In a funky open-plan office, beneath a hand-drawn, piratical sign that says lost boyz, with the sound of someone playing acoustic guitar in the background, Pete Paquette is wrestling with dog drool. On his computer screen, he is tweaking images of a cartoon bulldog with particularly slavery chops.
Paquette is a senior animator at Blue Sky, the maker of Robots, Horton Hears a Who! and the phenomenally successful Ice Age franchise – 2009's Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs took £550 million at the global box office. Of all animations, only Toy Story 3 (£620 million) and Shrek 2 (£571 million) have done better business. Even Robots, the studio's lowest-grossing film, which cost £50 million to make, took £161 million.
For the past 12 months, Paquette and 350 colleagues at Blue Sky headquarters in rural Connecticut have been working on the studio's latest film. Rio is a kaleidoscopically colourful and musical film about birds (and the occasional dog) that rings with the exuberance of Brazilian culture. Its Brazilian director, Carlos Saldanha, keen to honour his homeland, wants Rio's environmental message to strike a loud chord with the children (and adults) who see it. 'Enjoy nature and don't destroy it,' he says.
The film's opening sequence, an eye-popping showcase for Blue Sky's skills, paints a vivid portrait of the abundant and melodious natural life flitting through South American jungles – before bird poachers' cages suddenly descend, bringing eerie silence to the trees. 'If you want to capture something, take a nice picture and put it on a wall,' Saldanha says. 'That's the kind of vibe I wanted to convey, with birds especially.'
Making big-screen cartoons is a long, painstaking process. Saldanha had the initial idea for Rio around 1995, while he was making Ice Age 2. It involved a penguin being washed up on the beaches of Ipanema. Then word came of two other penguin-centric animations in production at other studios, Happy Feet (2006) and Surf's Up (2007). Saldanha crafted a new narrative: a domesticated rare blue macaw named Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg, who was Oscar-nominated for The Social Network), 15 years an 'American', is returned home by a conservationist. He is to mate with the indigenous, sassy blue macaw Jewel (Anne Hathaway). But mollycoddled Blu is flightless, somewhat clueless and used to a cosy life in sleepy Minnesota. He is out of his depth in the jungle of his birthplace, and in vibrant, buzzy Rio de Janeiro. His feathers are further ruffled when he runs into bird smugglers aided and abetted by an evil cockatoo (Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords).
Saldanha pitched his idea to Chris Wedge, the co-founder and vice president of creative development at Blue Sky, in 2006. 'When we were trying to find which film would fill this slot,' Wedge says of Blue Sky's 2011 release schedule, 'I felt strongly that Rio had, in its infancy, a very strong outline and thematic core. And the potential to exploit all the best things that Carlos was always talking about [with regards to] Rio – so the music obviously is a huge part of it. And the film gives you the experience of a place that you may never get to see otherwise.'
Pre-production on Rio started almost four years ago. When I visit the 'set' in November 2010 Paquette and the other 54 animators have the finish line in sight. Their expected weekly quota of completed animation amounts to 90 frames per animator. 'I think realistically we hit about 75,' says Paquette, a computer animation graduate of Florida's Ringling College of Art and Design. 'That's just over three seconds a week.'
Luís (voiced by Tracy Morgan of the NBC television series 30 Rock) is the film's bulldog character, sweet-natured but afflicted by an excess of saliva. 'We tried doing "real" versions of the saliva, where the animator hand-keyed each droplet," Paquette says (already, five minutes after sitting down with him, the complexity of his work is baffling). 'But it became too labour-intensive and we didn't have the time.'
Paquette had to solve that problem and move on to the next one: how to make Luís dance the samba with bowl of fruit on his head while evoking the spirit of Carmen Miranda, yet retain his essential 'bulldog-ness'.
In the lucrative world of computer-generated animation, realistic anatomy is everything, whether it is human or inhuman, animal or bird, alive or extinct. 'We had an ornithologist from the Bronx Zoo in New York explain how birds move, and discuss their anatomy and mannerisms – especially macaws and cockatoos,' Saldanha says. 'We have a lot of video footage.' Blu alone has 2,000 points of articulation.
