Why The Twilight: Breaking Dawn Baby Was CGI (& How It Was Almost WORSE)

The Twilight Saga is packed with visual effects, but there’s one detail that everyone remembers for how bad it was: the CGI baby Renesmee.

Twilight offers a completely different version of vampires and a love story that has been the subject of many debates, but its film saga remains infamous for the horrifying Twilight baby. The core of the series was the relationship between vampire Edward Cullen and mortal Bella Swan. Breaking Dawn was split into two parts. Readers and viewers spent four books and five films waiting for Bella to become a vampire. Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 begins after Bella gives birth to a half-mortal half-vampire baby.

Renesmee’s introduction was one to remember. It wasn’t because Bella was meeting her daughter for the first time, but because the movie used a CGI baby instead of a real one. Renesmee Cullen was not a normal child. As a half-mortal half-vampire being, the Twilight baby grew rapidly and could speak seven days after she was born. The crew of Breaking Dawn knew they had to show an already mature baby even if it was an infant. However, the baby they created with CGI was the least human-looking thing in the franchise.

Why CGI Renesmee Was So Unsettling

It Sat In The Uncanny Valley
The result was a CGI Twilight baby that couldn’t do the trick back when the film was originally released (and even less so now). Most audiences agree that the Twilight baby is rather unsettling since her facial expressions don’t quite match the preconceived notion of what an infant looks like. In many ways, what the CGI Renesmee created was an instance of the Uncanny Valley, an effect that occurs in film when CGI or animated characters appear just human enough to unsettle audiences with their subtle differences.

And yet, bonus materials released with the box set version of the films reveal that Renesmee could have looked much worse. A behind-the-scenes featurette included in Twilight Forever revealed what the CGI Renesmee originally looked like, and it was so bad the production crew named it “Chuckesmee,” thinking that it resembled the Chucky doll from Child’s Play. This version was a mechanical doll, but actors could not stand to act comfortably around it during scenes.

Doll producer Wyck Godfrey said (via The Guardian) that Chuckesmee was “one of the most terrifying animatronic babies to ever not be seen on film.” They decided to go with CGI instead, as they were trying to “create something that was otherworldly,” and she had to “be intelligent yet still look like a baby but actually look like a more mature baby.”

How The Twilight Baby Was Created

The VFX Team Looked At Kirsten Stewart & Other Places For Inspiration
While the animatronic Twilight baby was horrifying, the CGI version looked wrong in every way. However, the production team did what it needed to do to get a CGI Twilight baby on the screen at the last minute after the original plans failed. The team that created Renesmee was Lola VFX, and it was a complex process to create this baby. The eyes were inspired by Kristen Stewart’s eyes from photos of her as a baby. The team also created the older version as a teenager using the same tech that is used to help find missing children.

However, it didn’t look quite right. Even with Stewart and young actor Mackenzie Foy as inspiration, it never worked out quite right. This comes as no shock looking back at the history of creating CGI characters on the big screen. In recent movies like Captain Marvel and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, CGI was used to de-age Samuel L. Jackson and Harrison Ford, and it looked extremely realistic.

However, go back to Terminator: Salvation and there were numerous complaints about how Arnold Schwarzenegger looked fake in that movie when created by CGI. That was only two years before Breaking Dawn, and it showed the technology was not quite up to the task yet. In the decade since Breaking Dawn, technology has made leaps and bounds, so it might work now.

Why The Twilight Baby Nearly Ruined The Movie

It Ended Up Being The Biggest Talking Point
The Twilight baby came dangerously close to ruining Breaking Dawn since it was all people could talk about after the movie was over. CGI is a wonderful tool that can easily go awry, as technology can either make or break movies by stranding its subjects deep in the dreaded Uncanny Valley. The Uncanny Valley is exactly where the CGI Renesmee sat, as audience members were in shock and awe that anything resembling Renesmee could make it into a franchise as popular as Twilight.

The main problem with the baby is that it pulls focus from the rest of the story. Any scene a CGI Renesmee was in was completely dominated by her creepy, unblinking presence, and all dramatic and narrative points of importance were completely overshadowed when the Twilight baby was around, sending audience members either into hysterical laughter or sheer terror. Breaking Dawn was designed to close out the Twilight timeline, and the creepy baby did nothing but distract from the conclusion, five movies in the making.

There were a lot of features that the crew wanted the Twilight baby to have – so much so that the overabundance of CGI effects only made her look too unrealistic, unsettling, and even a bit nightmare-inducing. In the end, Renesmee was a valuable lesson in how to create CGI characters. Twilight’s weird CGI Renesmee baby will be forever remembered for how bad it looked, dating the film with poor usage of technology from day one. But, surprisingly, the initial animatronic was worse.

Lionsgate Has To Take A Different Approach To Renesmee In The Twilight TV Series

It was announced in April 2023 that Lionsgate is rebooting Twilight as a TV series. The new project will be entirely unconnected to the movies, and retell the story of the Twilight novels from scratch. It has a chance to handle a lot of narrative and visual elements differently. One aspect of the Twilight movies the rebooted show should approach differently is the Twilight baby. If the series reaches the end, there’s no reason Renesmee should be a CGI baby or an animatronic doll.

Despite Renesmee’s difference from normal infants, having heavy special effects to represent a human-looking infant throws the audience too far into the uncanny valley. However, it’s not just the CGI baby that is problematic when it comes to Renesmee in The Twilight Saga. The Twilight books haven’t been free from controversy of their own, with many of the romantic relationships between its characters at the center. A key Twilight relationship that’s aged is the one between Renesmee and Jacob — Bella’s once almost-lover.

The imprinting element of Twilight, and what it means for Renesmee and Jacob, is incredibly problematic even when rationalized by the lore that underpins its world of werewolves and vampires. Outside the obvious change for the Twilight baby, Lionsgate may consider overhauling her character, and her place in the Twilight narrative, entirely.