Tales of Earthsea Production Complete

Nausicaa News:
May 23, 2006 Animation Complete on "Tales from Earthsea"
The May 23 Production Diary announced the completion of animation on the film.

History of production:

Sep 06, 2005: animation production began
Jan 20, 2006: 149 cuts (12%)
Jan 27: 180 cuts (15%)
Feb 03: 230 cuts (19%)
Feb 17: 326 cuts (26%)
Mar 03: 422 cuts (34%)
Mar 10: 481 cuts (39%)
Mar 17: 517 cuts (42%)
Mar 30: 687 cuts (55%)
Apr 7 : 776 cuts (63%)
Apr 17: 844 cuts (68%)
Apr 25: 935 cuts (76%)
May 1 : 997 cuts (81%)
May 8 : 1,056 cuts (85%)
May 15: 1,176 cuts (95%)
May 23: 1,236 cuts (100%)

Animation production length:

Tales from Earthsea: 8 months and 17 days
Howl's Moving Castle: 17 months and 6 days (2/1/2003-7/7/2004)
Spirited Away: 16 months and 26 days (2/1/2000-6/27/2001)

《地海传奇》幕后班底大搜索

信息属南方动漫网中文专
2006-05-18 16:38　南方动漫网　作者：亚述
(编辑：唐)

背景一：动画制作班底

1．制片人：铃木敏夫（吉卜力总裁）

　　1948年出生于爱知县，1972年进入德间书店公司，然后在78年进入《月刊动画》编辑部。从1981年开始策划宫崎骏特集，次年开始大力推进《风之谷的娜乌西卡》的长篇连载；在《风之谷》拍成动画大片之后，一跃成为德间方的制作委员，十分活跃。1989年，转入今日如雷贯耳的吉卜力工作室（STUDIO GHIBLI），在此后所有的作品中都是以制片人的身份出现。同时利用此前作为编辑的经验，在出版界也开展得风生水起。在与德间书店成功合并之后， 1997年成为德间的取缔役，"吉卜力工作室"事业本部长，2000年9月开始成为常务。

2．导演&联合编剧：宮崎吾朗　(Miyazaki Gorou)

　　此人的身份当是本片最大的卖点之一：宫崎骏的儿子，38岁的宫崎吾朗。

　　1967年、东京生人。信州大学农学部森林工学科毕业后，从事建筑咨询行业，计划、设计公园绿地以及都市绿化。

　　自98年起着手设计三鹰之森Ghibli的总体造型，01年至05年6月任该美术馆馆长。

　　曾荣获2004年度艺术选奖文部科学大臣新人赏的艺术振兴部门奖

3．联合编剧：丹羽圭子

　　参与过吉卜力作品《听海》的脚本制作。

4．音乐：寺屿民哉

　　1958年4月10日出生在熊本县。

　　以独特管弦乐编曲而闻名的乐界天才，挎刀打造剧场版动画《地海传奇》音乐。

5．主题曲和插曲《特鹿之歌》演唱者：手茑葵

　　兼为歌手和声优，现住福冈，年龄--My God，1987年6月21日出生--19岁未满。有着模特身高：174cm；兴趣是芭蕾和读书。遗憾的是神秘新人的照片尚未披露……

　　新人手茑葵，在出任女主角Therru声优的同时，她悠远清澈的天籁之音打动了导演宫崎吾朗，被钦点担纲演唱影片的主题曲和插曲，被赞为"有着朴素,治愈系的歌声的她,是地海传奇中女神般的存在"。

　　相信大家都已经听到了她在预告片中的天籁之音了，那么我们一起期待这位呼之欲出的新人在今年7月份公映的《格德战记》中的美妙声线吧！

6．声优：

　　冈田准一、手茑葵、田中裕子、小林薰、夏川结衣、香川照之、内藤刚志、倍赏美津子、风吹纯、菅原文太……

背景知识二：

1．关于《格德战记》译名和内容：

　　《格德战记》的内容简介是这么说的：

　　"人与龙曾是一体

　　人选择了地与海

　　龙选择了火与风

　　这个夏天，人与龙将合为一体……

　　一名少年巫师的魔法之旅，他走的愈远，就愈深入自己的内心！

　　神秘绮丽的岛屿风情、巫术的奥妙、老术士寓意深远的智语、巨龙、创生古语真言、无所不在的黑暗势力、爱情的救赎、人性的试炼，在地海 (Earthsea) 的奇幻世界里波澜壮阔的上演……"

　　英文原著的书名是Legend of Earthsea--"地海传奇"，小说的繁体中文版以及早年改编的电影都译作《地海传说》，后来由人民文学出版社出版的简体中文版定名为《地海传奇》；在日文译著中书名改为《ゲド戦記》，原意译为中文是"格德/基德战记"；有如此多的版本，因此新片未出，片名先乱。然而既然是介绍GHIBLI的片子，本站从日版，从《格德战记》之说。

2．关于原著《地海传奇》：

　　《格德战记》根据美国女作家厄休拉·K·勒·古因《地海传说（Legend of Earthsea）》系列小说改编，这套小说常常被与托尔金的《指环王》三部曲和刘易斯的《纳尼亚王国》三部曲相提并论，在所有年龄段中都有这套小说的 Fans，曾经获得过五个雨果奖、五个星云奖和国家图书奖，《地海》系列小说已经被翻译成16种语言，总发行量数以百万计……有如此辉煌的原著支撑故事的骨架，想差都差不了了……

3．作画参考：シュナの旅（《秀纳之旅》暂译）

　　作者:宫崎骏
　　出版社/制作商:德间书店
　　发售日: 1983/06
　　媒体形式：文库

　　此书乃是宫崎骏大师以西藏的民间传说为原型创作的全彩图绘本。但没有拍成电影。在绘本的结束语里，宫崎爷爷深情地写道："将这个民间故事动画化是我的一个梦想……。"

4．原著作者：厄休拉·K·勒·古因（Ursula K. Le Guin）

　　勒·古因以从1968年到2001年横跨三十余载的《地海传奇》(Earthsea Cycle) 六部曲系列，奠定了她在奇幻文学界的崇高地位。六部曲被翻译成19国语言出版；其作品意涵颇富中国老子道家思想；并非强调善恶对立的二元价值观，而是传达 "平衡"、阴阳同源的理念；以阴阳相生的概念为核心，迥异于西方基督教的善恶二元对立观。

　　事实上宫崎骏作品中，从1984年的《风之谷》到2004年的《哈尔的移动城堡》）等，风格上都很受《地海传奇》的影响。但阴差阳错，大师最终还是没有将古因的作品搬上银屏，而这个历史性的工作则在这个夏天由他的长子完成了……

5．小说日文版译者：清水真砂子（しみず?まさこ）

　　1941年出生于北朝鲜。儿童文学翻译家?评论家。

　　毕业于静冈大学，现为青山女子短期大学教授。著作有《儿童读物的现在》、《学生发光的时候》（以上两本为岩波书店出版）、《幸福的写法》《儿童读物的视线》（以上为洋泉社）等。译著有《到天亮之时》《醒来、魔女！》《谈话?谈话E.L.克尼斯堡讲演集》（以上为岩波书店）等。因翻译厄休拉·K· 勒·古因的《格德战记》（岩波书店）的全6卷获得平成16年的日本翻译文化奖。

Toei targets Shanghai, China

Toei Animation will open offices in Shanghai next month. The company hopes their ties with local stations and manufacturers will allow for "large-scale business dealings." Toei's Digimon Adventure was broadcast in China in February, and Dragonball will air in June. Source: Animaxis

Toei Animation: a Japanese studio under which Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata used to work with. Famous TV series under their belts: Saint Seiya, Digimon, One Piece, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon etc.

Over the Hedge - AWN review

Over the Hedge: Making The Leap From Newsprint To Pixels
Joe Strike chronicles the long journey Over the Hedge took to make the leap from comicstrips to the big screen.

May 19, 2006
By Joe Strike

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DreamWorks’ Over the Hedge is unlike the competition: it manages to translate a property from another medium without destroying its spirit or alienating its creators. All images courtesy DreamWorks Animation SKG.

DreamWorks’ Over the Hedge, the latest star-powered CGI entry in 2006’s animated feature sweepstakes, opens this Friday on the heels of Fox’s Ice Age 2 and just ahead of Pixar’s Cars. Unlike the films bracketing it, Hedge is adapted from a pre-existing work — an 11-year old daily comicstrip featuring a cast of funny-animal characters observing and interacting with suburban sprawl and American consumerist culture.

The film succeeds in a rare-for-Hollywood balancing act — translating a property from another medium without destroying its spirit or alienating its creators — perhaps because they were heavily involved from the film’s conception. And while the strip’s critters have made the leap from newsprint to pixels, Hedge the movie is a different animal from Hedge the strip — a number of different animals, as a matter of fact.

Over the Hedge was born in 1995, the brainchild of writer/cartoonist Michael Fry and children’s book illustrator T Lewis. The pair had worked together on King Features’ Mickey Mouse comicstrip and tried to launch The Secret Life of Pigs, a strip of their own. “We thought it was destined for cosmic greatness,” Lewis recounts, “two pigs on a farm secretly observing humanity. We were told ‘it’s a great idea, but nobody likes pigs.’ Then Babe came out.”

Fry and Lewis tried again. They replaced the pigs with a trio of suburban animals — suave raccoon RJ, worrywart turtle Verne and manic squirrel Hammy. Instead of a barn, the critters lived on the outskirts of a suburban development rich in wasteful consumption and human absurdity. The retooled strip was snapped up by United Features Syndicate and today runs in some 250 newspapers, but back in ’95 it caught the eye of animation producer/writer Jim Cox. Cox, whose credits go back to Oliver & Company and include story development on Beauty and the Beast (and now co-producer of the Over the Hedge movie) contacted the pair via the e-mail address wedged between the strip’s panels.

