Planet 51, the CGI animated feature film is a galactic sized alien adventure comedy that tells the story of an inverse alien invasion

Sixteen year old LEM lives on Planet 51, a white picket-fenced world reminiscent of a cheerfully innocent 1950's America. He is happy in his safe, predictable world and spends his time daydreaming about running the local planetarium and dating the girl next door, NEERA.
One day out of the blue and millions of miles from his own planet, astronaut CAPTAIN CHARLES 'CHUCK' BAKER lands his spaceship in Neera's backyard, right in the middle of a family barbecue! Unaware of his surroundings, he disembarks the ship reveling in his Big Moment. He plants his flag triumphantly and turns…only to find Planet 51's green-skinned inhabitants staring back at him bemused! He panics and flees, finding refuge quite by chance in the planetarium where Lem works.
When Lem and Chuck meet, they gradually overcome their mutual fear and strike up a friendship. Lem agrees to hide Chuck from the paranoid Planet 51 Army who are determined to capture the alien within their midst, convinced he is out to destroy them. But all Chuck wants to do is reach his spacecraft before it returns to Earth without him! So with the help of Lem and his friends, a pair of not-so-bright Planet 51 soldiers, and an excitable but trusty explorer robot, ROVER, Chuck and the gang race to reach his spaceship before it is too late…

Presented by Sony Pictures, Ilion Animation Studios and Handmade Films International , Planet 51 is directed by Jorge Blanco (leading creator of  best-selling videogame saga Commandos),  co-directed by Javier Abad and Marcos Martinez (Commandos creative team) with a screenplay by  the Academy Award  Nominee Joe Stillman (Shrek, Shrek 2) .

