Every Hero must have a worthy antagonist. Some kind of villain that makes things difficult for the Hero. Like Dr. Evil, Sauron, Professor Moriarty for Sherlock Holmes, the building superintendent for Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov, Bad Weather for a rheumatic.
Since we weren’t satisfied with mid-range, we designed the most sinister antagonist for our Gojo – Death himself. An adversary you can’t defeat, but you can still achieve a temporary victory over.
As you know, our cartoon is a positive one, which is why our Death is not a sinister and scary Old Reaper. Our character is Death who’s tired of monotonous killing, who’s tired of just showing up with a scythe in hand. We thought we’d add an element of creativity to this grim process. And yes, our villain is not a girl, because death is a girl in so many cultures, including the Moldovan. Our villain is a man, because we didn’t dare entrust this roundup mission to a girl 🙂
So, Death approaches his mission in a creative way. For example, to kill a sparrow, he starts a game of golf and turns it into a show: he takes the skull of a groundhog and hits it with his scythe to strike the bird. And in our film, this character will be… it’s a secret! And what Death will do in our film, we can’t tell you either.
And so, the search began. What Death looks like, what he wears, what his temper and habits are. We literally butchered pounds of paper and tons of erasers before the look took shape.
After hours of arguing and throwing crumpled papers in the dustbin, we reached an agreement on how our Death should look like. And we got a tall, hunched figure wearing a dark coat sloppily sewn from cloth patches, a hood with gleaming eyes and a twisted scythe.
We worked out the details
And we started coloring the character, making it more dynamic:
We can show you the character we made. This is the unusual Death that Gojo came across:
