Any film business veteran knows that nothing is a sure thing in the business, given the fast and furious pace in which films are released and the taste of the movie going public at any given time.
But if "Madagascar" producer Mireille Soria ("Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron") and production designer Kendal Cronkhite ("The Nightmare Before Christmas") have found anything to be true, a great story with heart will lead a filmmaking team in the right direction every time -- and eye-popping computer-animation will only make it that much grander.
"For 'Madagascar,' we worked a full four years on the story, which is at the center of any movie," Soria told me in a recent @ The Movies interview. "We wanted to have a story about the power of friendship, but that also had funny and engaging characters."
So, Soria said, the challenge for the family film wasn't necessarily to give audience members something new, visually, just for the sake of raising the technological bar. In fact, she said the film draws inspiration from animation of the past.
"This was a very challenging movie to do, technologically, because we had a lot of water, sand, jungle, leaves and lemurs with a lot of fur, but here was also a challenge for the animators because of the film's 'squash and stretch' style," Soria explained. "It's something that's retro in its look, something graphic and cartoony. It wasn't that we invented something new that hasn't been done before, but we pushed it further, I think."
"I think for us, the creative pushes the technology," Cronkhite added in a separate @ The Movies interview. "What I try to do and what DreamWorks does as a whole, is that we design what's right for the film and the story and using the technology that we have.
"In the case of Madagascar, we worked off the technology that was perfected at DreamWorks for 'Shrek' and 'Shrek 2,' and create new tools to get new effects in 'Madagascar,'" Cronkhite said. "It's not like we're re-inventing the wheel every time. What we need to do is make sure that the story we're telling visually suits the story being told."
"Madagascar" tells the story of Alex the Lion (voice of Ben Stiller), Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), four New York Central Zoo inhabitants who have been spoiled by their upbringing in captivity.
And while Marty enjoys the rock star-like following of his zoo patrons, Marty has grown restless of life behind fences. But thanks to a series of mishaps, Marty gets his wish and accidentally end up on a remote tropical island. The problem is, Marty, Melman and Gloria end up there, too, and the foursome is suddenly forced to live in their natural habitat. It's particularly troublesome for Alex who's used to having steak meals handed to him.
The stunning thing about "Madagascar" is that, like many brilliant computer-animated and traditionally animated films before it, its characters
feel real. Sure, the characters were generated out of countless keystrokes, but amazingly, they're filled with very real emotion. That's something many live-action films can't achieve with its characters.
"Animation is a very collaborative process and I think that part of that emotion is creating a credible world -- a world that you take the audience into," Soria said. "Anything that you can imagine you can create, so part of it is in the world that Kendal designs, but part of a lot of it are these actors who are very good at what they do and lend acting chops and voice."
Plus, Soria said, the filmmakers videotape the voice performers during their recording sessions, which in turn inspire the animators in their quest to bring the characters to life.
"You see a lot of their mannerisms in the performances," Soria observed. "With 'Madagascar,' we balanced these very broad, silly, cartoony actions that have no reality to them, but at the same time, they're sophisticated New Yorkers. We didn't want to lose any emotional credibility with them. We asked our animators not only to push the broadness, but at the same time, make sure they got the subtlety of their acting to convey the emotion."
And that includes paying attention to even the smallest of details, particularly the eyes of the characters. They're often described as the "windows to the soul" -- and the last thing Cronkhite wants to do is pull the shades down on audience members.
"When we first designed Alex, he has a very narrow forehead and his eyes looked quite small," Cronkhite recalled. "We had built, textured and surfaced him that way, and we started to see the animation tests come back, the reality was, you couldn't connect with him that well because his eyes were too small. We ended up enlarging his eyes as much as we could, and Gloria's as well. It's very important."
Although the story is decidedly different than the "Shrek" tales, "Madagascar" employs the same sort of sensibilities in that it gears toward amusing both kids
and adults. To do that, the film has weaved in some clever pop culture references -- but never for the sake of being throwaway jokes. Each reference in the film, which includes cinematic gems such as "American Beauty" and "Planet of the Apes," actually relates to the story at hand.
The "American Beauty" reference, for example, hearkens the memorable bathtub-rose petal scene. It's a hilarious scene for adult moviegoers who are familiar with the film, but if you haven't seen the film, it won't be lost on adult -- and, most importantly, kid -- viewers.
"Our unspoken rule was that the moment had to work with the assumption that nobody had ever seen 'American Beauty,' 'Planet of the Apes' or 'Cast Away,'" Soria said. "But for a kid, it tells the story point that Alex is very hungry and dreaming of steaks -- and it's very funny to see steaks coming out of the sky. So it works on both levels."
Distributed by Internet Broadcasting. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
