Unweaving the Tangled Web of Inspector Sun

Excitement, art deco style, mysteries, derring-do, and spiders in suits. "What's not to love about all of that?" said Julio Soto Gúrpide, director of family-friendly animated detective adventure Inspector Sun, which is in cinemas today.

His new film stars Ronny Chieng as the voice of Inspector Sun, a hapless and egotistical detective in 1930s Shanghai who happens to be the world's greatest investigator. At least, that's what he thinks. And maybe, with the help of his energetic and initially unwanted sidekick (Emily Kleimo), maybe he can finally live up to his ego. The big twist in the case is that everybody – Sun, Janey, all the suspects and passengers on the flying boat taking them to the USA – are all bugs, insects, and arachnids. Just, this being the golden age of film noir, these creepy crawlies are all dripping in period style.

Gúrpide grew up watching all the noir classics, "The Maltese Falcon and Double Idemnity, and then I got into literature, the Agatha Christie stories, Poirot, and for a part of my youth it was very important." All that youthful fascination was sparked once more when he read the initial script for Inspector Sun from Rocco Pucillo (Voltron: Legendary Defender, Mega Man: Fully Charged.) "He had put everything into this script, the period, and Shanghai, and the insects, which was another love of my life."

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Austin Chronicle: So let's talk about the insects.

Julio Soto Gúrpide: My previous movie, Deep, was about the creatures from the abyss, the deepest part of the ocean, so every character was based on an actual species. We did the same thing here, so Sun is a huntsman spider from Brazil, Janey is a jumping spider, the assassin bug is a praying mantis, and Bugsy, the millionaire mobster, he's a type of tarantula, the blue tarantula. So each character is based on an existing species, with their Latin names.

We actually had a character bible, where each character is related to a spider, their behavior, what they do, their sizes.

AC: That must have been fun, to play with all those bugs in the script.

JSG: I wish I had been a natural biologist, but I ended up making movies. Still, in my heart, I am biologist, so I enjoy doing research for movies like this.

AC: With the character design, it seems like there would be a balancing act between making them too insect-like and too human.

JSG: We started with Inspector Sun with four eyes, because most spiders have four eyes or eight eyes, and it just looked really odd – not scary, but funny. And we thought, 'Where are people going to look at? What's the target of their eyesight? Where are they going to look if there are four eyes?" It ended up being really confusing, so we ended up sacrificing the four eyes and the reality of how spiders move, because it would be a bit creepy.

We ended anthropomorphizing the characters, sticking with two eyes and arms and everything, and steering clear of the arachnophobia so many people have.

AC: And the insect world is in parallel to the human world. How did you go about designing it?

JSG: There was a lot of research on what Shanghai and San Francisco looked like in the Thirties. So if you notice, at the end of the movie, the Golden Gate Bridge hadn't been built yet – it was mid-construction. I think those details are very important for immersing yourself in the 1930s.

The other big set was the sea plane. It was a Pan Am Clipper. They called it the China Clipper, because it always covered the route from America to Asia with a stopover on Midway. It was very idiosyncratic, they only built a few of them, and they discontinued them in the Fifties, but the plane was amazing, with all the cabins built in leather and wood, so in a way we mimicked that. Our thinking was, OK, the insects are living the same way as the humans, so they build the same cabins and the same structures, but there's an insect feeling to it. So there's a lot of art deco with spiderweb inspirations, the lamps are fireflies. The whole world is very methodically built around the insects.

AC: Was it hard selling studios on a film with so many spiders?

JSG: It was, but at the same time the accompanying artwork was very appealing, so people went, "Ah, I'm intrigued by this, so I'm going to give it a chance." Some executives and some buyers are adventurers at heart.

We're also an independent studios so we don't have the same boundaries and limits as big studios, so we can do pretty much anything we want.

AC: Inspector Sun and Deep are very different stories, but they're both about anthropomorphized animals. What did you learn from Deep as an animation director that you could apply here?

JSG: We make our lives very complicated when we embark on a project. Deep was about sea creatures, and the good thing about that movie was that there was no contact. They were always swimming so they only had fins, which what was a bit constraining, but we managed to make them expressive.

So we went from no arms in Deep to eight legs, and lots of contact, because the legs are always in contact with something, a wall or something. So that was a big challenge. What did we learn from that process? That in the next movie that we're working on, it's going to have bipeds.

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Inspector Sun is in theatres now. Find showtimes and our review on our Film Listings page.