Cuphead, the hard-to-run shooter platform game, is coming to PlayStation 4 today. Studio MDHR announced the game’s arrival on the Sony console with a fun (and creepy) stop-motion trailer featuring Cuphead and the evil King Dice.
Cuphead He was already famous for his hand-drawn art style that made him feel like a playable cartoon from the 1930s. But the new trailer put two of the game’s most iconic characters in a new animation style inspired by the 1933 experimental short. The Peanut SellerStudio MDHR co-director Chad Moldenhauer said in a PlayStation blog post.
Studio MDHR worked with the Toronto-based studio Stop Motion Department to make the trailer, and “they went the extra mile to make sure they were applying many of the same techniques as the stop motion animators of the time,” according to Moldenhauer:
The film itself was animated without the help of computer programs that allow modern stop motion animators to preview their shots and correct errors. Instead, Philip [Eddolls] and Evan [DeRushie] they were limited to drawn charts and metal gauges to record the position of each puppet, before aligning them to their next position. This mimicked the “do your best and see what happens” limitations of early stop motion productions.
Ultimately, it was all filmed with real lenses from the 1930s known as “C Mount” lenses, which exploit the footage and give it a deliberately vintage look. Each shot was used as-is, with no editing or corrective composition, meaning that if you look closely enough, you’ll see brackets and other animation implements in the background.
I would say that the original short is much more disturbing than today’s Cuphead trailer, but you must see the video for yourself to judge it.
Cuphead First released in 2017 on Xbox and PC and hit the Nintendo Switch last year.
