Look hard enough and you can find Australian excellence in arts everywhere. While our actors dazzle in front of the camera, there are dozens of homegrown artists making a splash behind the scenes.
Goat was Australian artist Daniel Pozo’s first project as Sony Picture Imagework’s Head of Character Design. (Supplied: Sony Picture Imageworks)
One of those talented practitioners is Daniel Pozo, a Sydney-born animator who has forged a career at Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), the animation and visual effects arm responsible for blockbusters like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Mitchells vs the Machines and the Academy Award-winning KPop Demon Hunters.
In 2023, Pozo was named SPI’s head of character animation. His first major project as head honcho? GOAT, a fantastical, world-expanding journey through a parallel universe populated by anthropomorphic animals.
“Coming into it was a little bit nerve-racking because it’s such an ambitious project and there were a lot of expectations for it to look the way it eventually looked,” Pozo told ABC News.
“But I knew that I had such a strong team behind me, so all the nerves started to go away once we started to actually make the movie.”
From TAFE to the world stage
An animation fan from childhood, Pozo began his career at TAFE NSW’s Sydney design centre.
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“The thing I learned the most [at TAFE] was to be specific with the discipline that I wanted to chase. I learned a lot about different disciplines in 3D animation, which encompass modelling, lighting [and] a lot of the filmmaking stuff that was involved in making an animated feature,” Pozo says.
“But what I really took out of it was that I wanted to focus on performance and movements, and the actual specific animation part of it.”
After stints on Australian shows like Erky Perky (2006-10) and in London visual effects houses, Pozo was poached by Sony as a character animator, working on blockbuster films like Hotel Transylvania (2012) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023).
When it came to leading up to 120 animators for GOAT, Pozo felt up to the task after his years of training.
Daniel Pozo (centre) with some of his animation team creating the movement for GOAT. (Supplied: Sony)
“The head of character animation is essentially tasked to bring the vision of the directors to the screen using a very large number of very skilled animators,” he says.
“It was an incredibly collaborative process with our director, Tyree Dillihay. They almost encouraged the performances to be surprising and unexpected.”
Here’s to the GOAT
In a world populated by anthropomorphic animals, GOAT follows precocious goat and “roarball” (basketball with more steps) enthusiast Will (Caleb McLaughlin) who dreams of becoming like his idol, panther Jett (Gabrielle Union), captain of the once-great-now-flailing Vineland Thorns roarball team. The only problem is the unofficial rule that “smalls can’t ball”, locking any animal under 6 feet tall out of the sport.
“We didn’t just rely on the characters looking like humans in costumes, we wanted the way they move to be specific to their species,” Pozo says. (Supplied: Sony)
Pozo and his team created hundreds of characters that populate the film’s environmentally diverse landscapes, building on the combination 3D and 2D animation style visuals that have proved fruitful for so many of Sony’s latest offerings.
“I think when Into the Spider-Verse exploded on the screen, people really responded to how handcrafted it felt, that there were decisions made that just made it feel more alive, more textural, more specific,” he says.
“I think that’s why a lot of people love the old 2D Disney kind of animation movies, because you can really tell that someone’s spent a lot of time drawing each frame.”
Pozo says that where Into the Spider-Verse was inspired by comic books and KPop Demon Hunters locked onto the look of anime, the goal for GOAT was to create a moving painting.
“The backgrounds had this acrylic kind of watercolour painting to it,” Pozo says.
“[GOAT] encompasses the culture of basketball; it can be the street culture, the music, the art, the shoes, the fashion — there’s so much specificity that was brought to the movie.
Modo, the Komodo dragon, was an animator’s delight; “He was our universe rule breaker, we could just do anything with him,” Pozo says. (Supplied: Sony)
“There were so many people working on this, and everyone has different stories to tell, and different characteristics to bring to the overall story and the overall animation, so it feels like a lot of real people made this [film].”
To the future and beyond
After more than two decades working in animation, Pozo has seen a lot of change, including the increasing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on the art form.
Fading sports star and fierce panther Jett was Pozo’s favourite character to work with. (Supplied: Sony)
But rather than buy into any anti-AI fever, the animator believes the tools could help the industry — if great care is taken.
“AI is already here and you have to learn to adapt,” he says.
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“Generative AI … can be a little problematic but I think if AI is used properly there’s still a of handcrafted vision to it, or if an actual person is guiding it to be a little bit more efficient with some things, I think there is a way for us to move forward without it affecting people’s livelihoods.”
For the young Australian animators hoping to follow in Pozo’s steps, his greatest advice is to keep going.
“You’re going to work as hard as you can, and you’re going to hustle to get that job, and sometimes it doesn’t work out but it will work out in the end,” he says.
“Trust that eventually the chance will come to get in the industry, to get your foot in, or maybe the dream job will eventually come, and then you can take that opportunity and work as hard as you can to continue it.”
GOAT is in cinemas now.