Loki director defends Marvel’s visual effects after criticism: ‘We do our best’

Watch: Loki director Dan DeLeeuw react to criticism of visual effects:

Loki director Dan DeLeeuw, who brought the show’s second episode to life, has defended Marvel after the visual effects in its recent film and TV shows were hit with criticism from fans and critics.

“You want to tell the best story you can and make the visual effects look [the] best you can, and we do our best to do that,” he tells Yahoo UK.

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The filmmaker has also worked as a visual effects coordinator for the studio, and had the role during the making of Loki’s first season as well as for Avengers: Endgame.

DeLeeuw adds, “It's hard to know what's happening on all the shows, I think it's important to — especially with something like Loki — [to] shoot as much practically as we possibly can.

“So you have time to work more on the visual effects and you're not going to such an extent to try to create alien worlds.”

It has been Marvel’s more recent projects that have been hit with criticism over visual effects, namely Thor: Ragnarok and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

But, while people have levelled criticism at the superhero franchise’s visual effects team for this, they in turn have hit back with allegations of difficult working conditions and having to work to tight, almost unrealistic, deadlines to ensure the Marvel machine keeps moving.

DeLeeuw focuses on the more positive when reflecting on working on visual effects, sharing how Marvel co-founder Stan Lee shared his support for their work prior to his death in 2018

“I met Stan Lee on Winter Soldier, and I was kind of nervous to meet him, I’ve been his fanboy for forever,” the director reflects.

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“And he and I were introduced and I say I was the visual effects supervisor, he's like ‘oh, you're the guys who make this possible’.

“I thought about it for a while and it kind of dawned on me that, up until this point, a lot of their storytelling couldn't been told because we didn't have the technology.

“Spiderman was a guy on a rope, you know, a cable pulling him, right? He couldn't tell the same type of story.

“And so suddenly we're at a place where we can now tell this story.”

Reflecting on Marvel’s early years, DeLeeuw explains that the visual effects team “started out a little more simply in Phase One, Phase Two”, but with Phase Three and beyond things have gotten more complicated.

“You're telling stories that you couldn't tell before, you're [in] all these different CG worlds,” he says, adding that the visual effects team are doing their best to make this a reality.

Loki season 2 airs Fridays on Disney+.