Why Does Davy Jones Look so Realistic

Pirates of the Caribbean’s Davy Jones is widely regarded as the best looking and most realistic all CGI character of all time, portrayed by Bill Nighy in both Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3, Davy Jones has now become hugely iconic with his unique appearance and captivating presences on screen. Davy Jones was also the first all CGI character to use a motion capture suite, meaning that Bill Nighy could be on set and interact with the other actors in each scene, which I believe heavily impacted his performance positively, Bill could walk around the other actors and take up space as Davy Jones on set. Since 2006 and 2007, CGI and motion capture technology has only progressed, so why does Davy Jones look so good in comparison to characters like Thanos from ‘Marvel’ and Azog the Defiler from ‘The Hobbit’.

There are 4 factors that contribute to why Davy Jones looks so realistic, those are: skin, lighting, water and human perception. The first factor, skin, comes from animation, skin is actually the hardest thing to animate for a character, mastering the creases and seams as well as the movement of muscles, especially in the face and the neck, this is why Azog’s skin texture is so smooth, such large parts of his skin are on display that it was a near impossible job to detail it to the point of it looking real, the reason Davy Jones looks so realistic in this respect is because of his enormous (and now iconic) tentacle beard, hiding large parts of his skin, this is also why Koba and Ceaser, from the Planet of the Apes, work so well, they’re covered in fur and the only skin needed to animate are their faces, like Davy Jones. Another incredibly hard thing to animate is shadows, this is a reason why Davy Jones is always under two light modes, the harsh and bright Caribbean sun and misty sea nights, these two light modes compliment the few parts od Davy Jones’ skin that are showing, when light shines through skin it created an opaque glow through the blood vessels and around bone, this comes back to skin being the hardest thing to animate, the troubles are amplified when you try to animate light shining through skin, such as fingers or tentacles, with no bone in them, the sunlight would shine through the tentacles if it weren’t for them being wet. This is where our next point, water, comes into play, water reflects light, water and the sea is a big part of Davy Jones’ character and the Flying Dutchman’s crew, by constantly giving Davy Jones a wet layer to him it does two things, helps to compliment the curse and his character, and it helps the animators avoid animating light through Davy Jones and enables them to use those resources into other details for Davy Jones, this is also why Grand Moff Tarkin was so sweaty in ‘Star Wars: Rogue One’. Our final point is something interesting, and actually doesn’t have anything to do with animation or technology, it’s human perception, in a human’s survival instinct we’re wary of anything not human trying to be human, as a part of trying to spot predators, those being other human species such as neanderthals, as a result of this instinct our brains won’t let anything humanoid-off-looking into our heads, but Davy Jones is a bipedal octopoid with a crab claw and a crab leg, he’s an augmented mess of sea life, not a real creature at all which makes it easier for our brains to let him into our heads as something “real”.

There are some other factors at play, Davy Jones’s height is one of those, his height relative to Bill Nighy, Davy Jones is 6 feet tall, Bill Nighy is 6 feet 2 inches, in comparison to Thanos’ 8 ft 3 in, and Azog’s 7 ft, when a CGI character is stretched out next to normal people, to become enormous, they can lose some of the detail and as such make it harder to add in those details, such as muscles moving on a larger scale, the same challenges can be found on a smaller scale, such as the alien, Paul, in the film ‘Paul’