'Quantumania': The Brain-Bending Designs of 'Ant-Man and The Wasp'

Reed credits prosthetics designer Conor O’Sullivan for building many of them around real actors. “He had to create all these different races of Freedom Fighters,” the director says. “These we call The Mystics,” Reed says. “They’re this very ornate sort of creature with almost kintsugi gold lines around their faces. They’re the sort of most religious sect of these Freedom Fighters. And we cast very tall people to play these characters. Once you got the headgear on, they were like seven and a half feet tall.”

A Mystic, Veb, Xolum, and a furry-headed member of the Steel Group

Marvel Studios

Next to the Mystic on the left in the photo above is Veb, a rosy and bladder-like cephalopod (voiced by David Dastmalchian) who wobbles around producing a psychotropic ooze that, when consumed, allows beings who speak different languages to understand each other. Basically he’s a walking punchbowl. Think of him as Kool-Aid Man, but squishy—more likely to bounce off a wall than break through it.

To the right of Veb is Xolum, with the cranium that looks like a replacement fuse. “We liked the idea of this very fearsome warrior whose head is essentially a supernova, a star that’s got to be contained within this thick glass-like cylinder,” Reed explains. “When he unleashes it, it’s a lethal weapon.”

Finally, on the far right, is a member of a class of Freedom Fighters the production called the Steel Group. “They’re very mysterious warriors, and they’re black-clad with these black hoods, and they’re scary. They’re terrifying. You don’t see their faces,” Reed says. But pull back the cloaks and its a cuddle-fest. “We like the idea of the juxtaposition that they were cute, almost like Ewok-y kinds of characters.”

Lilly’s The Wasp, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet van Dyne, and Michael Douglas’s Hank Pym explore a fungal wilderness in the Quantum Realm.

Marvel Studios

For all the wonders to be found in the Quantum Realm, it also lacks certain things: skies, for one. And flat horizons. Or anything that looks like it’s from our regular-sized world. “That was really tricky because how do you light these kind of internal spaces?” Htay says. The solution was found through the lenses of the world’s most powerful microscopes. 

“We looked at a lot of electro-microscopy,” Htay says. “We looked at all sorts of particle collisions. When they smash together subatomic particles, [these are] the kind of patterns that you get from that. There are recurring patterns that you see in nature as well, bifurcation and fractals. All of that sort of stuff became part of the language.”

A high-class tavern in the Quantum Realm where the elite can observe the energy bursts and particle waves.

Marvel Studios

In other words, the Quantum Realm is illuminated by bursts of energy and matter—storm clouds that radiate light and heat. “There’s an artist named Chris Parks who does these effects that aren’t digital, they’re actually chemical, and they’re literally shot in a Petri dish,” Reed says. “He did this whole shoot for us where, let’s say, you’ve got some yellow dye and you do these little droppers of blue and watch what the chemical reactions are, and we photograph them.”

As the chemicals and colors react to each other, the patterns that emerge almost seem to be alive. “They do take on a life of their own,” Reed says. “They’re all moving in a way that’s photochemical, so you could never predict how they’re going to move.”

Other light sources were the countless energy mines that the Quantum denizens work in to harvest their fuel. The glowing of these tunnels inside the distant looping walls of innerspace starts to resemble dim moons and suns that help light the world. 

Pfeiffer’s Janet van Dyne watches from her subatomic ranch as Majors’s Kang arrives in the Quantum Realm, backlit by colossal energy tunnels.

Marvel Studios

“You see these kind of apertures, and depending on your relative scale and distance to them, sometimes they would look just like a very subtle curve, and other times they would look like a hole. And it just depended on where you were in relationship to that,” Htay says. Those effects were woven throughout the film where needed, creating a sky surrounded completely by land. Look up and you might see a forest, or a field, or a desert. “We really wanted to have the kind of curving horizon lines,” Htay says. "Where is up, where is down? You didn’t really know.”

That kind of dizzying effect is what puts the mania in Quantumania.