Detective Pikachu’s VFX Supervisor Shares Bizarre Details About Designing Lickitung’s Tongue

Wondering how difficult was it for the creators of the Detective Pikachu film to get its Pokemon looking just right? Thanks to the film’s VFX supervisor Pete Dionne, we now have more insights behind the visual style of the film.

In a recent interview with io9, Dionne shared more details about how his team approached the design of Lickitung. Specifically speaking, his artists had to figure out a way to recreate the Pokemon’s huge tongue without making it too disgusting!

“It feels like a baby’s tongue. Ultimately, what we ended up using was a giant, scaled-up baby’s tongue, with the same very soft, but slightly coarse texture, with the slightest level of moisture. And trust me when I say a lot of discussion went into that.

The first proposal was that [Lickitung] wouldn’t even have any saliva. Saliva is too gross. It would just be a completely dry, soft silicone tongue, which, you know, wasn’t going to work for the whole gag. So there was endless amounts of finding, ‘In nature, what is the cutest version of a tongue?’ and then finding reams of reference for that. That was kind of our design process, across the board.”

Did you think Dionne and his team managed to make Lickitung look adorable in the film? Or was the Pokemon still disgusting? Let us know your thoughts below!