Jennifer Yuh Nelson
Jennifer Yuh Nelson
Jennifer Yuh Nelson, also known as Jennifer Yuh, is an American director and storyboard artist. She is best known for her directorial debut Kung Fu Panda 2. Yuh is the first woman to solely direct an animated feature from a major Hollywood studio...
NationalitySouth Korean
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth13 June 1972
facts can-do ifs
If you only do what you can do, you'll never be more than you are now.I never thought i'd be where I am now, but the fact that I am is pretty cool.
real mistake character
One of my favorite things about the Kung Fu Panda 3 is the look of it. We never go for realism. I think a lot of time when people go for 3D that's the mistake. Because we're never going for full realism - for computer generated live action films like Avatar the goal is realism, to make the audience feel like they are seeing something that is real. Lord of the Rings had character design and environments to make it look real, whereas we aren't going for that, we are going for something that is theatrically, viscerally, and emotionally real.
nice thinking people
I think it's really nice to have an authenticity, it's a huge source for us to be able to lean on people who have that knowledge.
mean kung-fu-panda village
Oriental DreamWorks did a lot of the surfacing of the village [in Kung Fu Panda 3] and you know all the little paintings on all the gables and everything? They have meaning, and they could do that because they know what that means, we don't necessarily know about that over here.
mean artist chinese
We had Chinese artists that would put in elements for the Chinese audience like the calligraphy actually means something so the audience when they read it they'll understand. So there were definitely little things we were able to do that specifically leveraged the artists' talents.
artist two voice
You have hundreds of artists you're dealing with across the world and the scale of this movie [Kung Fu Panda] was insane - we had a parallel pipeline going on where you had two versions recording Mandarin voice actors, getting it to be funny for Mandarin audiences going beyond a straight translation, and then animating it and lighting it, it's a lot of work.
dubbing subtitles situation
Usually they have to deal with a dubbing situation or subtitles, and it takes you out of the experience. That's why we wanted to make something that felt really immersive for Chiniese audience, but it takes a lot of work to make 2 versions of a movie!
two perfect chinese
We did two films [Kung Fu Panda], because the first two films were so embraced by the Chinese audiences we wanted to make something we could push further and since this is a co-production, it seemed like the perfect time to create something that felt native to Chinese audiences.
art thinking want
I think the one thing specifically that is most consistent, is that we want to harken back to martial arts movies because that's kind of the genre we're paying tribute to, so there are some similarities to a lot of films, because they all feed off each other!
art reality guy
We go for our own reality. I remember some of our guys saying it is way harder to make stylized art directed explosions of jade rather than a regular explosion of shrapnel.
two people style
We actually tried to put in [Kung Fu Panda 3] all the things we wanted to put into the first two films. We're all the same people who've been working on the other films and we all had things we couldn't do, and had to leave on the table. We just couldn't achieve them before. This time we have multiple new environments and different styles of animation.
giving feelings historical
The story in that particular spot was an ancient history story, and we wanted to give it a historical feeling, which was why we used a historical calligraphy scroll come to life.
ideas people important
When people feel safe, they can come up with ideas. It's important to listen to the actor who is there on the stage and living it.
crazy people support
As quiet as I am I find it amazing I can stand in front of hundreds of people now and make a speech because i've had to do it so much. I've so much support from the people around me that I can achieve something like that, crazy introvert that I am, I never would have thought that would happen.