The collective weight of Oscars that world-dominating visual effects house Wētā FX has is heavier than the King Kong they created and their groundbreaking work on everything Apes continues to blow the minds of fans everywhere.
You may think those apes are a far cry from a sleep ape in Wellington Zoo - but cut him some slack, it's a mid-winter nap for this lot. And in fairness, they're quite used to VFX guru Erik Winquist hanging around their enclosure - not as weird as it sounds.
Winquist has worked on all the recent Planet of the Apes films and studying the real McCoy before creating the digital versions has been pivotal - and even more so for this latest chapter.
"It was clear to us at the outset of this we needed to focus on facial animation more than we had on the previous movies - speech in particular," he said.
"We needed to make sure these characters, their facial rig, could actually support speech in ways we didn't have to do before, necessarily."
Over 1000 VFX craftspeople worked on the film and 33 minutes of the runtime is 100 percent Wētā FX; they needed all their years of experience and revolutionary tech to make it happen.
"The march of technology - it's been what, seven years, since the last film came out - and you think about all of the advancements that we at Wētā have done on films throughout that period. There been so many new techniques that we can leverage and the experience of the crew as well."
These Apes have much to thank - another planet, Pandora. Wētā's Oscar-winning work on James Cameron's latest, Avatar: The Way of Water cascaded perfectly into their new Kingdom. The new Apes has a lot of water.
"We came off the back of a film called The Way of Water which allowed me to go into this project without losing massive amounts of sleep every night," Winquist said.
"The six years of R&D that went into that project gave us a robust toolset for doing simulation work."
From the big screen to the small, fans can start beating their chests with joy as Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes heads to video on demand.