A partnership was quickly born. Cox, Fry and Lewis put a pitch together and made the studio rounds. According to Lewis, “Fox, Henson and DreamWorks were the most interested. A bidding war actually broke out, we were really rooting for DreamWorks — look at the personalities involved, c'mon. Fox ultimately won, the power of sheer money won. It was only a year or two after DreamWorks formed and they were not able to throw the money around that Fox was back then.”

The project wound up on Fox’s shelf and stayed there — much to the frustration of Tim Johnson, its ultimate co-director. “I was aware of it, I knew it was sitting there. It was making me crazy. Even eight years ago when I was making Antz, I knew Over the Hedge was there and just the seed of a fantastic film. I loved the characters and the opportunity to comment on suburban living. When Fox let the option expire in 2001 we grabbed it at DreamWorks and put it in development right away.”

Michael Fry (left) and T Lewis are the creators of the comic strip Over the Hedge, and also served as creative consultants for the film.

Rumor has it that when Fox optioned Hedge, DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg predicted, “those people will never make that movie, and when they don’t, I will.” Lewis attributes Fox’s failure to make the film to the fact that “Hollywood is wiggly — everything is always changing. We had a champion who brought us into Fox, Jon Jashni [most recently exec producer of the Poseidon remake]. Then he got shuffled somewhere. In a big studio system like Fox, as opposed to a boutique operation like DreamWorks, when you lose your champion, you pretty much get lost.

“We were at Fox when there was a lot of wringing of hands — ‘What’s going to happen to family films, what’s going to happen to animation?’ They were trying to break in with Anastasia and we were sort of this odd little duck. It was actually pitched back then as a Babe-like thing, where we were going to have live-action and then the animals would be computer generated, kind of like Garfield. When we came on board at DreamWorks for a month or two we were thinking Hedge was going to be a 2D movie. At one point they were talking about claymation because they had this contract with Aardman. Ultimately those were just ‘run it up the flagpole’ ideas.”

The original Fox story pitch (which Lewis describes as a series of set pieces “more or less strung together”) was refined into a “how it all began” tale, recounting RJ’s first meeting with Verne and the ‘blended family’ of animals he looks after — the excitable Hammy, a porcupine couple and their kids, a father and daughter opossum pair and a lady skunk with serious self-image issues. Other than Hammy, it’s an extended family that doesn’t exist in the comicstrip, whipped up for the purposes of the film’s feature-length narrative.

“The new characters are fine with us,” says Lewis. “We totally understand this was a story beyond the comicstrip and you had to add stuff. When we pitched the script early on we had this clan of animals — wasn’t exactly as it is now, but we had come up with more animals too, realizing the story more or less dictated it.”

Over the Hedge’s journey to the big screen took a circuitous route. Fry, Lewis and Jim Cox sold the pitch to Fox after a bidding war but it was quickly put on the shelf. DreamWorks, an original bidder, snapped it up years later.

Co-director Karey Kirkpatrick shares Johnson’s enthusiasm and respect for the original comicstrip. “Tim and I are both huge fans of the strip and what it has to say. Its point of view on society is what attracted DreamWorks to the project. We would constantly run stuff by [Fry and Lewis] to make sure we were in the right ballpark tonally and ‘Hey, do you have any jokes we’re missing?’” For her part, production designer Kathy Altieri praises the comicstrip duo too, “They were great, they worked with us a lot on potential ideas. They were really gracious about sharing our [version of Hedge] with theirs and finding the place in between where the match was perfect.”

According to Fry, writer of the Hedge comic, the filmmakers “mined the strip” for individual gags, working them into the script at appropriate moments. “They really got the sense of the characters and their spirit — I’m really pleased.”

Verne however underwent a not insignificant accommodation to the demands of the film’s narrative, one that met with Fry and his partner’s full approval.

“In the movie, it’s necessary for the characters to be rather innocent and naïve and for Verne to be their leader,” Fry explains, “whereas in the strip Verne is a leader, but more in his own mind. There’s a certain tension there between him and everyone else. Verne is the smartest turtle in the room and unfortunately no one appreciates that. They kind of, sort of ironed that out a little bit in the movie.” Lewis is even more unsparing of Verne, “He’s a lot more dysfunctional in the strip — he’s a mess. He’d love to be the leader of the group, he might think that he is from time to time and may for a moment be, but he’s lot more a boiling kettle of disdain and despair.”

Kirkpatrick credits Fry and Lewis for “keeping on us to make sure [the movie version of] Verne was smart and funny. What tends to happen in development is the character carrying the movie’s emotional core can be a one-note whiner if you’re not careful and all he’s doing is saying ‘let’s not go over there.’ They were really great about pushing us to not fall into that.”

