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After turning heads of comic book fan across the galaxy, Marvel Studios’ What If…? is back for a second season.
Emmy Award-winning animator and filmmaker Bryan Andrews, who has worked on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Samurai Jack, and various MCU projects, serves as Director and Executive Producer on the popular Disney+ series, and we were lucky enough to sit down with him for a chat ahead of the season two premiere.
“I love What If…?,” Andrews gushes over the Marvel comics that were first released in the ‘70s.
“We didn’t have as many amazing comic book stores, at least locally, so the stuff I got would be so random. A local 7-Eleven, like a mini-mart store, they’d have a rack of comics. They’d have a random issue of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, or something like that – sometimes there’d be a What If…?.”
Years later he received a call from What If…? Executive Producer Brad Winderbaum about working with Marvel.
“Brad says, ‘Hey man’ – because they knew I did animation – ‘we’re gonna do animation. Why don’t you do What If…? with us?’ And I was like, ‘Okaaaay.’ He said, ‘We’re doing the MCU, brand new stories with a lot more creative freedom.’ The rest is history. I hope you people are digging it.”
With an endless list of stories to explore, the team behind What If…? go through quite a process while brainstorming.
“Kevin Feige was like, ‘Give me 30!’ And we’re like, ‘What… 30 episodes? The season’s not going to be 30 episodes.’ And he’s like, ‘I know, we just need a nice pool to choose from.’
“You have to cast a wide net because there’s only going to be so many good ones. With our team and our incredible writers – Matthew Chauncey, Ryan Little – we come to the table with a number of ideas of what we would like to do, and with no problem, we get easily 30, possibly more.
“We give those to Kevin and he tries his best to choose the nine. He can’t. He normally gets to 14, or 12, and from that, we have to whittle it down to nine. There are always these extra episodes lying around that may never see the light of day, that are still A+.”
Not only are the stories A+, but its animation is stunning, and that’s thanks, in part, to Aussie animation studio Flying Bark Productions.
“I’m not even sure [how many animators there are per episode]. However many they have, they probably need even more,” he says. “We are doing our best and thankfully we get it done. We’re thankful for our vendors, especially Flying Bark, they’ve been with us forever and they do a great job and you’ll see some of their work in season two. We couldn’t do it without our vendors, and also our team here. Silly cliché but it’s true – it takes a village.”
On what inspired the show’s animation style, Andrews adds: “Basically I look to some classic American illustrators, mainly J.C. Leyendecker – he was legendary; words can’t even describe what he did for culture and pop culture in America at the time. He started creating some of the things that we gravitate to and how we recognise certain holiday imagery here in the States. He’s just iconic and his work is so beautiful. I’ve been a fan of it since college.
“The chance to finally see it up on screen, moving – and I don’t think we’ve fully achieved it – we had no time to develop a look. We did the best we could, and each season we do our best to dial it in – with more details and there’s still ways to go”.
He continues, “I also love Mead Schaeffer – how he lights things, using old school noir and letting things fall off into shadow. And cinematic influences as well, I really wanted to pay attention to lensing, to make it feel like we actually went out and shot this anamorphic – that it doesn’t feel flat… I think animation can be just as cinematic as anything else.”
More than anything else, Andrews reveals that he’s “glad that [he’s] had the career that [he’s] had”.
“Ever since I got out of school, I’ve been trying to bring cinema to animation,” he tells. “Oddly enough that’s never changed, every project is another chance for me to do that. Hopefully, it shows up on screen, and hopefully, people enjoy it.”
What If…? Season 2 begins streaming on Disney+ on December 22 with a new episode dropping nightly until December 30.
