[This story contains spoilers from Jurassic World: Chaos Theory series finale.]
Unlike other animated, kid-friendly franchise spinoffs, Jurassic World: Chaos Theory isn’t a cute-but-unessential extension of its live-action blockbuster counterparts. The series, a follow-up to 2020’s Camp Cretaceous, exists in the same universe as the Steven Spielberg, Colin Trevorrow and Frank Marshall-produced trilogy, taking viewers to some of the same places even at the same time as the big screen adventures.
Both were true for Chaos Theory’s final season, which dropped its leading group of teens directly into the timeline of Dominion. Their return to the small screen — which concluded on Nov. 20 with the release of season four on Netflix — allowed the series and its six young adult leads to go to corners of the Biosyn Valley audiences won’t see in the third installment of Trevorrow’s live-action films.
“Then you have that whole velociraptor training,” says art director JP Balmet. “We really looked at the movie, at those hallways and how you get down to the locust area, and asked what other stuff could be in this place that we hadn’t seen. What doors weren’t open?”
It’s not just the settings that expanded the Jurassic World sequel trilogy either. A plot twist tied to a character’s faked death and reemergence with a limb difference produced something that wasn’t possible even in the Chris Pratt-led films. “Colin told us after he saw it, ‘Wow, you did something that none of the features could do. You had one of our heroes sustain a serious injury,’” recalls Executive Producer Scott Kreamer.
For the fourth and final season, members of the Chaos Theory team spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about how they paid tribute to — and kept on expanding — their big screen universe.
Delivering a Disabled Lead to the Jurassic World Universe
When Kreamer was first developing his pitch for Chaos Theory, he knew two things: First, Brooklynn was never actually dead. Second, he expected her Camp Cretaceous voice actor, Jenna Ortega, to return. What he didn’t know was how they’d bring Brooklynn back — or that Ortega was no longer available. “Silly me,” recalls the co-showrunner and EP. “I talked to head of casting Ania [O’Hare], and went, ‘Well, maybe.’ She goes, ‘You turn on the TV and tell me how many times you see her.’”
Ortega’s shot to global stardom thanks to a different Netflix series (Wednesday) led the team to recast Brooklynn’s voice actor, paving the way for the hiring of Kiersten Kelly, a newcomer with congenital trans-radial absence. “If at all possible, we wanted to hire someone with a limb difference, but not at the expense of performance,” says Kreamer. “So we had castings with many people, some with limb differences, some without. There was a groundedness and an authenticity in Kiersten’s performance.”
In addition to voice work, Kelly would assist the show’s art and animation teams, providing video references and offering thoughts on Brooklynn’s animatics that Kreamer put in front of her, “any chance we got,” he says. The writing and animation departments also turned to scribe Peter Lee, whose hiring was the result of a series of panels organized by Disability Belongs, featuring a small group of consultants with congenital or acquired limb differences. Over several conversations, they answered “questions about daily life with a limb difference and, more specifically, the physical and emotional process of recovering from traumatic limb loss,” says Lee. It would lead to tweaks in things like Brooklynn’s injury scar, the addition of a zipper on her shoes, and the fit of her prosthetic.
The show also made adjustments to the kind of limb loss Brooklyn experienced, initially imagined as above the elbow for animation reasons. But to have a whole arm replacement and its respective prosthesis, Brooklynn needed to wear a weighty harness, restricting quick movement and certain kinds of action. “We had this idea that she gets this bionic arm,” Balmet recalls. “Someone spoke up and said this was something they didn’t like. [Limb loss is] something you have to adapt to, and becomes a major part of your life. You give them this bionic arm, and it’s like an easy solve.”
A consultant showed the team their below-the-elbow prosthetic, highlighting increased mobility. “She can be an action star with that kind of limb difference,” the art director recalls being told. “Another thing that came from those meetings was that a lot of this prosthetic stuff is for other people. People with limb differences while in the house don’t need or use it. We had to get people comfortable with the idea of Brooklynn without her prosthetic. Some weren’t used to it, weren’t sure what to do with the exposed limb. But we ended up leaning into it because we realized that was our problem, that wasn’t the problem of someone with a limb difference.”
“In TV or film, you never really get an inkling of how people’s prosthetics, chairs or whatever their device is become a part of who they are, and you don’t understand that those things are a tool that they use to get through the day,” Lee says. “So to see her without her prosthetic, and struggling to understand what it means to wear or not wear it — to accept it — those were super important things to show.”
Lee would be part of all those panel discussions, and while the Chaos Theory team didn’t initially know he was a writer, Disability Belongs facilitated the submission of a spec script, with his panel contributions serving as his unintentional pitch for Brooklynn’s arc. He was hired through the show’s freelance budget, and wrote three episodes total, with Story Editor Bethany Armstrong Johnson noting “if we had had a bigger budget, we would have loved to have had him on full-time.”
“We very easily included him in meetings, story breaks — just the whole creative process from the writing side, but also from the art side,” the head writer recalls. “It is weird because there can be a perceived difficulty or cost [of bringing on a disabled writer], but there’s a cost in anything anybody does. People will make these adjustments in their time or space for other things. This felt like a necessity, so we were going to figure out how to do it.”
Initially assigned season two’s flashback heavy “C13v3rGr186,” Lee sped through the two animated series to “dictate how Brooklyn would organically respond” to the dinosaur attack — a plot development that came from Supervising Producer Zesung Kang. “Not only did it make sense within the story, not only did it raise the stakes, but then we had an opportunity to showcase a character from a community that’s about 25% of the actual population,” Kreamer tells THR.
