This story contains slight spoilers for Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The appearance of Raccacoonie in Everything Everywhere All at Once was one of the film’s highlights, and a major talking point… and it turns out, it used a real, very-much-deceased, raccoon.
During an interview with The Ringer, makeup and effects supervisor Jason Hamer revealed how he made the incredible Raccacoonie prop.
“The guys were like, ‘Think cheap. We don't want it to look good. It should look goofy, like a bad taxidermy.’” The idea was the make Raccacoonie look low budget… but Hamer took their direction a bit too literally and used raccoon taxidermy as a basis for his animatronic raccoon.
Raccacoonie is first mentioned in a hilarious gag when Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) misremembers the title of the Pixar classic, Ratatouille. But later, Everything Everywhere All at Once uses this weird gag to illustrate the breadth of the multiverse.
“The idea that whatever she got wrong was real was a very exciting way to explore the multiverse,” said co-director Daniel Scheinert in an interview with Vulture. “That’s always when we know a joke is going to be worth pursuing—when first the idea is so ridiculous that we can’t stop thinking about it.”
Ultimately, Raccacoonie made it into the movie… but the directors didn’t want it to look perfect. “That was one of the challenges,” said Hamer. “The guys [were] going, ‘Cheap and quick and dirty.’ And I'm going, ‘No. Cool and beautiful and funny!’”
Of course, the logistics were… tricky. “You’ve got to think about the challenges of, you’ve got an actor and we’ve got to mount it to his head,” he said. “Are we going to do puppet arms? Are we going to make it animatronic?”
Ultimately, the taxidermy raccoon was used as a skeleton for a complex system of animatronics… while the outside was kept as lo-fi as possible. Hamer himself is renowned for his impeccable makeup and effects, having been nominated for an Emmy for his work on Westworld. So, how do you hold back the instinct to make it look better?
“It's going not as far as you would like to go, is basically what it is,” he said. “It's taking less time to blend the hair, or painting on the fur.”
The end result is an utterly charming (and hilarious) take on a Pixar classic that became a big subplot in the film as Evelyn helps chef Chad (Harry Shum Jr.) rescue his talking raccoon pal. Quite a step up for a taxidermized raccoon.
Everything Everywhere All At Once stars Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis. The film was both written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.