They were costume puppets ingeniously designed by the Henson Company. Majority of the time they were controlled by puppeteers and suit performers. In some of the more critical scenes, their faces were animated using CGI. It's some of the Henson Company's best work in my opinion. Marvelous film.
They were originally going to use Animatronics but they found it didn't look they way they wanted and it weighed so much that they had to strip out the mechanics of the puppets. Spike is a genius
@@orpheusoctober This is kinda funny as I worked on the film and spent a lot of it convincing Spike that our CGI pipeline was indeed going to look much better than the animatronics that the team originally planned. Yes, Spike is a genius (and above all LOVELY guy) but he had very little to do with that decision and was terrified we made the wrong call until he saw successful tests starting to come through.
The part where Spike holds Max awkwardly until he says “ow... you’re hurting me” is a weird moment, but it’s on-brand for Spike. It’s an odd, innocent gesture of affection that most people wouldn’t do, but that’s just how he is.
I re-watched it literally 4 minutes ago I remember watching it as a young child and being terrified but also not of the film It's weird to explain, I had "fond nightmares" about it
That’s how I felt about the book as a kid. The wild things are really ugly and scary to a kid, but overall I remember liking it. I was 20 when the movie came out, but I thought it captured that aspect of the book very well.
It still baffles me that 2000's and early 2010's films had better CGI. Fucking hell transformers dotm had a budget of 195M and it looks good to this day, while the flash had the budget of 265M and it looks like ass.
A lot of parents believed that the themes are a bit too mature for kids. I disagree, the movie is creepy at some moments but it really represents the confusing emotions of children and their coping mechanisms.
