When The Bad Guys came out in 2022, it was riding a flashy new wave of movies redefining American animation. Four years earlier, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sent a shockwave through the industry. It was a radical break from the push toward visual realism that had dominated American animation since Pixar Animation became the studio to beat. And it was praised and profitable — proving extremely stylized animation might just be a draw. Other animation studios immediately pivoted to more experimental visuals. The Bad Guys was part of the first surge of Spider-Verse followers, but it was no easy feat. As director Pierre Perifel told Polygon at the time, making an animated movie with such dramatic shading and lighting, flat comics-page textures, and unusual character designs involved “fighting the computer” to get the look he wanted.
So, checking in with Perifel ahead of the 2025 release of The Bad Guys 2, the first thing we had to ask was whether that fight has gotten any easier — or whether he’s still trying to break the machine.
“A lot less than for the first one,” Perifel told Polygon. “The systems we have still want you to generate realistic rendering, with a physically accurate lighting setup. But since Bad Guys, we’ve done Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, we’ve done The Wild Robot — those movies leveraged some of that technology that we established. All these endeavors piggyback on what’s been done before, because all of them are trying to be a little more stylized, a bit more graphic-oriented.”
Perifel says that in the six years since the first Bad Guys entered production, DreamWorks has also been training artists for the new wave: “They’re getting more and more used to stylization, to bringing 2D inspiration into our CG looks. And so it’s a much more known entity now than it used to be. It shows on screen. You can tell that the artists are more comfortable with it, and the machine is giving us more possibilities.”
The challenge on Bad Guys 2 was in coordinating with another studio: Sony Pictures Imageworks handled about 20 minutes of the 104-minute movie, to save on costs, which meant sharing assets and matching the first movie’s distinctive style with another company’s production pipeline. “Thankfully, Sony Imageworks is very used to doing stylized work as well,” he said. “So they caught up rather quickly.” (Sony Imageworks most recently worked on Netflix’s K-Pop Demon Hunters, another visually idiosyncratic animated movie, albeit one with a radically different look.)
The new movie also gave Perifel and co-director JP Sans a chance to push their design work and experimental lighting even further. “It was literally following the same recipe, let’s say — I didn’t want to lose the audience by doing something different,” Perifel said. “The main differences could be subtle, but at the end of the day, you feel them in the film. The main difference is, [Bad Guys 2 is] more stylized on the matte paintings — it feels a bit more painterly. We tweaked the character design a little bit: I wanted a bit more meat on our characters, so they’re just all a bit more inflated. In the special effects, I wanted more of a blend of 2D and CG, so you’ll feel it, bringing more of that graphic equation to our effects. We added some layers, 2D animated effects on top of everything else. It’s a very unique look, a very interesting blend.”
Another subtle detail: Bad Guys 2 is designed to look like it was shot with an anamorphic lens, a choice often used to give movies a “more widescreen look” with a 2:40 aspect ratio and a signature curving of detail around the edges of the screen. “There is no use for an anamorphic lens in a digital environment,” Perifel says. “Anamorphic lenses were created for film [cameras] — but the problem is, the look is so cool that even in live-action, they’re using anamorphic lenses on digital cameras, so that you recreate that look, that looks so unique and so iconic. […] We finessed our technology to do anamorphic lenses, so that we get the really interesting artifacts there — more bleeds and more light spills in the picture. So overall, it’s the same look, just a bit more refined, a bit more pushed, just a bit more elevated.”
The anamorphic-lens look is one of the elements Perifel and Sans took from the movies they studied to give Bad Guys 2 a classic action look, from James Bond films to space movies like Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
“Even on the first one, [we were] bringing in massive live-action influences from iconic films — Oceans 11, Snatch, The Italian Job for the heist genre, big car chases,” Perifel says. And then for this one, we dabbled a bit more into action films: James Bond and Mission: Impossible. To give us that feeling of live-action — they’re all shot with anamorphic lenses, these movies. It gives scope. It gives the sophistication that a spherical lens doesn’t give you. And you see that barrel distortion on the side of the screen, it almost inflates the picture. Those are all artifacts from the lenses — in a way, it’s a mistake, but it looks cool. And that’s why we love anamorphic lenses so much.”
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The Bad Guys 2 will be in theaters on Aug. 1.
