In case you didn’t realise, pretty much every character in Avengers: Endgame needed CGI at some point in the film.
You have the really obvious uses of CGI in characters like Smart Hulk and Thanos, and then there are the subtle things like Captain Marvel’s hair or the mask put on Captain America during the fight scene against himself.
Seriously, the amount of stuff they had to put in after they finished shooting this movie is insane.
But there was one character that managed to remain completely free of CGI, and that was the true hero of the story: the van rat, who brought Ant-Man out of the Quantum Realm.
Jen Underdahl, Visual Effects Producer for Marvel Entertainment, spoke to WIRED, explaining a lot of the VFX work for the movie and at one point she noted that the rat who pretty much kick-started the whole story was 100 per cent real.
“For those of you who are curious, that is not a digital rat. For all the things that we do and for all the things that we replace, that is actually a practical acting rat. I don’t have his name, but he’s really there.”
I mean, it seems pretty sad that she doesn’t know his name considering everything the Avengers owe him for helping them save the world…
Underdahl added that there was a bet between the VFX supervisor and a line producer about the rat with the line producer betting they’d have to replace the rat with CGI, but the VFX supervisor was sure they’d be able to find a rat who could “behave” and do the job. In the end the VFX supervisor was right!
While the crew might not know the rat’s name, fans of the film have remembered the rat as the hero he or she is:
CinemaBlend reports that at one stage Hope van Dyne’s missing cat was going to be the one to free Scott Lang from the Quantum Realm.
The film’s writers previously revealed Ant-Man and the Wasp almost including a line about the cat and they assumed this was because the cat was going to do the rat’s job. However, the idea was scrapped in the end because the Endgame writers told them they were going in another direction and not to worry about it after all.
Watch the video here, the moment happens at about 15:45:
The whole interview is actually super interesting and gives you a real insight into all the work the visual effects team put into the film.
Underdahl added that she thinks it will be pretty tough to top the work she and her team did on Smart Hulk and Thanos, “Those characters, for a visual effects person, I mean, those are pretty peak. So I’m enormously proud of the work we did.”