Everyone involved with Over the Hedge credits the relationship between RJ and Verne as the heart of the film and the quality that set Hedge apart from any number of other talking animal strips on the comics page. “Verne and RJ are best friends in the strip; they’re such a great odd couple,” Johnson says. “Someone who’s always worried about tomorrow and someone who’s always ‘seize the day,’ the ultimate party animal. I loved that because all of us have that battle — do we do the smart thing and think about the future, or do we sit around and play videogames and eat nachos all day?” Kirkpatrick compares the pair to “Felix and Oscar, Lucy and Ethel… the man-child vs. the nudge… the id vs. the superego.”

Directors Tim Johnson (left) and Karey Kirkpatrick share an enthusiasm and respect for the original comic strip. They constantly ran stuff by Fry and Lewis and mined the strip for individual gags.

For Kirkpatrick (whose scripting credits include Chicken Run and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), the film was both a screenwriting job and his first directing assignment. “DreamWorks had approached me to write Over the Hedge months before, but I was busy with other scripts. They came to me six months later: ‘How about directing it?’ When I came on, two writers were already on board, Lorne Cameron and David Hoselton who were doing a fine job. I was actually a little tired of writing, my first thought was ‘this will be great, there’s no typing.’

“Len Blum was the first writer who tackled translating it from the comicstrip. Lorne and David came on and gave the film its current structure. When they were done with their contracted stuff they moved on. I was the typist, it was on my résumé so I assumed writing responsibilities.”

Kirkpatrick recalls that it was Katzenberg himself who asked him to co-direct Hedge, a challenge he was eager to take on. “After Chicken Run he’s been trying to get me to direct, he had no doubts. I was at all the Chicken Run recording sessions; I worked closely with some of those actors through Nick [Park] and Pete [Lord]. It really wasn’t that big a leap. Jeffrey saw me at meetings, working with storyboard artists. A lot of it is ‘how good a collaborator are you, how good are you at communicating your thoughts, how strong is your vision?

“Tim was already on the movie. We knew each other; we’d been consulting on each other’s projects. We’d been circling and wanted to work together. This was great for me because Tim had already directed a couple of movies; any rookie mistakes that I might make, he was there to fill in that void.

DreamWorks animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg brokered the directorial marriage between Johnson and Kirkpatrick and the pair found their skills and experience were complementary.

“In some directing teams you handle this and he handles that side of it, but for me and Tim it was a straight partnership/collaboration. We were both at 98% of the meetings. On occasion when you get into the heat of it you’ve got 350 people on crew and the day is broken into 15-minute increments. Sometimes you literally need to be two places at once and that’s when two directors come in handy. In those cases if there was something that required more tech expertise than I have, and Tim comes from a computer animation background, I’d say ‘you should take that one.’”

Johnson’s CGI background reaches back some 18 years into the dawn of the digital age when he joined the staff of Pacific Data Images, one of the very first computer animation shops and the company that would eventually become PDI/DreamWorks. (“That PDI badge means something, at least in our world, so they kept that name, which is great.”) While production of Hedge was based in DreamWorks’ Glendale studio, a satellite crew operating out of the original Silicon Valley PDI facility pitched in with additional animation, effects and lighting support. “We share everything, it’s really amazing,” Johnson enthuses. “We’ve all got the same software and the distance disappears once you get the video conferencing going. We had animation dailies and all the team would be sitting with us in a screening room and there’d be bunch of people in northern California synched up on a huge screen at their facility so we’re all watching the same thing.”

From Lewis’ perspective, the synergy between directing partners was to the film’s benefit. “Tim has a good story sense, but Kerry has a great writing background. When he came on and partnered with Tim the picture really started taking off. They really had a good chemistry, never losing sight of that sense of fun you need to bring to a project like this.”

After redesigning the strip’s 2D characters for CGI, Kathy Altieri’s next job was the film’s environment, recreating the world from the perspective of the film’s foot-high stars. “We were trying to create a world that felt like it was in our backyard. Every one of us has gone out, gotten down on our belly and crawled around with a camera so we can feel what we felt in the movie.” Meanwhile, Johnson and Kirkpatrick were wrestling with the film’s story and structure, and the evolution of RJ’s character from self-centered con artist to someone who cares about others. A turning point in the film comes when RJ is about to take off with a red wagon-load of goodies he’s tricked Verne’s family into helping him gather.

Johnson and Kirkpatrick wrestled with the film’s story and structure, and the evolution of RJ’s character (front) from self-centered con artist to someone who cares about others.

“We always sort of likened to RJ to Harold Hill in The Music Man, that he was a bit of a traveling grifter,” Kirkpatrick explains. “We always thought there’d be a scene called RJ Gets a Home, where the other animals would give him the thing he’d never had, a place to come back to. What we liked about it structurally was when they tell him, ‘RJ come here we want to show you something,’ had he said, ‘You guys go on’ and hopped in the wagon and left, he would have been home free. The fact that he let his guard down and was emotionally hooked further complicated things.

