI, and animals that had to move around but also had close-up beauty shots or had to interact with the cast were both animatronics and CGI.
The lion was one of these digital/practical hybrids.
They built the lion with an animatronic head that could be controlled by external operators whilst the front paws were controlled by a creature performer.
This performer was concealed inside the lion and wore a headset with LCD screens in order to see how he was moving. the entire puppet was then supported by a crane on a dolly that it could be moved around on.
The animatronic lion was used for the close-up and the facial expression shots, and the CG version was used for the shots that required full body movement.
If you stop to look for it, you can actually see the transitions between the two quite clearly in this scene
We start with the animatronic model, here too, now it's CGI back to animatronics and back to CGI
Now here, if we slow it down, you can see just how good their new fur tool was.
There are around 1.5 million hairs individual on this lion and the two minutes of total screen time that the CG lion has, took 5 months to complete.
Now I know what you're thinking "if they were able to make this CG lion look so good, why did they leave these monkey's looking so bad?"
Well, the short answer is that, back when the movie was made, they just couldn't possibly make them look any better, and the main reasons for this were lighting, and reference.
For the lion scene, they had an animatronic puppet that they could use as a light reference on set, the scene also occurs inside the house under controlled lighting conditions.
This meant that even though there were parts of the lion (Like this rear leg here) that didn't quite sit right in the shot they could be hidden in shadow.
The monkeys though were a completely different story.
Even though maquettes were made to define the monkey's look, there was no puppet that they could use for light reference, and the monkeys themselves mainly appeared outdoors in broad daylight with little or no shadows to hide their flaws.
(...)
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