‘The Bad Guys 2′ Filmmakers Up the Ante with the Animal Thieves’ Return

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This article was written for the July-August ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 351).

 

“This movie has been such a fun adventure … I’m so proud that we managed just to make a sequel that fits in really well with where we left the first one but yet elevates the scope, the look and the size of that the franchise.”

— Director Pierre Perifel

 

 

Turning over a new leaf is tough for anyone, but it’s especially difficult for the Bad Guys. Having won over audiences with their style, skills and humor in the 2022 original, the crew is back — both on screen and behind the scenes — for The Bad Guys 2.

Pierre Perifel returns to direct, with co-director JP Sans coming aboard. Among the voice actors reprising their roles are Sam Rockwell as Mr. Wolf, Marc Maron as Mr. Snake, Craig Robinson as Mr. Shark, Anthony Ramos as Mr. Piranha, Awkwafina as Ms. Tarantula, Zazie Beetz as Diane Foxington, Alex Borstein as Chief Misty Luggins and Richard Ayoade as Professor Rupert Marmalade IV. Joining the cast are Natasha Lyonne as Doom, Maria Bakalova as Pigtail and Danielle Brooks as Kitty Kat. Produced by Damon Ross, The Bad Guys 2 is due in theaters August 1.

Perifel says his reaction to getting a sequel was a mix of gratitude and terror. “Can I make a movie that’s as good as the first one?” he says. “It’s like you go through the entire thing, against a giant mountain … it takes forever, but the most amazing people surround it. And [it’s] just like an excellent, rewarding, fun adventure that we’ll go through together. And that’s what I love about animation.”

Ditching the Nine-to-Five

Two plot points in the sequel were clear from the beginning: The first one was set in place with the final line of the original film, where Diane Foxington declares that the team is ready to get to work. “When we wrote that line, it was like, ‘All right, let’s go do some action!’” Perifel says. “Let’s have fun together as a group, and then when we’re thinking about the second [film], it was always like, ‘Wait, hang on a minute. What if work is just, like, nine-to-five jobs and it’s boring, and they’re trying to enter society, and they can’t? Nobody wants them, and they’re really bad at it?’”

The second plot point came from the Aaron Blabey graphic novels the movies are based on. “There is that gag that is the most favorite gag, for our kids, and that’s the fart in space,” he says. “And we were like, ‘OK how do we get there?’ So now we have the starting point, and we had the ending point. How do we bridge all of this stuff?”

The books, from which they borrowed some aspects, also inspired the villains of the piece: Kitty Kat, Doom and Pigtail — a formidable trio looking to take the Bad Guys’ place as the world’s top villains by pulling off the ultimate heist. “With these three, we had the starting point, we had the ending point and then we had the breakdown in the middle.

“The thing I didn’t expect was more pressure from, more scrutiny from, the studio, because [the franchise is] a known entity,” Perifel says. “We’re not the underdog — now, we’re the big one coming out.” He also wanted to make a bigger movie, which was difficult because the budget was not necessarily bigger this time.

Additional production on The Bad Guys 2 was tackled by Sony Pictures Imageworks which handled 20% of the animation. This brought its own challenges, such as ensuring that the final product matched seamlessly with the animation produced in-house using a different crew and pipeline. “They had to rebuild a lot of things, so that part of it was very challenging, very eye-opening and fun as well, because these teams are so fun to work with,” says the director.

The film required about 30 to 35 animators at the studio’s Glendale base, with a similar number working on it at Sony Pictures Imageworks in Canada, says co-director JP Sans, who has known and collaborated with Perifel for around 15 years, including as co-directors on the 2018 DreamWorks short Bilby. “I think that got us a little bit of a groove of how we would work together in a directing role,” Sans says. He was the head of animation on The Bad Guys before moving up to co-direct the sequel, a practice the studio encourages to develop new directing talent.

