Dwayne Johnson stars as the voice of Krypto the Super-Dog in Warner Bros. Pictures’ animated action-adventure feature film “DC League of Super-Pets,” from director Jared Stern.
The film also stars the voices of Kevin Hart, Kate McKinnon, John Krasinski, Vanessa Bayer, Natasha Lyonne, Diego Luna, Marc Maron, Thomas Middleditch, Ben Schwartz, and Keanu Reeves.
In “DC League of Super-Pets,” Krypto the Super-Dog and Superman are inseparable best friends, sharing the same superpowers and fighting crime in Metropolis side by side. When Superman and the rest of the Justice League are kidnapped, Krypto must convince a rag-tag shelter pack—Ace the hound, PB the potbellied pig, Merton the turtle and Chip the squirrel—to master their own newfound powers and help him rescue the Super Heroes.
The film will be released by Warner Bros. Pictures in theaters internationally beginning 27 July 2022 and in North America on July 29, 2022.
Production Design
“DC League of Super-Pets” pulls audiences into one of the most iconic cities in the DC Universe—Metropolis—takes them on a journey amidst their favorite Super Heroes and surrounds them with a menagerie of four-legged friends who come together to save the day!
Production designer Kim Taylor describes the inspiration for the city’s overall aesthetic: “We used iconic imagery to define the look of Metropolis, our utopian ‘Golden City,’ with the Daily Planet building at its heart. The key inspirations we kept going back to as we were refining the look of the film were the drawings of American visionary architect Hugh Ferris as well as the classic art deco architecture of the 1920s and `30s, especially New York City and Chicago buildings from that era.”
In addition to shape, Taylor notes that the Metropolis color palette was also critical to creating the right look and feel for the film. “We put a lot of golden light on the city in order to achieve the Maxfield Parrish-type of colors—those oranges and blues in his paintings were a big inspiration for us on how to achieve a bright, optimistic, utopian feel for the city. We wanted to push the bright, overexposed feeling to the point where things disappear and it feels warm and appealing, like glowing, rich ‘magic hour’ photography.”
For Krypto’s forever home—Superman’s apartment—the team used color as a sort of Easter egg for fans as well. Sam Levine says, “Superman’s apartment is basically the colors of his suit. We have reds and blues and yellows and golds. Even Lois Lane’s outfit has those colors, and all of Metropolis was designed by our teams to have an optimistic feel, which has a lot to do with Krypto’s nature, and our love of Superman; we infused that love into the look of the movie.”
Animation supervisor Dave Burgess says that one of his team’s biggest challenges was, ironically, simplicity. When it came to characters like Krypto and Ace, he observes, “They have simple shapes and sharp angles, which look really, really great, but are very hard to figure out how to do in CG. Once we had the models right, they had to be rigged with a digital skeleton inside and controls so you can move them around and set poses and things like that. All of that took quite a while and was quite a departure for Animal Logic. Surprisingly, the other films that we’ve made over the years, which are amazing, didn’t have the ability to scale or squash and stretch.”
When it came to the character designs, Krypto served as the design team’s prototype. Burgess says, “He’s been animated for TV, he’s been in comics, so he’s out there; we just needed to figure out what would be our version of this white dog with a red cape. How we could make him unique to our world and our universe and, again, incorporate some of the design aesthetics of nice clean lines, nice angles that work with each other, because we’ve got straights against curves—another element of appeal.”
Appeal, Burgess admits, is a bit esoteric. “Appeal is hard to describe, but it basically means that when you see it, you want to touch it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hand drawn image or a posed CG asset or anything, if you achieve that appeal, the audience will almost reach out when they see it, and for an animator that’s an amazing accomplishment.”
Another element of appeal in any film is its score. Stern turned to composer Steve Jablonsky to provide music that would soar just as high as any Super Hero. Just as the imagery in any DC film has history, the legacy of all that has come before it, Jablonsky felt that the music should nod to that as well.
Jablonsky was also excited to explore the film’s humor through the score, because it gave him the opportunity to lean into superhero musical motifs audiences would embrace. “One thing that makes ‘Super-Pets’ unique is the way it combines Super Heroes, animation and humor. There is so much humor in the film it allowed us to have fun with tropes rather than treat them too seriously. For example, I used a theremin for Lex Luthor, which is one of the tropiest instruments of all time. It allowed me to score him seriously but with a wink to the audience to still have fun. And when your most evil villain is a hairless guinea pig named Lulu, that’s something a composer should have fun with. For her, I used a huge brass section and choir to create our biggest and most serious theme in the film. In Lulu’s mind, she is the ultimate villain, so I wanted to treat her that way!”
