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
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.
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.
art style portfolios
As I said, i'm very quiet, i don't go around saying "I'm awesome!" but when I brought in my portfolio into DreamWorks and showed them what I could do, my art style is a lot wilder than I am.
artist advice listening
Aside from that i'm an introvert and i'm a quiet person. The benefit of that is I listen. It's not like my mouth is open and I broadcast everything and i'm drowning everyone out. When I'm listening to the incredible artists I work with and i'm hearing their specialized advice on what they would do with something then we can, all together, as a big collaborative group.
school kids artist
There aren't a lot of female story artists, and it's baffling to me. There are a lot of kids in school that are female and I wonder, 'Where did they all go?' People have brought it up, asking me, 'What did you do?' I don't really know. I puttered along, did my thing and gender has really never been an issue.
artist talking actors
Talking to actors is the same as talking to any other artists; it's getting into the moment for them, and making sure they can lose themselves in the performance!
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.
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.