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Ilion Animation Studios was launched in 2002 with the aim of becoming a leading animation studio creating computer generated full length animation feature films with global appeal. Such an ambitious project brought along with it huge challenges from a creative, technological and human standpoint; "we needed a great storyline, leading edge, in-house technology and a talented team of professionals to push the project forward. This was no mean feat. From the start we began looking for a fresh and original storyline that was highly differentiated from other movies", says Perez Dolset. It was at this point that we decided to embark on a journey through our own hopes, dreams and fantasies. Just like many others before us, we searched hard and fast through all the common themes, as well as some of the more unusual ones. We looked at universal themes with less original ideas which we felt were never really told well, or big storylines with universal appeal that we felt maybe deserved to be told again. And, as usually happens in these circumstances, just as we were coming to the conclusion that it had all been done before, we found Planet 51, or was it that Planet 51 found us, appearing from that place where great ideas lie in wait for their creators? At that moment we knew that this was Our Story.
After the first phase of development we searched for a world class scriptwriter to tell our story and we found one of the best in the business; Joe Stillman. He maintains it was love at first sight! From that first meeting, after we had presented the project to Joe, he packed his suitcases and went off to live on Planet 51. I believe he took up residence at a place opposite where Lem lives, or was it actually in Lem's attic? Wherever he ended up staying, what was true was that he had created an extraordinary storyline packed with fantastic characters, bundles of humour, surprises, emotion and excitement. 
"When I saw a 3 minute scene that showed an astronaut landing in the backyard of an alien suburban family, it completely knocked me out" says Stillman.  The scene of the astronaut landing was really inspiring. It showed so much: the world of Planet 51, the sense of people in it, an understated acting style, a sense of visual motif, color palate, a really terrific sense of place and an advanced technical ability. And then there's the stuff you can't really quantify, which probably is best described as sensibility.
Jorge Blanco, Planet 51 Director point out that "our aim was always to tell a great story within an original context, to move away from the repetitive themes seen in many recent animated features". We knew it wasn't going to be easy and after exploring a long list of different ideas we came up with Planet 51: alien beings - little green men with antennae on top of their heads - living in fear of human invasion. The classic tale of an alien invasion but seen from a completely different angle!
This original idea opened up a whole world of possibilities and straight away we began to place our alien planet in its equivalent of 1950's America. That fitted perfectly; in the 1950's science fiction was king of the drive-in movies and on-screen heroes fought invaders from outer-space. These movies also provided the perfect melting pot for comedy and caricature; aliens wearing a toupee driving a Cadillac shaped like a flying saucer or invading 'spaceships' dangling from strings! We knew that all of these icons could work perfectly in our film.
In the same way that 1950s America inspired us to build Planet 51; it also gave us the opportunity to tap into the social paranoia towards sabotage or invasion which was increasing around that time. These were times when people's mistrust lead them to believe that their neighbor could easily be an undercover agent trying to blow up the local bakery! In a similar way the inhabitants of Planet 51 regard an innocent astronaut with terror and mistrust, fuelled by fear and ignorance. These themes of conflict between different cultures fear of the unknown or anything that's different run throughout the film.
Conscious of the huge challenge facing us with Planet 51's character animation, we decided we would design our own computer animation tools and software, says Planet 51 co-director Javier Abad. Over the last six years, the team behind the characters and background sets have continuously developed these tools and placed Ilion Studios amongst the top ranked character animation studios in the world.
Developing the dramatic elements of each character is hugely important for the animators. They record each other time and time again until they come up with just the right performance that will help them to develop the best animation for the frame.  It is incredible to see the sheer effort that each of the animators puts into their work so that the audience can truly feel all the emotions being portrayed in the movie.
All of us have seen movies featuring beings from other worlds; green, brown, with scales, without scales, monsters with huge heads or simply giants. Designing the inhabitants of Planet 51 involved taking these different references and blending them together. We wanted them to be fun, appealing and realistic without appearing too similar to us, but at the same time not looking like a monster either.
We also had to imagine an entire world, says co-director Marcos Martinez: the clothing, the doorways, the cars, the streets, the city, the mountains, the animals.  Planet 51 is world of happiness, and a world of innocence, where people don't even consider what might be out there beyond the heavens, because in their world everyone is as happy as they'll ever be. However this idyll is disrupted when something strange arrives on the planet. Something that will change their lives forever. Something from beyond the stars... A being from another planet.
Planet 51 is much more than a planet inhabited by green colored beings with antennas. Do they eat hotdogs? Do they go ten-pin bowling? What music do they listen to? In the cinema a spectator eats popcorn that floats and drinks a satellite soda… On the street a traffic sign warns the flying saucer vehicles not to float too high. The city is so full of life that it doesn't all fit into one film! However the attentive spectator will realize that in each poster, each billboard and shop front, there is a window that opens up to a world as large as our own.
Who hasn't seen a poster for an alien movie?  Old and new films about  nasty invaders from outer space with green skin.  What if the posters came from an alien planet featuring human beings as the invaders?!  How would they market their films?  Planet 51 is full of funny twists, both for the young, the old and for the nostalgic…
The movie shows a planets going through its own 1950's, with a sci-fi invasion movies and a healthy dose of paranoia atmosphere. "The main difference between their world and ours is that by the end of our 1950's, we were looking towards the stars, to the great unknown and the beginning of our age of space exploration", says Stillman. But the people of Planet 51 are missing that thirst for knowledge. They're afraid of the unknown. And so their innocent 1950's period is one that just goes on and on. What changes all that, what opens our main character to the greater universe, is the arrival of astronaut Chuck Baker. In this sense,  Lem embodies everything about Planet 51 and the theme of the movie. He's afraid of the unknown. As it happens, I am too, Stillman says. When a character gets to grow in a way that's resonant for me, as Lem does, he becomes kind of special.

READ MORE ABOUT THE PLANET 51 CHARACTERS

CREATING  A NEW WORLD: Planetization!
Three basic patterns constitute the core of Planet 51's visual style: Circles, spheres and saucers: a template that was specifically designed to adapt all shapes and forms familiar to us to a more alien -yet recognizable- style, providing overall consistency and credibility.
Two of these patterns were extracted from classic icons of Sci-Fi pop culture and mythology - flying saucers and crop circles - while the third was derived from Googie Architecture, a futurist design style born of the post-WWII car-culture and thrived in the 1950s and 1960s and which was also highly influenced by the Space and Atomic Ages. The futuristic designs that typified Googie Architecture inspired the notably retro look of Glipforg. Thus a term was unofficially coined whenever facing the design of any new prop and having to adapt it to Planet 51's circular and rounded aesthetics… 'let's Planetize that telephone!  Read more

