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 "Madagascar." |
The art of making a 21st-century animated cartoon will never be the same again.
That's because the new comedy Madagascar -- a magical mystery tour with zoo animals -- makes such a significant breakthrough in digital animation that it will, in the words of one animator, "blow the doors off" what is possible.
Oddly enough, DreamWorks animators had to go to the past to create their new future. "We wanted to harken back to the old days of animation when it was really snappy movement with the 'squash and stretch' -- really quick stuff," Rex Grignon says during a recent interview in San Francisco.
Grignon, a veteran of the animation business, is the Canadian-born head of character animation for Madagascar. He co-founded the character animation team at PDI/DreamWorks, the studio's animation arm. The Ajax native is a graduate of the animation department at Sheridan College and has worked on Antz and Shrek for DreamWorks, as well as Toy Story for Pixar/Disney.
As a result of the retro-future approach, Grignon says, Madagascar borrows heavily from techniques pioneered by legendary Warner Bros. animators such as Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Robert McKimson and other members of the famed Termite Terrace gang, including voice genius Mel Blanc and composer Carl Stalling. Together they created Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety and Sylvester and a galaxy of other cartoon superstars who endure today.
"That is one of the hallmarks of Madagascar,"
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Grignon says of the style developed for the DreamWorks animation computers. "We tried to push over in that direction more than, certainly, we had done and more, really, than anyone had done."
What Grignon is talking about is that "squash and stretch" technique, which means that, from one quick pose to another, a character's body can be grotesquely distorted, the eyes can pop out of the head and reality is momentarily suspended for the cartoon effect. What that achieves, besides the surreal image itself, is a superfast speed across the screen. No more herky-jerky, robotic movements. No more stiff or slower, human-like poses, unless that is what is desired.
Until now, it was impossible for computers to achieve the effect successfully. Characters would literally fall apart on screen when a computer animator tried to push the envelope. All that has changed because of new sophisticated software and hi-tech breakthroughs.
This technique is specific. Digital technology in general has "revolutionized" the animation genre, says DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who also was instrumental in reviving animation at Walt Disney Studios before moving on -- acrimoniously and with lawsuits -- to DreamWorks.
"I mean, what we are able to do today because of technology genuinely was unimaginable 12 years ago when Aladdin came out," Katzenberg says, referring to early digital experiments that helped the hand-drawn animation on that movie. "It has impacted every single aspect of the filmmaking, from the most mundane to the most complex."
For example, Katzenberg says, the choice of colours in
animation has changed. The Disney film The Little Mermaid was "the last fully hand-painted animated movie." In the colour room on that project, there were about 250 different pots of paint of different colours to choose from. The computerized colour palette for Madagascar gave the animators up to 4,000 colours to choose from, Katzenberg says.
"We're almost to a place where, if you can dream it, we can make it," Katzenberg says. "That is what technology has done."
In Madagascar, the development of the "squash and stretch" technique allows the four main characters, who are captive animals raised at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, to become more extreme and exaggerated than characters in previous digitally animated movies.
As a result, boastful Alex the Lion (the voice of Ben Stiller), impulsive Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock), feisty Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and pathetic Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer) all seem fresh and new in the movie because they are looser, more feral and more cartoon-funny than characters in any other movie in the genre.
When they find themselves washed ashore next to a jungle in Madagascar -- after a shipping incident caused by subversive and rebellious penguins -- our hapless heroes are thrust into comic chaos. That includes an amazing encounter with hundreds of lemurs in the Madagascar wilderness.
"We didn't just do it for its own purpose," Grignon says of using new techniques. "This allows us to do very snappy animation. We can deform the characters, just instantaneously, just for a frame or so, so it allows us to move them very quickly and then hold them. That was the Warner Bros. trick: Really slam the pose and hold it and then ... whiiippp! ... slam to another pose.
"Those are kind of the main elements of the Madagascar style. It feels different. I hope it feels way more wild with the gesturing. We wanted to have fun with the animation (so) that the animation itself would become comedic: If you turn the sound off, you'll still like to look at these guys moving."
When the project was started four years ago, computer technology lagged far behind what was needed to complete the film this year. For example, in the spectacular scenes in which our heroes meet the jungleful of lemurs, early attempts to create the lemurs resulted in a maximum of six animals on screen at one time. But, by the time the project matured, the team could produce a shot of several hundred animals of several species, all heavily furred, dancing, acting crazy and looking realistic, at least for a cartoon.
"We had a lot of confidence in the team," producer Teresa Cheng says of the gap between what the animators could do four years ago and what they ultimately achieved to complete the film. "Because this was the same team that developed a lot of systems for our previous movies (such as Shrek), we built on previous knowledge. We basically set a goal and they delivered, not without difficulty, not without challenge."
Those challenges led to significant advances in the technology and the results are obvious to audiences, says co-producer Mireille Soriat.
"What do they say?" she muses. "Necessity is the mother of invention!"
Just don't get hung up just on technology, says Cheng. "Technology is important but ... it's a really important thing to keep in mind that, even though it's a CG (computer generated) movie, it's really a movie first before it's anything else. And story is really the key. If you have a good story, good characters, then these (technological) things go a long way. All these other bells and whistles add to that and help that and complete the illusion."
DreamWorks executives, of course, hope Madagascar is a summer hit, and there is reason for optimism.
Katzenberg says there has been just under a dozen totally computer-generated animated movies made in Hollywood, including the Disney and DreamWorks entries in the field. "Virtually every single one of them has been from successful to off-the-charts -- and I think it's our process that allows excellence."