  Big Z (right) trains Cody Maverick for the coming Penguin World Surfing Championship.
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HONOLULU -- CGI animators get all excited and esoteric about breakthroughs in the art -- wind blowing through hair in one film, skin texture in another, rain falling.
In the "surfing penguin" movie Surf's Up, it turns out, it's all about "the wave."
Here, not far from the enticing surf at Diamond Head, Jeff Bridges holds forth about signing on to voice a Big Kahuna-type penguin named Big Z, who lost his soul to competition and redeems himself by mentoring a little squirt penguin surf prodigy named Cody Maverick (Shia LaBeouf).
The dealbreaker: How were they going to render the waves?
"What really got me on board was the whole surfing aspect of things," Bridges says, "How are the waves going to look. Is it going to look like a photograph, and you superimpose somebody on it?
"And then they showed me some of the footage of what they had worked on, and being a surfer myself, it was a thrill to be able to be part of bringing to an audience what it feels like to be locked in a tube."
We're not saying The Big Lebowski was a documentary, but lifelong surfer Bridges gets pretty philosophical when talk turns to the oscillations of the ocean. "It's a wonderful feeling, whether you catch a wave or not. It's a bit like fishing, you're out there, you're a part of nature, you're sitting in the ocean, looking at the land, when most other times it's the other way around. There's something about it that gives you a different perspective on life."
(By contrast, LaBeouf says he was an avid surfer until age 13, "when I stopped because work started and insurance companies won't let ya.")
Okay, but penguins? We do appear to be in a bit of a Penguin Era, entertainment-wise, from the documentary March of the Penguins, to last year's CG penguin musical Happy Feet to Bob Saget's profane spoof Farce of the Penguins (Mario Cantone -- the voice of a talent-scouting sandpiper in Surf's Up was also a voice in Farce). What's with all the birds in black-tie?
Writer/producer Chris Jenkins has been with Surf's Up nearly five years, "back when I didn't know about March of the Penguins and I certainly didn't know about Happy Feet. If I had, we might have done skateboarding squirrels.
"What happened was Sony had a surfing-penguin movie that really wasn't working and they put it on the shelf. And I said, 'There's something kinda cool about it,' and I approached them with the documentary angle." (Surf's Up is presented as Cody's story -- from Shiverpool, Antarctica to Pen Gu Island -- revealed in a reality-type mock documentary). "I thought, y'know, surfers seem to spend a lot of time doing documentaries on themselves. We should do this and embrace it as a full-length movie like Spinal Tap.
"Anyway, the thing is, in good animation the characters become bigger than the species. You connect with a small fish in Finding Nemo. You connect with cars, for God's sake, in Cars."
With that, Surf's Up indeed became, not so much a movie about penguins, but about the strange place surfing holds in the heart of the American psyche. Some of the animators were newbies, some were skilled surfers, but all ended up at Southern California's Zuma Beach getting their sea legs. "We took all our animators out surfing because we thought it was important to know how it felt to wipe out," Jenkins says. "We have this great picture of about 40 of our animators all riding the same wave and all crashing together."
Adds director Chris Buck (who co-directed with Ash Brannon), "these guys studied waves all over the world. We've got the Pipeline wave, the Maverick's wave from California, we've got Chop-poo, to see how they'd react differently. And we had help from (champion surfers) Kelly (Slater) and Rob (Machado). They'd say things like, 'This wave would break a little bit further out.' "
"We think of each wave as a character," Jenkins says. "Each scene is balletically controlled by an animator. But each wave has an internal characteristic that's amplified by the emotional intent of the scene."
Yeah, okay. But penguins? Even if you do have Kelly Slater and Rob Machado, motion-capture technology isn't of much use if the creatures onscreen are an entirely different species. "The problem is penguins have no knees," Buck says with a laugh. "Or at least you can't see them. So we're trying to define the (computer interface) to stretch their legs out, so they surf kind of splayed."
"I have the same problem when I surf," Jenkins quips.
And even the story, the filmmakers say, is a reflection of a great debate that shakes the sport of surfing today -- competition versus completion. "Z made a lot of mistakes in his life, because he had been all about the winning," Jenkins says. "Cody and Z are father and son in a sense, but they're also the same person -- the guy at the beginning of his career looking forward and the guy at the end of his career looking back and telling the kid, 'Don't do what I did.' "
"We kind of looked at the journey of (old-school surf legend) Laird Hamilton, who was all about the wave above competition," says Brannon. "It's really a spiritual quest. Competition is something that's been imposed on the art of surfing. If you're so into grabbing that trophy, what do you lose in the process?"
To hammer the point home, they created Tank Evans (Diedrich Bader), a win-at-all-costs penguin who loves his trophies so much, it's, um, almost indecent.
"A couple of Super Bowls ago," Buck explains, "during breaks in the game, they had photos of all these players holding the trophy, kissing the trophy, and loving the trophy just a little too much.
"And we just took it and ran really far with it," he says.
Or waddled.
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