After successfully pulling off the marvelous hand-made-looking DreamWorks heist comedy, The Bad Guys, (Zootopia meets Oceans Eleven), director Pierre Perifel wanted to go more epic for The Bad Guys 2 sequel. In fact, he began brainstorming even before the end of production. Fortunately, there were plenty of great ideas to grab from Aaron Blabey’s sophisticated and absurd Scholastic book series.

He began with a fan-favorite joke in space: Wolf (Sam Rockwell) and Piranha (Anthony Ramos) are trapped in a spacesuit filled with gas, thanks to muscle guy Piranha eating too many burritos. But before being suffocated, Wolf punctures the suit and uses the escaping air to propel them back to safety.

That became Perifel’s North Star. Now he just needed a clever plot to get them into space: He cherry picked the Bad Girls — a ruthless counterpoint to the Bad Guys — who kidnap the titular gang of thieves gone good in the sequel and force them to steal a rocket from tech billionaire Mr. Moon’s (voiced by Colin Jost) aerospace facility.

This time it’s “Mission: Impossible” meets James Bond. “We took the bad girls from the books, even though they’re like heroes, and turned them into villains and we had that gag,” Perifel said. “The cool thing is the first movie was already outrageous with a meteorite that mind controls a guinea pig [Marmalade, voiced by the returning Richard Ayoade].”

Here the Bad Guys have a tough time finding jobs as good guys, but get pulled back into their crime roles when safecracker Snake (Marc Maron) falls in love with ravel Susan (Natasha Lyonne), who’s really the manipulating Doom, part of the Bad Girls, led by snow leopard Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), and joined by Pigtail (Maria Bakalova), a Bulgarian wild boar.

“I love their personalities in the books and how different they were from each other,” added Perifel. “The cool leopard, the bigger than life boar, and the zero expression, sarcastic raven. They are a great contrast to the Bad Guys. They’re fresher, younger, more ambitious, and smarter.”

This definitely raises the stakes for Wolf and his gang, which, in addition to Piranha and Snake, also includes master-of-disguise Shark (Craig Robinson), and hacker Tarantula (Awkwafina). The opening flashback heist/chase in Cairo is colorful, thrilling throwback to the first film, done up in Bondian fashion.

“The idea was to do a super cool infiltration of this lair,” said Perifel. “I don’t know how we ended up with that crazy idea of a whirlpool aquarium — I think it was one of the story artists — but it was awesome and at the same time it didn’t make any sense. And the car chase was about getting the feel of speed. And in those narrow streets we added a very short fisheye lens, which deforms a little bit more of the world and gives you that dynamism. And the layout team came up with the jump, which was not even boarded.”

The 2D aesthetic, which uses simplification to achieve its stylized look, has been expanded in the sequel, thanks to improved tech.“It keeps getting better and better,” Perifel said. “It’s more additive than different here. In terms of finessing the 2D style we tried to get it even more like the brushstroke effects on the painting. All the transition between light and shadow we get even less sharp, making sure that the texture felt even more painted than actually a realistic texture.”

But this time the animation was split between DreamWorks and Sony Pictures Imageworks, which did two sequences (the elaborate Lucha Libre wrestling tournament and a wedding).

“In order to reduce some of the cost, we needed to find a partner to match this style and Sony has proven that they can do it really well,” Perifel continued. “But the Lucha, in particular, was quite crazy. I wanted very anime cameras where it’s almost too flat, almost like 2D foreground and background that just drift a little bit, and then characters are running behind or in front. They require two sets of cameras moving at different speeds, which Sony does very well. It’s something that DreamWorks needs to work on a little bit.”

The most challenging sequence, though, was the exciting rocket launch, which required an extra level of realism and detail in its mechanics. The filmmakers drew on reference from Apollo 13 and Interstellar, as well as NASA and SpaceX launch footage.

“If we wanted to send our characters in space, given how silly the idea was that that they are clinging onto a rocket, we had to ground it and make it incredibly difficult and dangerous,” Perifel said. “So that’s why we have all that prep of the rocket taking off, all the dry ice falling from the rocket, and that billowing smoke coming out, and then the boosters kick out and it’s incredibly powerful. So is the sound.And then we have that beautiful visual, graphic treatment.

“But the point is to bring the audience in that takeoff because of the danger and the scale of it. And we shot it with actual lenses, just like a live-action movie. So when they start running up a rocket, that makes zero sense, obviously, but everything gets you immersed, and then a couple of jokes here and there gives you the tone of The Bad Guys. We flip it with absurd comedy.”