“What never worked about it, it used to be too maudlin — until we twisted it. Just as it’s getting a little sappy, that’s when we yanked the carpet out from his happiness.” The carpet-yanking consists of a barrage of TV soundbites on the subject of betrayal that triggers RJ’s dormant conscience while the camera stays on the raccoon’s guilt-ridden face. “We always knew conceptually we wanted something like that. I think it was David Soren, one of our storyboard artists who came up with TV idea, and I think I added the Dr. Phil punchline.”

A trio of high-energy slapstick set pieces punctuate the film — Verne’s traumatic initial foray into the suburban development ‘over the hedge,’ Verne and RJ’s encounter with a slobbering, extremely playful dog that ends in a kerosene-powered rocket flight and an apocalyptic battle aboard a runaway truck. While the first sequence was part of the film from its earliest days, the second originally featured a ferocious dog who swallowed Verne in one bite. “Then it was up to RJ to perform a canine Heimlich,” recalls Johnson. “That scene was in the film for a surprisingly long time, before we conceived a friendlier dog and funnier chase about 20 months ago. The truck battle entered the picture after several third act experiments; we only settled on that scene a year ago. The script was not written around any of them — they were all created to serve the overall story.”

Like all contemporary animated features, Over the Hedge’s voice cast is a mixture of high-profile stars and accomplished character actors, led by Bruce Willis as RJ. Johnson says “having Bruce voice the character meant you could have a con man, but there’s something he brings to it that keeps RJ sympathetic and lets you go on the ride with him. RJ was based on the character in the comicstrip, but when we approached Bruce we said we missed David Addison from Moonlighting. He said, ‘I kind of miss him too, I’ve been busy saving the world for the last 12 pictures.’”

Over the Hedge’s voice cast is led by Bruce Willis as RJ. The directors urged the actor to channel David Addison from Moonlighting to create the sympathetic con man character.

While acknowledging that name-brand actors are crucial in giving an animated feature visibility among higher profile “event” movies, Kirkpatrick admits that he keeps certain performers in mind from the get-go. “Who am I thinking of when I write this character? Coming up with an opossum who dies big — Shatner! Or you think Albert Finney — that’s what I want, Shakespearean. You kind of think of that voice while you’re writing it, and you wonder if he’ll do it. Then you call Shatner and he says yes!

“We have a powerful head of the studio in Jeffrey who can get anybody on the phone and get them to agree to be in one of his movies — but he won’t do it unless the voice is interesting separate from the face. There are some stars out there that we’ve listened to that just aren’t good voices. When you’re not seeing their face and just picturing the character, sometimes that voice just doesn’t work.

“We never do star for star’s sake. For instance, there was early inclination with the Verminator (the orange-suited exterminator pictured prominently in the film’s advertising) to do some stunt casting with a really big name. But I was working with Thomas Haden Church on Charlotte’s Web. He’s a big name to me, he was Oscar-nominated but he’s not on the Tom Cruise level. But when I heard his voice I said, ‘you guys have to hear this.’ He’s great, he’s perfect and he made that character. Or you take someone like Garry Shandling. No one’s used him, but he has a strong, distinctive voice and a phenomenal sense of humor. If we can tap into that we’ve got something really special.”

For his part, Fry offers special praise for Steve Carell’s voicing of the high-strung squirrel Hammy. “Steve is really incredible, he gave a great voice performance. The most impressive acting from him is the moment he says, ‘I’m not stupid.’ He says it once as Hammy and it just pulls your heart. Then he walks away and says it in his own voice. In that moment it gives you a little bit of the depth of the character — somewhere inside there’s this Steve Carell lurking about who’s really wounded.”

Steve Carell continues his break-out year with the voicing of high-strung squirrel Hammy (left). The comic’s creator Michael Fry was impressed by the depth of emotion in his performance.

Johnson denies that any of the characters in the film were deliberately drawn to resemble their voice actors, but suggests the impression may result from “the way we recognize motion in people. We videotape the actors recording their lines and some of the animators like to look at the tapes for how they’re going to do their motion. I think it’s amazing and a tribute to the animator’s art that even though none of the characters were designed to look like the actors, in a way they all do a little bit. I think Eugene Levy was captured very well by the animators and ended up looking just like him, although if you looked at the freeze frames [of his character Lou the porcupine] I don’t think Eugene would be very flattered.”

Johnson looks at his voice actors as collaborators. “They’re not just reading lines. They’re actually helping us design and discover the character. We mold and change and adapt the story, rework scenes around what we discover. It’s so important to match the performance to what the actors bring — it’s really like workshopping a play or a Broadway show, but in slow motion.”

That slow motion sped up near the end of the production cycle, with new dialog added as recently as the end of March. “We made a ton of changes,” Johnson recounts. “It’s amazing how you can fly in new lines of dialog. Garry saw the picture and wrote something like 12 new lines, things like, ‘I’d thought we’d be dead by step two, so this is going great!’ You can’t show him the whole film because you don’t have it, and when you finally have it it’s almost too late so you scramble to get these great ideas in.”

