Partly to provide a scale reference point in some scenes as well as a focal point and something for the actors to react to, the production enlisted animatronics and prosthetic makeup effects specialist Neal Scanlan, of Neal Scanlan Studio, an Oscar winner for his work on Babe.
“Our goal,” says Scanlan, “was to make a photo-realistic Oompa-Loompa.”
He and his team assembled five completely motorized puppets, one for each room in the factory. Made from molds taken from an original sculpted model, the puppets were covered with painted silicone skin, hair-punched, and fitted with highly reflective blown-glass eyes. Their fiberglass skulls accommodated motors to realistically move their eyes and cheeks. Remote-controlled rods beneath their chests turned and moved their heads, necks and limbs.
The creations were so lifelike that even Roy himself was taken aback upon first seeing them. “I was truly amazed,” the actor recalls. “They can talk, they can move their eyes and mouths. I thought, hey, am I going to lose my job here? Maybe they can just use the puppets.”
Another 15 puppets were designed full-bodied and pose-able but lacked internal mechanization and gained their illusion of motion through attachment to other moving props, such as the motorized oars on the spun-sugar boat.
In his own fantastic yet logical fashion, Wonka understands that the world’s greatest experts on the quality of nutmeats are squirrels. No other creature on earth and certainly no man or machine could pick out good nuts from bad with such single-minded accuracy and speed.
So, as Wonka’s tour reaches the nut-sorting room the children see 100 of the captivating rodents perched on tiny stools, intently engaged in doing what they do best. Evaluating each nut by scent and sound, they nimbly shell the good ones and place the meat onto a conveyor belt while tossing the bad ones over their shoulders into a giant trash chute.
Like Wonka, Tim Burton also wanted the real thing – live, trained squirrels.
“When I found out what was involved, it was a bit overwhelming,” says Senior Animal Trainer Mike Alexander, of Birds & Animals Unlimited. Alexander was happy to re-team with Burton following his successful stint as a chimpanzee wrangler on Planet of the Apes, but admits, “squirrels can be very tough, and training 100 of them was inconceivable.”
Ultimately, the animals on screen were an artful amalgamation of skillfully crafted animatronics plus some CG and multiple images along with 40 individual, rambunctious and very real squirrels to set the standard and lead the animal action.
Alexander’s team of four trainers (under the watchful eye of a Humane Society rep), spent 19 weeks with their lively charges, providing mostly one-on-one attention. Some of the animals came from private homes in the UK while the majority were recruited from local rescue shelters. Once rescued, squirrels cannot be released to the wild, by law, for their own protection, so those that were not returned to their owners when filming wrapped were adopted by Birds & Animals Unlimited, where they will be cared for until possibly called for another job. While undeniably intelligent and, Alexander attests, “incredibly photogenic,” squirrels are notoriously difficult to handle. Independent and unpredictable, “they’re not necessarily good at doing specific, intricate things,” he says. “They don’t like to sit still. They’re hard to keep in one place. The first couple of weeks were spent in just getting the animals to come out of their crates and sit with us, never mind any of the things they were supposed to do.
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