How did you decide how much to anthropomorphize the guinea pigs versus making them look completely real?
Stokdyk: It was really important from the beginning to Hoyt that these guinea pigs feel like real guinea pigs. There was an inherent tendency to want to make them more athletic-looking and more like secret agents, but the key concept of the movie is that they’re guinea pigs, and all of their physical limitations, their tiny little arms and legs, that make this movie play. Seeing them do all of this secret-agent action stuff is really fun to watch. So going into this movie with all of these challenges when we were designing the characters, we had to take this into consideration—we were dealing with the big head, the tiny arms, even the fact that their eyes are around the sides of their heads like prey and not predators. We wanted to keep them all, because they were inherent to the look of the guinea pig, but we had to figure out a way to work with them. So we did stylize things on a very subtle level; we kept the eyes around the sides, but we keep them angled forward just a little bit—h
