In ‘The Electric State,’ Jolting a Robot to Life

Kid Cosmo’s head is enormous, as robot heads go. The primary nonhuman hero of the film “The Electric State” (on Netflix March 14), Cosmo has a bright yellow globe of a head the size and shape of an exercise ball, propped atop an incongruously spindly frame.

Cute? Yes. Mechanically feasible? Not really.

Cosmo’s character was inspired by Skip, the similarly bigheaded hero of Simon Stalenhag’s graphic novel. A cult hit when it was first published in 2018, the book “The Electric State” is set in an alternate 1990s universe after a mysterious war has ravaged the California landscape, leaving the husks of enormous drones and robots in its wake.

“Simon Stalenhag’s work is what attracted me to this movie to begin with,” said Matthew E. Butler, the film’s visual effects supervisor. “But his designs are often aesthetically cool and engineeringly impossible.”

In the film, Cosmo and his young companion, Michelle, played by Millie Bobby Brown, embark on a journey across the American West to find Michelle’s brother. Along the way, they meet up with scores of other robots, many just as improbably designed as Cosmo.

Of course, Cosmo doesn’t really need to make mechanical sense in either the graphic novel or the feature film, given the flights of physics fancy regularly found in both mediums. But Anthony and Joe Russo, the film’s directors, wanted to ground their movie in reality, even more so given the story’s 1990s setting (think Orange Julius and MTV News with sci-fi enhancements), and the film’s fanciful robots, which include a midcentury postal carrier (voiced by Jenny Slate) and an urbane Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson).

“We’re creating a fantasy world, but one that’s based on a world you recognize and perhaps even lived through,” Anthony said. “Part of delivering that recognizable world is making everything feel real.”

With Cosmo, the filmmakers had to create a robot that viewers would believe could work — based on a comic book robot that decidedly would not.

“We did a lot of research with true robot designers, and they like to keep a robot’s mass at the core,” Butler said. “As extremities move out, the mass wants to drop off, so you’ll see typical robots have smaller and smaller appendages at the end.”

The stakes were high. Not only did viewers have to believe Cosmo was real, they also had to feel for him, a tall order given that the book’s version has a static, painted-on face and is incapable of speech. “We loved the idea that this girl was on a very emotional cross-country journey to find her brother with a robot that had very limited communication skills,” Joe said.

One of the first things the Russo Brothers did was create a back story for their bot. In the film’s alternate reality timeline, Walt Disney created a series of robots to promote the opening of Disneyland in 1955. The robots worked so well, however, that they soon began to replace human workers in all sorts of unpleasant jobs.

Cosmo was one of those robots, a promotional model based on a popular animated children’s TV show (like Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, with a similarly unlikely hairdo). “You could rent him for children’s parties,” Joe said.

In the film, Cosmo’s face has the old-timey look of a circa-1950s tin toy with a manufacturing seam down the middle of his face, enormous painted-on ovals for eyes, and a goofily wide grin. “That was all Simon,” said the production designer Dennis Gassner (“Apocalypse Now,” “Blade Runner”). “We tried a variety of smiles, but that was pretty much what Simon created.”

One challenge, said Gassner, who has a variety of tin toys in his home collection, was retaining the static look of those antique collectibles while nodding at the somebody, or something, inside.

Butler also expressed this dilemma, saying, “We convey a lot of information with our faces, so when all of a sudden you have this inert object, you’ve starved the animator of a lot of their tools.”

Animators can do a lot without a moving face — Butler points to Luxo Jr., Pixar’s animated desk lamp mascot, as proof — but it’s hard. “There was a knee-jerk reaction to try and add animated parts to his face, but thankfully we didn’t go there,” he said.

“We wanted the character to be hard to access and decipher,” Anthony said. “But we also had to have that robot be able to convey intention or emotion.” The solution: add camera lenses that were evocative of eyes, but set deep within the robot’s painted eye holes.

The filmmakers also wrestled with making Cosmo’s improbable structure — his big head, spindly legs and oversized boots — physically believable onscreen. “We spent a lot of time focusing on subtle, surreptitious design ideas that would allow the audience to believe that he’s been mechanized to achieve this,” Butler said.

The designers beefed up Cosmo’s neck with mechanical sinews, the better to hold up that oversized head, and added twisting coils to his feet. “His silhouette at a distance looks very much like Simon’s design, but when you get in close, you see the pistons and push rods,” Butler said. “You go, OK, that’s how he’s able to move his body around.” Later, sound designers added the hisses and whirs of moving servos to complete the effect.

The robot’s movements were created through a mix of animation and motion capture. Devyn Dalton, an actress, stuntwoman and motion- capture performer (“War for the Planet of the Apes”) was called upon to play Cosmo.

A proxy head was created to give the actress a sense of how big Cosmo’s noggin would be; later, the design crew considered having Dalton don big clunky shoes to help her get into character, but ultimately nixed that. As it turned out, most of the props were unnecessary.

“She’s an amazing actress,” Joe said, “so she was able to embody the movement of the character just through hours of workshop.”

In the film, Cosmo is strictly a computer-generated creation, but for press events, the filmmakers enlisted the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLA) at the University of California, Los Angeles, to create an actual physical robot. At last October’s New York Comic Con, a life-size Cosmo appeared alongside Brown, her co-star, Chris Pratt, and the directors, waving at attendees and chatting up the crowd.

It was a particularly meta idea: create a promo robot to promote a film about a promo robot, and build it at a West Coast university for a film that is set in an alternate Western United States hellscape.

“Basically we told them to bring him to life as best as they could, and they exceeded all expectations,” Joe said.

U.C.L.A.’s team took a year to create their practical bot. For the Russo Brothers, similar care was taken in creating their C.G. one. “Dennis Gassner, who’s one of the great production designers of all time, and his team, were very methodical in asking, how is this thing constructed in a factory?” Joe said. “What is it made of? Were those rivet shoes? Are there cameras behind the eyeballs? We just asked thousands of questions.”