One of the most interesting things about Over the Hedge though, is what’s missing. In a film swimming with fast food and merchandise, there isn’t a single instance of product placement, and hardly any self-conscious pop-culture references. Johnson admits that the film “is making comment, not always flattering, about the world of consumer products. I don’t know if any company would’ve wanted to get involved with us. The other thing we realized the parody was part of the fun.

Like the best of Pixar’s films, Over the Hedge has the feel of a classic animated feature. Its directors hope the film to make animation whole family entertainment like live-action used to be before it became stratified.

“One of the first scenes to really come together was that Trail Guide Girl cookie heist. We had a little competition among the staff of who could come up with the funniest name for cookies. We ended up with Love Handles, Smackeroons, Neener-Neeners, great names. Kerry and I got really excited and remembered those old Wacky Packages stickers. We thought that’s where we’re going to go with this thing, we don’t want real products. The way to make a comment and hold up a funhouse mirror to this consumer culture is to make up all the names we want. It goes by so quick too. One of the things I want to put on the DVD is all the work that Kathy [Altieri]’s department put into the product design.

“The only product that’s in the movie? The THX logo [seen briefly on a TV set]. Do you know we had to pay for it? We had the joke and we asked Lucasfilm if we could use it. They said ‘yes, but’ and we said, ‘wow.’ It didn’t cost that much, though.”

Like the best of Pixar’s films, Over the Hedge has the feel of a classic animated feature, one where we eavesdrop on the animal world to see our own through different eyes. Unlike Disney’s overly literal The Wild, Hedge is replete with cartoon exaggeration — characters squash, stretch and speed so fast they distort time and space; they survive the worst sort of physical misadventures with only their dignity injured; and one classic cartoon image that hasn’t been seen a while, a turtle who wears his shell like a removable suit of clothes.

Johnson and Kirkpatrick look at Over the Hedge and other animated features as continuing a tradition that’s lost ground in Hollywood in recent years. As Johnson puts it, “Hopefully we’re taking animation to where I think live-action films used to be — whole family entertainment. Live-action films get so stratified — teen-slasher, superhero movie, big-budget special effects films — I feel animated films are now the general entertainment films you don’t see in live-action.” For his part, Kirkpatrick finds himself “upset a little bit when somebody says ‘I wouldn’t go see this, animation isn’t really my thing’ and it gets relegated to something just for kids. Some of the smartest, best archetypal storytelling out there in the movies is being done in animation, movies like The Incredibles and Toy Story and Shrek, they’re as good as any movie that comes out all year long.”

Regardless of what happens to Over the Hedge’s critter cast when they enter the multiplexes of the human world, their comicstrip counterparts will continue to go their own way. “We talked with DreamWorks about folding some of the movie characters into the strip,” Lewis admits. “We both very independently, very stridently thought no. The movie and the strip ought to be two parallel distinct things. The power the strip brings to this is that it has its own integrity; it’s its own separate thing. You start merging the two, it’ll look like the strip’s just shilling for the movie.”

Regardless of what happens to Over the Hedge’s critter cast in the cinema world, the comic strip will not add any of the movie characters. Lewis wants to avoid the appearance of the strip shilling for the movie.

Lewis’ art for the strip has evolved since its 1995 debut, due both to his desire to keep the strip’s look fresh, and the addition of computer toning to his arsenal of tools. When asked, he admits the characters’ big screen redesign has also influenced their look on the printed page. “Around 2000 when I started working on the movie a little bit [contributing concept art for new characters] the strip’s animals became more naturalistic.” (One character Lewis particularly regrets not making it to the big screen is an owl that would have been voiced by Gene Wilder.) “When I started doing those characters for them it jostled the illustrator in me because I come from that background. Ernest Shepherd, Winnie the Pooh’s illustrator, he’s like my hero, Tenniel, that late 19th, early 20th century is my style.

“That change was inspired by my work with the folks at the studio. There’s such high quality of work you’re surrounded with there. When you know your stuff is being looked at by these guys — and a lot of them would get our strips e-mailed to them every day by the syndicate — I’d say to myself ‘I’ve really got to be on my game here.’”

If Over the Hedge the movie achieves the success its creators are hoping for, will there be a sequel in the works? It’s a question one hardly needs to ask of DreamWorks, considering Shrek 3 is due out next May and a fourth Shrek is already in the works. However the studio may have already tipped its hand early on in the movie — when RJ shows Verne and company a map of the suburban development that’s sprung up around them, an arrow reading ‘FUTURE DEVELOPMENT’ is pointing to their small, unspoiled patch of green. Stay tuned for future developments…

Joe Strike lives in New York City and writes for and about animation. He has recently completed a children’s novel.