READ MORE ABOUT: Where to Hang Around When Visiting Glipforg? Places to go with your friends, and How to Move Around in Planet 51

TECHNICAL PRODUCTION NOTES
To withstand the rigors of production, Ilion Animation Studios must have a well developed technical infrastructure, as such the initial ideas of using 'white box' workstations and assembling a render farm from computer parts, were quickly discarded. With the aid of over 200 Hewlett Packard workstations and HP network infrastructure, over 56,000 GB of BluArc storage space and over 2500 , Blade and 1U, render cores, Ilion's artists are now delivering a world class product. Read more

About Internal Developments
Creating Planet 51, required not only creativity and commitment but also innovation. Even when only considering the technological aspects of a movie such as Planet 51, the amount of innovation is astounding. Ilion Animation Studio's Tools department created over two-hundred developments for the production of Planet 51. These developments range from the 'four pillars' of Ilion technology: GLT, Asset Tracker, Asset Manager, Asset Loader to large scale developments such as the Lighting Layers Manager to comparatively small developments directed towards simplifying or optimizing specific work flows.  Read more

About Ilion Animation Studios Pipeline (Work Flow)
The first step towards creating a movie like Planet 51 is to develop the script. A good story is the beating heart of any movie, especially an animated feature. However the script is also an important part of the planning process, as it helps the production team breakdown exactly how many shots, characters, location etc. will be in the movie. Read more

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

IGNACIO PEREZ DOLSET (Producer) , with more than 17 years of experience in the digital entertainment sector, he  has played a main role in the video game business from its beginnings, having performed responsibility roles as those of General Director and later CEO in Proein Games, one of the main distribution companies in the Spanish video game market; and as Founder and Member of Board of Directors at  TeleLine, ISP pioneer in Spain and Terra precursor. In 1996, together with his brother Javier Pérez, he founded Pyro Studios and LaNetro (today Zed).  In 1998, with Ignacio Pérez at the top, Pyro Studios launched its first title, 'Commandos', reaching No. 1 in 17 countries and sales of 1.5 million copies. Throughout its history, Pyro Studios has released 6 titles to the market and has sold a total of more than 6 million units worldwide.  In 2002, after a successful career in the World of videogames, Ignacio Pérez founded Ilion Animation Studios, a company dedicated to the production of computer-animated films, which announced three years later its first feature film, "Planet 51".

GUY COLLINS (PRODUCER) After 12 years of experience in the financial sector, Guy Collins began his journey in the film industry in 1976, specializing in areas such as finance, marketing and distribution, among others. During his more than 30 years of experience in the sector, Guy Collins has been responsible for financing the production of more than 100 independent films; and being chairman of Handmade Films International, he has participated as Executive Producer, in numerous productions, including the family feature film "Eloise in Paris", the Highlander feature film and TV franchise and, in 2008, "Wild Duck" and the police drama "50 Dead Men Walking" with Ben Kingsley and Jim Sturgess.

JORGE BLANCO (DIRECTOR)With more than 12 year's experience in the 3D Animation Industry, Jorge Blanco began his professional career in 1996 at Pyro Studios, where he performed the role of Art Director for more than 7 years; being one of the key success factors in the production of the successful franchise "Commandos"  . In 2002, after a successful career at Pyro Studios, he joined Ilion Animation Studios as Film Director and Creative Director for Feature Animation Film "Planet51".

JOE STILLMAN (SCRIPTWRITER) co-wrote "Shrek 2" for Dreamworks as well as "Shrek," which earned him an Academy Award® nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay as well as an Annie and BAFTA award.  He co-wrote "Beavis & Butthead Do America".
In television, Stillman co-produced the animated series "King of the Hill," for which he received two Emmy Award® nominations.  He was co-executive producer on the USA Network series, "The War Next Door" and a writer on MTV's "Beavis and Butthead". He was a writer and story editor for Nickelodeon's "The Adventures of Pete and Pete".
Recently he wrote "Planet 51" due out in the fall of 2009 and "Gulliver's Travels", starring Jack Black, due in the summer of 2010. He is currently writing "Alien Zoo" for Warner Bros.

THE ART OF ANIMATION

HOME