Who would’ve known that a game about birds who can’t fly being slingshotted towards green pigs would become such a sensation? We all had that phase of the Angry Birds crazy. I personally believe that a huge appeal of the mobile game was the ideation and design of it all. God bless those rounded birds and pigs with not a thought in their heads. The way those green goofballs finally fell and the victorious relief it gave our tense minds honestly made our days better.
How Did It All Start?
The 2010s-famed game was popular during the time of the mobile gaming era. Angry Birds was among the top names in the mobile gaming industry with contemporaries such as Temple Run and Subway Surfer. It was a household name, so much so that they made 2 movies about it.
Angry Birds, by Rovio Entertainment and later owned by Sega, began in 2009 as a puzzle and strategy game featuring colourful birds seeking to rescue their eggs from green pigs. Inspired by Crush the Castle, it gained widespread popularity for its engaging gameplay, comical style, and affordability. The franchise reached over 3 billion downloads by 2015, making it the most downloaded freemium game series. The sequel, Angry Birds 2, launched in 2015. Rovio faced challenges before Angry Birds, almost facing bankruptcy. The game’s concept emerged from the idea of angry birds seeking revenge on pigs who stole their eggs. Despite a slow start, Angry Birds soared after being featured on the UK App Store in 2010, propelling Rovio to financial success with downloads, ads, and in-game purchases. In 2023, Sega acquired Rovio, marking a significant chapter in the franchise’s journey.
The Game Design
During the initial design when the company was presented with the sketches of these rounded birds by designer Jaakko Iisalo, only one question came into mind, “what are these birds so crossed about?” and then originated the stories about the green pigs who stole their eggs. Iisalo told The Guardian, “We realised the game needed enemies, but the schedule was tight, so obviously I just drew an animal – a pig thing I’ve been drawing since I was 10, according to my mum. Everything had to be super simple, so I picked a prime colour for each bird. Since the main character is red, I chose green – the complementary colour – for the pigs”
The Movie Design
In 2016 Columbia Pictures and Rovio Entertainment came released, “The Angry Birds Movie”. The movie grossed a total of 353.3 million USD worldwide making it the 4th highest-grossing video game movie of all time. The production Designer of the movies, Pete Oswald had previously worked in many famous animated franchises such as “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa”, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”, “Hotel Transylvania” etc.
Explaining the thought process and ideation behind the main character of the movie, Red, Oswald tells Pushing Pixel, “[…] Red had to be appealing and cute because of his anger issues. There’s a great juxtaposition between cute and dangerous. That’s what makes Red a successful character design.”
There are always challenging aspects animation designers face in drawing the characters, especially if it’s a movie based on a video game. “Red has black eyebrows, for example, and we needed to make sure that the iconic look was evident in the film to have the brand stay recognizable and to make everything work together. We had to balance that throughout the whole process” says Oswald.
The world-building in an animated movie needs tedious attention since you’re building everything from scratch, it’s the tiny details that complete an animated movie. The Birds in the movie live on a fictitious “Bird Island”, explaining the formation of the island Oswald says, “[…] we wanted everything on that island to be built by the birds for the birds. We used things that people know about birds in nature, birds in the real world […]We would take nest material and we would build their huts out of that so that it felt like a bird actually built that from the real world. But it becomes a whole new universe in and of itself.”
Then there was the formation of ‘Pig City’, The designer explains that they used the theory “architecture of idiocy” to visualize and come up with the animation. “We used the basic building elements of glass, wood and stone from the game, and then gave a lot of personality to the design[…]They’re not smart creatures, and they’ve constructed their world in an opposite way to how the birds constructed theirs.”
The game’s simplicity, coupled with the clever ideation and design of cross-looking birds on a journey of seeking vengeance on egg-stealing green pigs, captivated a global audience. From the intriguing question of why were the birds so angry to the meticulous world-building in the animated movies, Angry Birds has been quite a sensation and left a lasting impact in the minds of the millennials and Genz audience that grew up on the game.
References:
- The Guardian: How We Made Angry Birds
- Pushing Pixels: Production design of “The Angry Birds Movie” – interview with Pete Oswald
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Vaishnavi Srivastava is a learning writer, a keen researcher and a literature enthusiast. She is a Sub-editor at Abir Pothi.