Note: Readers may contact any Animation World Magazine contributor by sending an e-mail to editor@awn.com.

Paperless Animation Production

Animation World Magazine: "The Animated Scene: “Paperless Animation Production” — Myth or Reality?
In this month’s “Animated Scene,” Joseph Gilland addresses the reality of “paperless animation production,” which used to make his blood curdle.

May 16, 2006
By Joseph Gilland"

After an almost two-decade stint in the animated feature film industry, I have been re-introduced to the world of television series work, bit by bit, over the last four years. In some cases actually working on an animated television series, but more often as a casual observer, watching my overly stressed-out animation industry friends, who always seem to be rushing off to work over-time on yet another on-going television series with an insanely short schedule. Storyboard artists, character designers, layout artists, animators, effects animators — you name it — they’re all out there trying to make ends meet, in what seems to be an industry of ever shrinking schedules and budgets.

Whenever I hear about the insanely tight schedules that these artists are working on, my head just spins! Shorter and shorter schedules, smaller and smaller budgets, but is the quality of the shows diminishing? Well, sometimes yes, but incredibly, a lot of the time it is not! We have at our disposal today the tools to make quality cartoons, faster, slicker and better looking than a great deal of the so-called “limited” animation of years gone by.

This trend that we’re seeing has taken off in the wake of a staggering plethora of new animation technology, hardware and software, which, for better or worse, has enabled us to create stories, storyboards, animatics, backgrounds, characters, animation and special effects in ridiculously short order.

This is much to the delight of distributors, broadcasters, and animation clients of all kinds worldwide, who find that in today’s animation industry, an idea or a script can get from early development, into location and character design, straight into production and actually on the air in a matter of mere months. Projects that would have taken at least a year to fully develop and begin to get off the ground, can now sprout wings and take off in a really big hurry, and at a mere fraction of the cost of an old-school hand-drawn cartoon.

There are some key technological advancements in the tools, both hardware and software, that we use to produce cartoon series these days that have contributed enormously to the speeding up of the overall process, and I’d like to discuss a couple of the most important ones, that I feel are changing the way we make cartoons today, besides the obvious technological developments that we have all come so familiar with, like Flash.

The combination of the screen surface with a sensitive grip pen makes artists comfortable with the drawing “feel” of Cintiq 21UX.

First of all, the whole idea of “paperless” production (Oh, how that concept used to make my blood curdle!) which has been batted around for the last two decades, is actually starting to successfully take place, largely due to a couple of truly innovative, effective tools that have finally come close to matching the needs of traditional artists, who are willing to work with digital tools, if they actually help, rather than hinder, the creative process. Now we finally have these tools at our fingertips, they actually work and they are rapidly changing the face of the modern animation studio. Not only the television series industry either, or only the “2D” animation industry. Every studio, from the smallest hometown commercial ventures, to the biggest feature animation powerhouses, is taking full advantage of this new software and hardware.

First of all, the incredibly effective Wacom Cinitq 21UX interactive pen display is an LCD monitor that enables artists to draw directly onto the computer’s screen, and it is the first product of its kind that really has artists getting comfortable with its drawing “feel” very quickly and intuitively. I had tried one of the earliest versions of this tablet many years ago, and it was at that point in time still a relatively frustrating tool for a traditional pencil and paper sort of an artist to deal with. The tactile quality of the drawing pen just wasn’t there, and there was an enormous disconnect between the hand and the image. I was skeptical that I would ever be able to become comfortable with such a tool, but that has all changed recently.

The folks at Wacom, in developing the Cintiq have put a lot of time, research and effort into creating a screen surface that actually has some “bite” to it, much like a real piece of paper, as well as a wonderfully programmable and sensitive pen, and the results are surprisingly successful. It seems that the developers have really been listening to us pesky artists after all! Up until now, getting a really natural drawing sensation that inspired an old school artist was inconceivable.

And I was one of the biggest naysayers to the tablet technology that has been emerging, precisely because of that very reason. The tactile sensation of a graphite pencil digging into the texture of a good quality piece of paper, well, there’s nothing quite like it. The sculptural feeling of “working” a drawing on paper is a key element of how I create design drawings, and, until recently, I had never encountered a tablet that was even remotely satisfying in that respect.

But today, of all the artists I know are using the Cintiq tablets, myself included, the vast majority are enjoying it a great deal and truly getting a good drawing feel with it. It speeds up many aspects of the animation pipeline, by finally doing away with enormous amounts of paper that needs to be scanned and put in binders and archived in filing cabinets. Artists can create everything from storyboards to character, effects, set and prop designs in literally half the time it used to take them, simply by the virtue of being able to undo things quickly and work in layers, which enable quicker development and experimentation with designs.