Exposed to the Core

The role gave Sans a macro view of the project, and he and Perifel worked side by side on the movie. “I think he wanted me to go through each stage of creating a movie,” Sans says. “He wanted to expose me to all these different departments that I haven’t been exposed to, but he also wanted me at his side so we could both be on the same page on everything and then push each other and elevate each other and question each other.”

The production found that the most efficient way to collaborate was to give Imageworks standalone locations so the team could build its own sets and not have to share those assets across two pipelines. For example, Sony animated a lucha libre wrestling sequence and a wedding scene. “That really helped them almost make a mini movie within the movie.”

 

“[Pierre Perifel] wanted to expose me to all these different departments that I haven’t been exposed to, but he also wanted me at his side so we could both be on the same page on everything.”

— Co-director JP Sans

 

Making the sequel required fleshing out the characters, which Perifel says was a significant challenge that they overcame by placing them in new environments and situations. Snake, for example, falls in love while Wolf struggles with the humiliations of trying to find a job without losing hope.

Of course, The Bad Guys 2 is at its core a heist story. The cold open puts its own spin on the cinematic traditions of James Bond, The Fast and the Furious and Mission: Impossible. The flashback sequence is set in Cairo, as the Bad Guys infiltrate a supposedly impregnable fortress to escape with a treasure beyond compare — all with a sly silliness of its own. Perifel says the long opening shot parallels the first film while reintroducing each character and giving them a moment to shine.

Continuity was important for the film. Katherine de Vries worked as a story artist on the first Bad Guys, which provided a solid foundation in the characters and world, enabling her to take on the head of story role for the sequel. “I didn’t feel like I was lost in the woods too much,” she says. “There was a lot to learn in terms of managerial stuff, but at the very least, I was very familiar with this team, this leadership, Damon [Ross, producer], Pierre and JP and, of course, the world and the characters.

“I come from the world of story, whereas our directors come from the world of animation, [so] our skills are sort of complementary,” de Vries says. “I was fortunate to be invited into a lot of the formative story discussions on this movie and discussing the script on a foundational level, and very, very early on in the process, trying to shape the plot into what it ultimately became.”

De Vries also supervised the story team, which consisted of eight to 12 artists who translated the script into storyboards for the first time and iterated on them based on notes, editorial changes and feedback from the directors until a final version was reached that satisfied everyone.

The animation style in The Bad Guys 2 stays pretty much on model. However, there are instances where the rules would be bent, says Ben Willis, head of character animation. In the in-between moments, for example, they would push a character’s pose or expression for just a moment, enough to read the expression. “We would do fun things to the in-betweens that would break the model a little bit more than maybe we had before, just to make sure that the movement itself also felt fun and interesting and entertaining,” Willis says. “We were very selective about the moments in which we push them away from model, and usually it was for dramatic effect or it was for that impact.”

There were a few moments that went even further, which was one of the ways the animation in the second film evolved from the first. “There were moments where we just allowed ourselves to be a little bit more expressive or go a little bit further with a certain expression or an idea than maybe we did on the first,” says the head of character animation.

Sequences like Wolf’s job hunt required fewer iterations than the action set pieces. “We over-boarded those, in some cases, to generate a lot of footage and a lot of ideas, which then we cut down in editorial for time,” de Vries says. “Once it moved out of storyboards into previz and layout, I know there was quite a lot of work done in those departments, with that team, between that team and the directors really going into different possibilities with how to do this camera move, or how to shoot this, or how to cut into a certain detail to make something feel punchier. And so there was a real marriage between the editorial and layout, in that case, to just refine and make it as intense as possible.”

“This movie has been such a fun adventure, both humanly and in terms of what we achieve with it,” Perifel says. “I’m so proud that we managed just to make a sequel that fits in really well with where we left the first one but yet elevates the scope, the look and the size of the franchise. And I think it is such a great transition to potential third one.”

 

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Universal Pictures releases DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys 2 in theaters nationwide on August 1.