Animatronic Falkor Dog

Sonjah, a name of our client, posted the Cooper in his Facebook and mentioned that “People were almost breaking their necks to look at Cooper as I was trying to figure out how to walk him back into the garage. Someone walking almost got hit by a car because she was watching Cooper. Too funny. LOL”.

Cooper was named by Sonjah, who is very enthusiastic and kind-hearted. He found us in the Facebook and asked if we can customize an animatronic which needs to be simultaneously similar to a dragon and a dog. He would like to give it as a gift to the stray animal shelter, effects more and more people to understand and accept the stray animals.

It was absolutely unexpected by Sonjah at that time, that the emergence of the Cooper would bring a lot of fun to this ordinary village. Neighbors come to see the Cooper, which brings heavy traffic jams in the front of the garage (Cooper’s residence).

Sonjah would like to own one custom animatronic which looks like Falkor but walks and bark like a dog. On the one hand, he wished all the stray animals are as lucky and bravely as Falkor; On the other hand, he would like to call upon more and more people to pay high attention to the stray animals.

In fact, when we learned about all of his ideas, we analyzed the feasibility of these ideas. It was of great difficulty to achieve these ideas. We were confident of our technology surely, but we were afraid that the Cooper in our mind is different from the Cooper in Sonja's mind. Since he only provided his ideas, for example, dragon’s face, dog’s body, fish’s tail, and scales, strange wings, bent knee, blue eyes, brown furs, dog’s neck collar, walking and barking like a dog, snoring when sleeping...etc. It really bothered us since we couldn’t even imagine what it looks like since we didn’t get any design pictures.

Sonjah told us that many vendors had rejected his requirements due to his baseless ideas. He was not sure if we would accept his ideas and make the Cooper for him.

We tried to draw the rough shape of Cooper on the paper, such as dragon’s face, dog’s body, fish’s tail, and scales, strange wings, bent knee, blue eyes, brown furs, dog’s neck collar...etc.

After repetitive communication and modification, Cooper’s shape which had been appeared many times in Sonja's mind was finally confirmed.

As one motor can only control one movement, and there were many movements that we need to achieve, we had to make sure that all the motors could be loaded in the limited space of Cooper’s stomach. Our engineers kept editing and adjusting the programs many times, in order to make sure that using the least motors to achieve all the movements. Finally, we succeed!

It's really not easy to engrave the scales on a 4.6-meters-long Cooper. Our workers used the electric iron and kept making the texture of scales on Cooper’s body, they were so careful, as if Cooper was the most serious art they done these years.

Sticking the furs is really a troublesome job. The largest difficulty we met was to stick the furs on his face, but let off his dimples. Anyway, we did it!

On January 1, 2019, Cooper was born in Zigong(our factory). He was much perfect than what Sonjah had expected. His bravery (he never felt fear when he met many dinosaurs in our factory), his lively (he walked around with barking all the day), his kindness (he stopped walking and barking, keep quiet at the night time, although he snored during sleeping).