The Art and Technique Behind The Bad Guys 2
“The Bad Guys 2” was released in theaters on Friday, August 1, 2025, as a sequel to the 2022 film “The Bad Guys”. It grossed a total of $273,339,556 worldwide, earned an 87% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and received an “A” grade from CinemaScore audiences. Through a second-hand account of meeting a character designer who worked on “The Bad Guys” along with some of the techniques DreamWorks used to make this film such a visually appealing and worthwhile watch, you’ll understand why this movie has done so well.
In the spring semester of 2025, Annie Award–winning character designer Taylor Krahenbuhl visited the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) to give a seminar. He was one of the lead concept artists who worked on the character “Mr. Snake” from the first film. During the seminar, he led an inspiring discussion and demonstrated the design process behind his characters, sharing his inspirations and development process.
Krahenbuhl spoke extensively about exaggeration in animation — how pushing poses, movements, and expressions beyond realism can make a character more dynamic and emotionally engaging. A great example he brought up was the “flour sack exercise”. If you are an artist, film designer, or animator, you’ve probably heard of this. The flour sack exercise, used by Disney animators since the 1930s, challenges the artist to animate a bag of flour. Although the object is inanimate, the animator must stretch, bend, flatten, and squash it to give it life, imbuing it with characteristics real-world objects could never have on their own. Watching “The Bad Guys 2”, I couldn’t help but think back to Krahenbuhl’s seminar and that exercise. Moments like the chase scene leaving the grand stadium — where hundreds of people flood after the main characters, moving like a tsunami in an exaggerated wave — feel like a direct application of that philosophy.
The embellishments and over-the-top movements of both main and side characters strengthen the audience’s emotional attachment to the story and plot. But how did they accomplish such a feat? The answer goes deeper than you might think. DreamWorks has to stand out in their field, so they blend 3D and 2D techniques — much like “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”, another highly successful series both critically and commercially. For “The Bad Guys”, the producers pulled back the detail for a more stylized approach, allowing the movie to have a unique feel with painterly backgrounds and striking color combinations.
To produce such high-quality work, they used Premo for animation, MoonRay for rendering, and Doodle to add 2D linework over 3D characters — creating a style all their own. Other techniques, like anamorphic and fisheye lens effects, smear frames, and motion lines, gave the movie a cartoonish, high-energy feel during chase and action scenes. Overall, “The Bad Guys” is not just a movie — it’s an amazing representation of how talented and far we’ve come as an artistic community. DreamWorks has gone above and beyond, combining traditional techniques with modern ones to create something new, unique, and fresh. That’s why “The Bad Guys 2” is the greatest example of our progression in animation and skill in 2025.