“Her acquired limb difference informs her character, but it doesn’t define her character,” he continues. “Her journey sees a lot of questionable decision-making, which we wanted to have set in motion before the limb difference, so it wasn’t like, ‘Now she’s evil because she’s got a limb difference,’ or ‘Now she’s superpowered.’ We didn’t want to ‘how brave to overcome’ her.”
Kreamer also points to an initial uncomfortable interaction between Brooklyn and fellow “Nublar Six” member Ben (Sean Giambrone) after he discovers both she’s alive and experienced Brooklyn’s limb loss as another way they team wanted “to tell that truth” through Brooklyn’s story.
“I shared my personal experiences with those things, and that informed part of how we handled that in the show. After I lost my arm, strangers just thought that’s who I was, as opposed to me having to explain myself [to people I knew before], and having to navigate their emotional journey on top of whatever else I was doing,” Lee says. “The kind of loss that she experiences, the relationship dynamics that she has to navigate, her coming to a new understanding of who she is, and meandering off the right path for a while, all those things were things that I talked about from my own personal experiences. But they are universal experiences, too. We all go through losses and changes.”
Added Lee; “We never tried to take the easy way out; to say, ‘Let’s not deal with that because this is an animated show, and, ostensibly, for kids. She found her way to this place of maturation and becoming who she is. It’s a coming of age story and I love that for her.”
A Fearsome Farewell to Chaos Theory’s Dinosaurs
Across four seasons, Brooklyn was part of how the Chaos Theory team pushed the boundaries of storytelling within the Jurassic World universe. But they also delivered their own spin on the sense of awe, wonder — and horror — of the franchise’s biggest stars: the dinosaurs. To do that, Balmet and Lighting & Compositing Supervisor Eric Hawkins turned to cinematographers from the original Jurassic Park films, their libraries, and Dominion as references, with John Carpenter, as well as Terrence Malick’s Badlands and The Tree of Life, inspiring the animated series visuals.
“When Ben sees [ankylosaurus] Bumpy for the first time, and it’s that pretty sunset, that’s the stuff that we were looking at to try to get an emotional response. A big sunset makes you feel like the world is worth living in,” Balmet explains. “In the hallways of the underground lab in Senegal, when the blind Baryonyx was running around, it was a little bit more Silent Hill or Jacob’s Ladder. This place is where bad things happen. We wanted you to really feel like they were in danger, so we put in that lighting, that texture.”
In the final season of the DreamWorks Animation Television installment, the team continued that approach to animating the theratinosaurus and the quetzalcoatlus — “the two biggest rigs and designs we’ve ever had,” says Kreamer. The show received materials from Industry Light & Magic, who worked on the live-action films, and among multiple departments, made slight adaptations to Dominion’s existing dinosaur designs for their animated medium, while trying to remain “accurate to what they had already put on screen,” says Balmet.
“[Visual Development Artist] Chris Sears, in particular, was really smart about the way that he sculpted the body [of the quetzalcoatlus], so it feels furrier than it is. We didn’t have to put as much simulated fur, and we could focus on its cool Mohawk,” he explains of the furry, winged dinosaur that was the size of a car.
The therizinosaurus would deliver one of the season’s most memorable scares, in a sequence that sees the creature tracking the Camp Crew to a Biosyn Valley veterinary clinic as they attempt to escape a raging fire. Kreamer credits Hawkins, Armstrong Johnson, Kang, the show’s directors, artists, and composer Leo Birenberg’s score for helping “put the audience in the same headspace as these kids who are fighting for their lives,” he tells THR.
“The therizinosaurus claw that swipes across the window was a conscious choice,” adds Balmet, while pointing to Hawkins’ work. “We wanted to have this flickering firelight in the background that’s there, so you feel like it’s closing in. And we were thinking, if you can see outside, why wouldn’t you see the shadow of it lurking nearby? Then someone had the idea of putting the claw in. That was something that we hadn’t seen in the movie.”
Yet season four’s most captivating moment arguably came from what CG Animation Director Ryan Donoghue calls the grand farewell to Chaos Theory’s dinosaur ensemble — a battle staged outside that clinic featuring three tyrannosaurus rexes and five junior velociraptors. ‘
He and the show’s overseas animation studio CGCG were particular about depicting the dinosaurs, particularly their weight, throughout the clash, because “if they move too fast or they don’t have the right step, then the action doesn’t hold up” in terms of believability, he tells THR. “When the main Rexy is down, and then the two juvenile Rexes run up, they’re kind of emotional. You see them bounding up and kind of into each other. They’re not predatory and in control. In that moment, they’re a wild, almost herd — an unstoppable force.”
In the sequence, both groups of dinos essentially form up into lines, but Donoghue notes that it “was a tricky moment because… at first it looked like West Side Story.” To avoid the dinosaurs “acting” like a football team’s offensive line and thus anthropomorphizing them (versus portraying them as instinctual, “unpredictable” creatures), the CG animation director changed the raptors’ positions so they naturally stopped in the middle of something.
“The way we slow [the T. rexes] in is that they start to assess the situation. The story isn’t about them running up, going ‘We’re going to fight.’ They’re like, ‘What are you doing here? What are you doing to our friend?’” Donoghue says. “Because the raptors are taken by surprise, they just kind of wait, confused for a second, and that’s what gives time for our main Rexy to stand up slowly and ominously, get back on her feet, and start to dominate the scene. And that’s when all hell breaks loose.”
It’s a sequence made even more dynamic thanks to Hawkins. “When you have that rain-lit night with the fire, and you get the bounce light off of the dinosaurs with the warm light that’s coming in from an outside source, it’s so scary and so dramatic,” Donoghue says. “When you think about CG series, TV can be hard to get real atmosphere, where you feel like you’re in a place, and Eric, with how he adds that emotional depth to the shots, through how he lights, it gives us all this atmosphere. It’s the secret sauce that really helps tie everything together.”
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