Monolith Soft published today a new entry in its ongoing staff interview series focused on The Legend of Zelda franchise development team, and this chapter is dedicated entirely to animation. Three animators who worked on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom sat down to share what the production was actually like from the inside, how ideas were born, how enemies were brought to life, and what it means to build a world as breathing and reactive as Hyrule.
The three animators are identified by their initials: T.T., who served as sublead of the character animation unit and was responsible for NPCs and creatures; H.S., sublead of the enemy animation unit, who handled bosses and multiple enemy types; and F.W., an enemy animator who also worked on bosses and a wide range of enemies across the game. All three joined Monolith Soft as career hires, meaning Tears of the Kingdom was the very first project each of them worked on at the studio.
The interview is part of a broader recruitment-focused series on Monolith Soft’s official website, designed to give prospective applicants, and frankly, curious fans, an honest, behind-the-scenes look at what working there is like day to day.
From day one, everyone was in the room
One of the first things that stands out in this interview is how early each of these animators got plugged into the creative process, and how different that was from what they expected.
H.S. recalls joining the project at a stage when the game’s direction wasn’t fully defined yet. Nintendo and Monolith Soft were still in full brainstorming mode, generating ideas and debating them back and forth. Rather than waiting for a direction to be handed down, H.S. jumped right into that process. “Animators don’t get many opportunities to draw during development,” H.S. says, “but since I originally liked drawing, I produced a lot of idea sketches.”
T.T. had a very similar entry point. The team was exploring how to express one of Tears of the Kingdom‘s central themes through its NPCs, the reconstruction of Hyrule. The questions they were asking themselves were grounded and human: “If Hyrule is being rebuilt, there should be people making things, right?” and “We want to show groups acting together, right?” Rather than drawing concepts, T.T.’s unit preferred to prototype directly using assets from the previous game, testing ideas in a tangible, playable way. Through that process, and through repeated conversations with Nintendo, the idea of townspeople joining the fight against monsters was born.
F.W. entered the project a bit later, when game design and story direction were largely settled and the team had moved into full production mode. Even then, the experience defied expectations. “I thought I would receive specifications from Nintendo and create animation data according to a fixed design,” F.W. explains. “But that wasn’t the case at all, I was surprised to find that I could be involved from the stage of thinking about the gameplay mechanics and the ecology of enemy characters.”
That observation leads F.W. to pinpoint something fundamental about how this team operates: they don’t separate “the people who think up the gameplay” from “the people who make the data.” Everyone does both, at every stage. That’s not a small cultural detail, it shapes everything about how the game gets made.
Every enemy reaction was a creative decision
When the conversation shifts to the actual work of animating enemies, the depth of thought involved becomes very clear very fast.
Tears of the Kingdom is built around player freedom, the ability to approach any situation with any combination of tools, weapons, and physics-based creativity. That means every enemy in the game needed to be ready to react to an enormous variety of situations. H.S. describes the challenge directly: how does an enemy panic when it catches fire? How does that look and feel different from being paralyzed by electricity? Those distinctions had to be expressive, readable, and character-consistent, not just functional.
Nintendo took care of organizing which reactions were mechanically required. But the how, the actual character-driven expression of each reaction, was worked out through ongoing group discussion among the animators and every other department involved.
F.W. gets specific with one example: the Like Like, a returning enemy from the Zelda series that appears in Tears of the Kingdom in three elemental variants, fire, ice, and electric. Each version needed reactions that matched its individual nature and personality, not just its element. That meant the creative decisions multiplied significantly for each enemy, because you weren’t just designing one creature’s responses, you were designing a family of creatures, each with its own identity.
What made that scale manageable, H.S. explains, was the way the team stayed connected across the entire production. Monolith Soft divides its design work into modeling, animation, and effects, but nobody clocked out of a project once their phase wrapped. If you worked on an enemy, you stayed in the conversation about that enemy all the way to the end. “From the planning stage to the completion, all the staff of all occupations involved gathered and continued to discuss while producing,” H.S. says.
