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Guillermo del Toro’s films have a lot of geeky goodness in them, not just from a filmmaking point of view, but from how he employs CGI and holds his inspiration close. This is best depicted in his work in Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
The Golden Army || Credit: Sony PicturesOne of the best scenes in the film saw Hellboy and his team come face to face with the famed Golden Army, a hoard of mechanical automatons that were made to fight humankind and their never-ending encroachment on fae lands. Del Toro revealed that the scene involving the creatures was one of the production’s greatest feats, given the level of ingenuity it required to get it right.
It took three designers across eight months to get the Golden Army right
Ron Perlman in Hellboy || Credit: Sony PicturesGuillermo del Toro, speaking with Den of Geek, revealed the sheer challenge that was posed by the Golden Army when it came to rendering them with CGI. Del Toro wanted the mechanical aspect of the creature to be as true to life as possible, which caused designers to try and figure out how the automatons would move and locomote. He said:
So we spent… three designers, three different designers spent in total about eight months, eight months, just solving, mechanically, the Golden Army… And when they move we created every articulation. Every nut, every bolt makes sense. That was a pain in the ass to rig! It was a pain in the ass to construct, it was a pain in the ass to rig. You know because we wanted them to have a very clean silhouette.
Hellboy II came out around the same time as Michael Bay’s Transformers film, which has an infamously messy depiction of its mechanical organisms. Del Toro was especially happy with how clean the automatons ended up looking in the final film, and how they moved.
Guillermo del Toro has a lot of plans to expand his version of the Hellboy mythos
Prince Nuada from Hellboy II || Credit: Sony Be it a third installment with Ron Perlman, or a spin-off film that followed the dishonored fae Prince Nuada, there were big plans to expand on the universe that Guillermo del Toro has built over the course of two films.
However, this was not meant to be, as del Toro decided to dive into the production of The Hobbit (which he ultimately left). There were also talks of launching a BPRD series if Silvelance did well, but that film was scrapped with the announcement of 2019’s Hellboy.
In 2023, Ron Perlman expressed his interest in returning to complete the Hellboy trilogy, but a separate Hellboy film was released instead, which would have been the second reboot the character received in the past decade.
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