The Last Of Us viewers have been left stunned after being made aware that a real giraffe was used in the finale.
The hit series, adapted from the popular video game of the same name, has seen Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) grow to share a powerful father-daughter bond, which reached an intense conclusion when he was faced with saying goodbye to her for the final time, and did everything he could to save his life in the process.
Ahead of reaching the Firefly facility, which they’d trekked through the previous eight episodes to get Ellie to in the hopes she would be able to help create a vaccine, the pair come across a friendly giraffe.
The moment stands out amongst the apocalyptic universe they’re in, while Ellie gets the chance to just be a child as she feeds and pets the giraffe.
And it was all real – leaving viewers pretty divided.
Some, who thought it was all CGI, called out the giraffe for looking too fake, which left other viewers in hysterics knowing that it had all been real.
‘Love that there’s just a random and clearly fake giraffe in the Last of Us,’ someone commented, while another said: ‘I thought the last of us giraffe was fake and the horse was real but it turns out it’s the other way around are you literally kidding me.’
‘One of the best things to come out of the last of us finale is all the people who are saying the giraffe was bad CGI when they used a real giraffe. You guys just want to hate the show so bad it’s hilarious,’ one person wrote.
Another penned: ‘People thinking the Giraffe in The Last of Us was fake make me wonder if these people have never seen a giraffe in real life. They’re weird, incredible animals.’
‘I’m sure Alex Wang, visual effects supervisor, could have made a CGI giraffe if we had the time,’ production designer John Paino told Variety.
He continued: ‘We needed to see if we could acclimate the giraffe to strangers feeding it, with a very small film crew there.’
‘The trainers worked to get them to eat out of a stranger’s hand. So, when Ellie and Joel walk up at the enclosure, that’s the giraffe eating those branches of food,’ Paino added to the publication.
‘That’s Hollywood magic of Alex isolating the giraffes and putting them on our set. That was probably the most complicated piecing of VFX stage, scenery and location I’ve worked on.’
Last year, Bella had recalled filming the giraffe scene, which took over a month.
‘They had to do it a little bit at a time so the giraffes would get used to it,’ she told GQ.
‘We’d done a rehearsal with the giraffes a week or so before, maybe longer than that, and that was really special.
‘Having to do it again when we were actually shooting it, it was a bittersweet moment.’
She added: ‘I realised, basically, whatever Ellie was feeling, I was feeling. The whole time.’
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The Last of Us is available to watch on Sky and NOW.
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