My latest article lands over at ILM.com as – in a first for the ILM website – I share a byline with fellow writer Jay Stobie, as we look into the visual effects of Guillermo del Toro‘s 2025 Netflix drama Frankenstein, and the incredible work that went into bringing this unique gothic world to life. Speaking with ILM visual effects supervisor Ivan Busquets, we discussed the locations and creatures of the film, and here we look at the animals the monster encounters, an area of visual effects that ILM has a long and storied history with.
ILM’s depiction of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) was a seminal moment in visual effects history, presenting the capacity to create authentic animals that would delight audiences. The challenge of organic elements like fur and feathers was still beyond early 1990s technology. Jumanji (1995) saw the first computer graphics photo-realistic hair and fur, bringing lions and monkeys to life as they stampeded through Joe Johnston’s classic adventure film. As the tech and their mastery of these elements developed, ILM was able to bring creatures from this world and beyond to the screen, crafting a menagerie of wildlife that would dazzle even the great John Hammond. For Frankenstein, ILM was tasked with bringing a trio of very real animals to life, and as Busquets explains, that took some work.
“There’s a wolf trainer in Alberta called Andrew Simpson, who’s worked extensively in the industry. The production cast seven wolves to be the pack in the movie, and myself and ILM animation supervisor Adrian Millington went to his ranch during preproduction to gather photographic and video reference of the wolves.
“They trained the wolves for months to do specific actions,” Busquets continues, “so the whole scene had been prepped and blocked for the choreography of the fight. We had the advantage of not only taking high-resolution close-ups of fur, teeth, and claws, but also to film them performing those actions while they were training.”
In parallel with this intense training period for the wolves, the ILM team “always knew there was a percentage of those wolves that would become CG,” as Busquets explains. “But the real wolves were able to actually perform those actions, so we had the perfect reference from the real world.”
