Were you distracted throughout Guardians Of The Galaxy because you couldn’t stop looking at Groot’s crotch and wondering if sentient trees have a twig and berries? Good news, weirdo! The Globe And Mail dug deep into this mystery with Guardians Of The Galaxy‘s Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisor Nicolas Aithadi.
It turns out the hardest part of animating Groot was making his pelvis mimic a human — as the rest of his body did — without being creepy. As io9 points out, Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn posted the link to The Globe And Mail at his Facebook page and added some insight:
Some interesting tidbits here. It makes me remember how all the early Groot designs made him look so old, whereas I always saw Groot as a teenager. What it doesn’t mention was how incredibly difficult it was to work on the crotch area — either a piece of bark looked too cheesy and fig leaf like or a root was in just the wrong place that looked like an ingrown penis. There were more iterations of Groot’s crotch than any part of his body (for Rocket it was his mouth and feet).
Here’s the final iteration of Groot’s crotch, for your edification.
So this is a strange topic, but at least it’s not as weird as the strip club scene in the all-Groot version of Grand Theft Auto V.