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The Zooquarium Podcast

BONUS: Crickets, Clay, and the City of Roses with Chuck Duke

6/2/20269 min

Mike and Chanel chat with legendary animator Chuck Duke about his background with Will Vinton Studios, observing actual dogs for Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs, animating special characters for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and more!

Chuck began his professional career in animation in his early twenties and has since contributed to a wide range of feature films and television productions in the animation and visual effects departments. Aside from James and the Giant Peach, his credits include Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, as well as stop-motion animation and effects on Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (2019), and Star Wars: Mandalorian and Grogu (2026).

Be sure to visit thezooquarium.com/podcast to download quizzes, activity sheets, and bonus materials, upload YOUR art, and submit YOUR animal questions!

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The Zooquarium releases episodes about different animals every other Tuesday with bonus content for each episode the following week. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you’re informed when new episodes come out! Video versions are available on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and thezooquarium.com/podcast

Credits

Special thanks to

Willa & Willa's family, Chuck Duke, Michele Kraus Bennett, Cayley Pater, The Elakha Alliance, Teddy Albertson, crickets in general

Clips

Sebastian The Dog Legacy
Finding Joy In Cricket Carnage
Dogs As Live Reference Library
Mad God Freedom, Star Wars Rules
Clay Tricks Behind Pinocchio Splats

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Mike Bennett· Host0:00

    This is a Zooquarium bonus episode featuring extra interview content from Mike and Chanelle's chat with animator Chuck Duke, who brought Sebastian J. Cricket to life in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. Enjoy. I'm a cartoonist. I love drawing things that exist in the real world, but something that really brings me a lot of joy is creating animals from my own head, or animals that don't exist. And you, you've had the pleasure of working on a bunch of projects that have creatures from other planets, perhaps.

  2. Chuck Duke· Guest0:28

    Mm-hmm.

  3. Mike Bennett· Host0:28

    Uh, do you get to create some of that lore or some of that, how those animals, like, breathe and exist in, in movie form?

  4. Chuck Duke· Guest0:36

    Real chance I got to do that was on a movie called Mad God, 'cause there was a lot of crazy creatures in that, and there wasn't a set bible of how things moved. Phil Tippett directed it, and he would give you, he would give you the puppet, and, uh, you were just allowed to animate it, um, sort of the way you felt that that creature should look, basically. Um, and so that was fun, and that was really freeing. The other characters, especially for Star Wars, um, they've already been sort of created, and people know how they move. Um, I worked on the chess sequence in the Millennium

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