This may not seem like something entirely new to so many people who have become accustomed to using digital drawing tablets and working with software like Photoshop and Painter for many years now, but not enough emphasis can be put on how far the technology has come. The natural feel of the pen on the drawing surface of the Cintiq is quite amazing, and the ability to rotate the entire tablet much like an old school animation disc is also a huge asset. I can’t believe how quickly many of my old-school pencil and paper artist friends are catching on to the Cintiq, and raving about its astounding functionality.

Old school pencil and paper artists are astounded by how far technology has come. Products like Cintiq allow creative teams to present their drawing ideas quickly, compressing the time it takes to deliver a project.

Today, creative teams are able to send their drawing ideas quickly and directly to the director or lead designer, who can then make changes, notes and suggestions on a new level directly on top of the artwork and send it back to the artists in the blink of an eye. The time saved by an artistic director who once had to be constantly on the go, moving from artist to artist, making suggestions and changes out on the floor of the studio, is enormous. Of course if a more hands on approach, face to face interaction is desired, that can still be done, but the options available to manage the flow of our creative ideas are far greater with these new tools working as well as they do today.

Software too has been catching up quickly to the desire for a natural drawing experience on a computer, and Alias (Autodesk) Sketchbook Pro 1.1 is another tool that is catching on like wildfire, because of its extremely user friendly, intuitive tools, pencils, pens, brushes and levels. The learning curve is extremely fast, no real need for training or leafing through weighty user manuals.

This is the kind of tool traditional artists have been waiting a long time for. No fuss, no superior computer skills required, just a fast intuitive way to draw on a computer. For a purely straightforward piece of drawing software, it is hard to beat, although of course there are bugs to be worked out, and countless improvements that should be, and I’m sure will be made.

Personally, seeing the work being created in my current production workspace using the Cintiq and Sketchbook Pro, I am finally becoming convinced that “paperless” animation production may one day become a reality, even at the earlier design stages where it is still common to see artists using every thing, from charcoal to oil paint, to create design ideas, character, location, special effects prop designs, color palettes, and conceptual ‘look of picture’ designs of all kinds.

If these tools become even better than they are now, we will see more and more old school artists giving up their beloved paints and pencils, and moving, if somewhat reluctantly, onto the world of digital drawing.

The Alias SketchBook Pro, with its ability to capture ideas quickly, might replace the pencil and napkin. It is extremely user friendly with no real need for training. © Alias Systems Corp.

Beyond the earlier stages of development, design and storyboarding that I have detailed here, of course we have seen digital ink-and-paint and particularly, Flash transform 2D animation into a process that takes a fraction of the time to produce than the old animator assistant/inbetweener/production model of years past. No need to go over that here, we all know the process is speeding up, some of the resulting animation is looking better and better, and not necessarily too far removed from the “high quality” animation that we all want to see being produced.

It looks to me like digital “2D” animation, is really coming into a new and exciting era. Even with shrinking budgets and schedules, we can look forward to creating better looking shows than ever if we embrace and exploit the super efficient digital tools that we have at our fingertips today. Even this crusty, narrow minded, old school, hand-drawn, animator’s survival kit thumping animator can see that we are entering an era of a much broader and less restricted visual vocabulary.

Of course I for one will never stop emphasizing the need for good old school hands-on training for our students of the craft, if only for the purpose of teaching them the importance and the value of every frame that we deal with in animation. Letting the computer do too much of the work too early on in an artist’s development may severely stunt their ability to process creative ideas thoroughly in their imaginations before committing them to paper, uh, that is, their digital tablet… But even the earliest, teaching, design and development stages of animation production may be done on digital drawing tablets some day soon, as these products become more widely available and affordable.

One by one, my industry friends who use the Cintiq at work are getting them for their home studios as well (at least those who can afford the still rather high price tag). Keep in mind folks, I certainly don’t write about animation to advertise these products! In my mind, this phase of technological development is one of the most important developments in the history of our industry, up there with Technicolor, digital ink-and-paint and 3D CGI technology.

Visit a few studios these days, and these new drawing tablets are conspicuously evident everywhere you look. And they are giving us greater and greater creative freedom, as well as making it possible for more new shows to be developed and produced affordably, (even in spite of their somewhat lofty price tag), and within the time constraints of an ever more demanding clientele. Hopefully this will challenge more and more companies to develop and offer us even better and more importantly, even more affordable new digital drawing tools.

In his 30-year animation career, Joseph Gilland has worked with studios as diverse Walt Disney Feature Animation and the National Film Board of Canada. He has worked on all styles of animation, experimental films, television series, commercials, theatrical feature films, stop motion, title sequences, live-action films and documentaries. Formerly the head of the classical and digital character animation programs at the Vancouver Film School, Gilland is writing a passionate book about the art of animation.

Gedo Senki Director Interview

- Director Goro Miyazaki

Original artical can be found here: http://www.ghibliworld.com/goromiyazakiinterview.html

Aoi's voice (the singer of Gedo Senki's theme song 'Song of Teruh') conveys that loneliness in youth, a bit unsteady, but clear and charming. It's 'love at first hearing', Goro said.

I like that ^^