Getting Penguins on Board
Behind the Scenes on ‘Surf’s Up’
Producer Chris Jenkins dicusses about his film, the crew members and the pains for making a great animated film.
By: Stephen Saito*
Capturing that naturalism was especially important to “Surf’s Up” because of the production’s documentary approach, complete with faded “archival” footage and shaky “live action” camera work.
Most movie studios go to Comic Con, the annual comic-book/fantasy convention in
Which is an issue, of course. Jenkins, who is also credited with the film’s story, knows that his film inevitably will be compared to such recent, penguin-centric films as “Madagascar” (2005), “March of the Penguins” (2005) and “Happy Feet” (2006), none of which had debuted when “Surf’s Up” began its four-and-a-half-year journey to the screen. Still, they add up to a legitimate risk of penguin fatigue among film audiences.
“We didn’t know about ‘March of the Penguins,’ we didn’t know about ‘Happy Feet,’ we didn’t know about ‘
The “real story” of the pipeline-paddling penguins finds its hero in Cody Maverick (voice of Shia LaBeouf), a 17-year-old surfer who hails from Shiverpool,
“All he cares about is his passion,” LaBeouf says. “He’s an underachiever in a family who can’t recognize his achievements, a mother who can’t see him. It’s more emotional than any animation I’ve ever heard of in my life.”
LaBeouf admits that he was surprised by the intensity needed for his performance.
“We were doing stuff (like) Cody Maverick’s crying scene,” the young actor says. “You show up to the animation room, you’re not expecting it to be what it becomes. And (as) it becomes that, you’re being filmed. Animators are taking your performance and applying it. So it becomes a real performance -- it’s not like I switch into voiceover mode. That’s not what this was, and I think that’s why it was so much fun, because it was a performance.”
Jenkins and the “Surf’s Up” crew went to great lengths to preserve the purity of the performances. Unlike most animated films, for which each member of the cast is recorded separately, “Surf’s Up” was made with the cast recording together, giving actors like Bridges and Zooey Deschanel, who voices Maverick’s love interest, lifeguard Lani Aliikai, a chance to work in the same room and improvise dialogue.
The result is a film that feels fresher and more alive than most animated fare, says Jenkins, who was a visual-effects animator and supervisor during Disney’s 1990s golden era, working on such films as “The Little Mermaid” (1989) and “Beauty and the Beast” (1991). Now that he’s seen how well collective recording works, he says, he would never do it any other way.
“We don’t want the average audience member to even think about it (as animation),” Jenkins says. “We want them to experience it as they would a live-action movie. We were doing a reality-TV, documentary-like thing and we knew that, if we ever fell down on the cadence of that speech, or if we ever made the audience too aware, too clever, (or) winked at the audience, then the movie would start to fall apart.”
There is a reason that most animated films haven’t attempted to record their casts together, of course: One actor and one microphone is easy, but each additional person adds to what can become a logistical nightmare.
“We would block a full scene in a sound stage,” LaBeouf recalls, “and then we would walk through the whole scene as though we were penguins, and they would mike it so that we could go to our first mark and there’d be a mike there, and we could walk to our second mark and there’d be a mike there. I don’t think that’s ever been done in animation. We spent arduous hours just blocking scenes. And having more than one character in a room has never been done either, where you have five, six different characters in a scene, they’re all miked and you have to keep my voice out of Jeff Bridges’ microphone.”
LaBeouf’s star has risen since “Surf’s Up” began work, but what impressed the filmmakers was his comedic timing and the depth he brought to the role of a son who grows up without his father -- a topic that resonated with LaBeouf’s experiences with his own dad and with his breakthrough role in “The Battle of Shaker Heights” (2003).
To play Maverick’s surrogate father figure, Jenkins says, he had Jeff Bridges in mind from the beginning, even though Bridges had never done an animated film before.
“There was only one person that could play this old kind of out-of-shape surfer dude,” he says, “that had the right voice characteristics, had a California voice characteristic, who could go as deep as we needed him to go.”
They still had to convince Bridges, though, which Jenkins accomplished by having his animators create a short clip of his penguin character, Big Z, speaking in the voice of Bridges’ most famous role, the Dude from “The Big Lebowski” (1998). The actor was wowed, and signed on -- to the delight of LaBeouf.
“When I went in and met with (the filmmakers),” he says, “they told me who they were thinking of casting, and they were telling me Jeff Bridges and James Woods. And these are like icons. I’m all about that. I love working with people whom I respect. That’s the whole point.”
Add to that mix a talented array of character actors including Deschanel, Jon Heder, Mario Cantone of “Sex and the City” (2000-2004) and Diedrich Bader of “The Drew Carey Show” (1995-2004), and Jenkins had a group of performers who were as engaging visually as they were audially -- important, because all recording sessions were filmed to guide the animators in shaping the scenes visually.
“We would film everything,” Jenkins says, “so we would pick up nuances of their performance, their facial characteristics. You know, the odd smile that you wouldn’t even normally think about, the sarcastic smile, maybe, that would cue another actor to go ‘What are you smiling at?’ We very determinedly would go for the stuff that was off the cuff. And it’s led to some just fantastic filmmaking.”
Capturing that naturalism was especially important to “Surf’s Up” because of the production’s documentary approach, complete with faded “archival” footage and shaky “live action” camera work. Co-directors Ash Brannon and Chris Buck can also be heard in their film, providing the offscreen voices who give direction to the characters during the many penguin interviews that are peppered throughout the film. Sometimes the camera lens “cracks” as some camera-shy characters pelt the camera with rocks or, during the filming of the surf scenes, the water splashes the lens as Cody paddles out on a wave.
The filmmakers drew on a rich history of surfing documentaries such as Bruce Brown’s iconic “Endless Summer” (1966) and Stacy Peralta’s “Riding Giants” (2004). But the documentary that resonated most, Jenkins says, was “Step into Liquid” (2003), directed by Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown. The film is a virtual travelogue of gorgeous waves and surfing hotspots from around the globe, with the best world’s best surfers riding high.
Released three months before “Surf’s Up” went into production, “Step into Liquid” permeates the animated film. Comic foil Chicken Joe, voiced with appropriate aloofness by Heder, is said to have been born in
“We’ve met some wonderful surfers, Kelly Slater and Rob Machado, two of the guys that are actually on the movie with us,” Jenkins says. “And it’s clear that they demonstrate this wonderful sense of innocent fun. They just have a very Zen-like calm about them, and I think that, amongst many other things, that attitude, that sense of being one with life and one with the wave, had echoes all the way through the development of the project.”
His favorite review so far, Jenkins says, came from Errol Morris, the Academy Award-winning documentarian behind “The Thin Blue Line” (1988) and “The Fog of War” (2003), who saw an early cut.
“He said, ‘This isn’t a mockumentary, this is a documentary,”’ Jenkins says. “He said that we were being so honest to the medium that it was much more believable. None of us expected him to be so enthusiastically into the idea of this surfing-penguin competition. It was very cool.”
*Stephen Saito is an associate editor for Premiere.com
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