T.T. brings up one moment that captures this culture perfectly. There’s a performance band in the game that appears on stage. Originally, the musicians were playing through a short, looping animation, generic enough to suggest “playing an instrument,” but not tied to any actual music. A staff member pushed back and said they wanted the band to look like it was genuinely performing the song it was playing. That one comment turned into a full-length animation synchronized to an entire musical track.
But it didn’t stop there. Because players can interrupt the performance, by talking to a band member, for example, the animation needed to be able to resume in sync with wherever the music was in its progression. That required Nintendo to build a dedicated system specifically for the band, one that tracks the song’s progress and picks up the animation at the right point. An entire custom system, built for one group of NPCs, because a staff member said “this could be better.”
“Even with a small idea like this,” T.T. notes, “it cannot be completed by animators alone, the cooperation of various sections is necessary.” The planners handling NPC dialogue and placement, the field designers building the location, everyone had to be in sync. And they were.
The speed limit nobody warned them about
The most technically fascinating section of the interview involves something called a speed limit, a hard constraint built into the game engine that prevents any moving part of any character from exceeding a certain velocity. The reason is stability: keeping that ceiling in place ensures the game system runs reliably. For most enemies, this is barely a concern. Then came a boss-level creature of exceptional size, フリザゲイラ in Japanese, and everything changed.
Because of how large this enemy is, even smooth and well-crafted motion would push certain body parts past the speed threshold. The problem was compounded by the fact that there was no way to know which parts were over the limit without loading the animation directly into the game, and even then, you couldn’t see which specific areas were causing the violation. H.S. describes the early process of fixing it as essentially running on intuition: “Fixing one spot took a long time because I was relying on intuition as to which part was over the speed limit.”
The team shared the problem internally, and the response was immediate: a debug tool was built that allowed animators to see, in real time inside the game, exactly which body parts were exceeding the speed threshold at any given moment. That single tool transformed the workflow for that character entirely.
T.T. puts that moment in a broader context that says a lot about the studio. Debug tools don’t ship in the final product, they exist purely to help during development. When a tool’s use case is as narrow as this one, animators tend to hesitate before asking a programmer to build it, not wanting to create extra work. But at Monolith Soft, that hesitation was actively discouraged. “There was always an atmosphere in the team of ‘please let us know if there’s something you’re struggling with,'” T.T. says.
F.W. takes that point even further: what made it feel special wasn’t just that requests got fulfilled. It was that the team would sit down and think through how to solve the problem together, before solutions were even on the table. “Not only were the features I requested created for me,” F.W. says, “but the attitude of ‘let’s think together about how to solve the problem you’re facing’ was truly appreciated.”
What they’re taking away from the Zelda team
As the interview wraps up, each animator reflects on what this project gave them, not just as professionals, but as people who make games.
T.T. points out that on large-scale productions, animators who come in during the later stages often end up focused entirely on volume, producing data, hitting targets, shipping assets. What made this project different was that every single person on the team got to experience the full arc, from early idea sketches all the way through to a finished product. “I think that being able to experience the process from coming up with ideas at the planning stage to becoming a product has become a very large asset for the team,” T.T. says.
F.W. keeps it personal: a lot of people helped along the way, and the hope is that the help went both directions. One memory that stands out is the final debug push, the entire enemy design team working together until it was done. “It was a team where everyone could develop with mutual respect,” F.W. says.
H.S. brings it home with something that sounds simple but means everything in game development: working this way, with everyone exchanging ideas, everyone invested, everyone heard, doesn’t just produce better results. It’s genuinely more fun. “I want to keep increasing the number of colleagues who share these values,” H.S. says, “and I want to continue to be a team where everyone brings their own passion and creates interesting games together.”
Monolith Soft continues rolling out new entries in this interview series, covering different disciplines across the Zelda development team. We got you covered with the full series, you can check Character Art / Modeling and Programing.
Have you ever thought about all the creative decisions that go into making a world like Hyrule feel alive? What part of this interview surprised you the most, drop your thoughts in the comments, we want to know!