Zeta is the villainess for the new installment. She leads a motley crew of eagle guards and engineers who all live on the freezing cold Eagle Island. She’s tired of living in the icy wasteland and desires to take over the tropical islands of the birds and pigs for herself.
Zeta is voiced by Leslie Jones, most notably from Saturday Night Live.
As her design is very exaggerated and cartoony, the initial animation tests were also pushed quite far in this direction. The feedback from the directors was that they wanted a more subtle, nuanced performance. Their reasoning was that since she’s already such a cartoony design, that cartoony motion on top of that really felt like too much. Additionally, they wanted the audience to take her seriously so that she would be a more formidable villainess.
Achieving this subtly meant relying more on filmed reference and pushing the poses and timing less. The animators were able to start with the video footage of Leslie Jones during the recording sessions and augment this with their own filmed animator reference. Once her character was found, the animators were let loose to explore various performances under these guidelines.
A couple of facts about Zeta: Her animation rig has around 2,108 controls combined between her face and her body. This is about double the average for the other characters in the film. Additionally, she has 8.4 million hairs and 728 feathers.
In order to make Zeta an appealing character, beyond just being branded the villain, we needed to make her wholeheartedly believe that what she was doing was for the greater good. We made her acting naturalistic which also was a nice offset to her pushed, muppet-like design. We avoided making her feel sinister but instead passionate and full of conviction.
- Pete Nash, Animation Supervisor