Feathers, too, obviously have a huge presence in Rio. Rendering them in a realistic fashion has been another challenge. Not least because they have to stand up to the scrutiny of 3D, in which the film is being released. 'The use of 3D is pretty impressive,' Jemaine Clement says. 'A lot of 3D movies I've seen, you almost don't notice it's 3D. But with Rio they really went for it. I think they amped up the colour to make up for wearing the glasses in the cinema – because they're dark, it can dull the colour. So they've really pushed that.'
Over in Blue Sky's sculpture department, Alena Wooten shows me the ultra-detailed character models she has made using a wire armature and clay. They are based on drawings from the design team. Once modelled, the characters are laser-scanned into the computer, then passed to Paquette and his colleagues in other technical departments – rigging, lighting, fur, materials, special effects – to bring the idea, script, designs, storyboard and models to life.
Human characters, their shapes and their movements, are no less challenging. Saldanha took six members of his team on a field trip to Rio during carnival season to soak up the experience and learn about Brazilian dance – they even joined a samba school, Mageira, and took part in the city's famous parade.
Blue Sky opened its doors in 1987. Wedge, who had created graphics for Disney's Tron (1982), and his founding colleagues were there at the dawn of computer-generated animation. 'We did have a vision for the company, but it had very little to do with how we were going to make a living,' Wedge recalls. 'It had mostly to do with how we wanted to make images and what we wanted them to look like. This was 24 years ago, and very few people knew what computer animation was back then. You certainly didn't have people coming out of colleges ready to come and work for you. We had to develop our own technology.'
Blue Sky's first few years were spent writing software, acquiring new equipment, 'and starving. We were all very early in our careers and we all had big dreams. We knew that some day someone in the world would be making movies with computers – and we were hoping we would get there, too.'
The wolf was kept from the door by taking on commercial work – Blue Sky's first commission was an animated laxative advertisement. Its reputation grew. It created a talking fish for an episode of The Sopranos, and animated singing cockroaches for MTV Films' Joe's Apartment, a comedy about a penniless musician sharing his New York flat with thousands of the bugs. Its breakthrough, though, was Bunny, directed by Wedge. It won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Bunny served notice of the arrival of a new animation house, located, against industry type, on America's east coast, as far from Hollywood as you can get, to challenge Pixar and DreamWorks.
'We worked on Joe's Apartment for about a year,' Wedge says, 'which kept the bills paid. The fish for The Sopranos was the kind of little job we would take just so we could say we'd done them, little loss leaders. And Bunny had been a passion project for years. We took a bath financially on that,' he laughs. 'But at the end of the day it gave us the kind of recognition that led to us making movies. Once people saw that we could make short films on our own and win Oscars with them, maybe we could do a feature film, too.'
In 1997 20th Century Fox bought Blue Sky, and the animation studio began work on its first feature, Ice Age. It was co-directed by Saldanha, who has been with the company since 1993.
'We have a slightly different look to our movies,' Saldanha says. On a Blue Sky film, 'you almost feel like you can touch the picture. And also our animation style is not specific… We animate how it feels right. We are not bound by Disney rules or Warner Bros rules – studios that already had a reputation in animation. We are more independent. So we are able to use elements of all animation traditions.'
'From the beginning,' Wedge says, 'as soon as we were able to start making animation, there was always a focus on character. When we went to make the first Ice Age film, we knew characters were going to be the most important aspect of it.' To play his lead characters in Rio, Saldanha cast his voice talent two years ago. Jesse Eisenberg is Blu because 'I always felt that he had this awkwardness and hesitation in the way that he talks – it felt very much like the way Blu is. Book-smart, but in a way, caged.'
Don Rhymer, the writer of the Rio screenplay (he also wrote Surf's Up), says that when Eisenberg was cast, 'I immediately got all of his films and watched them two or three times, trying to get the rhythm of the way he speaks and incorporate that into what Carlos was doing with the character.'
Hathaway was also a good fit 'because Anne is a very high-energy actress,' Saldanha observes. 'She's super-smart and she has this great clarity in the way she delivers emotion. I needed that contrast – I needed a more mellow character and a very passionate figure. And I thought the two of them would work well for that. Also, Anne can sing very well.'
The Black Eyed Peas' singer will.i.am performs a similar double duty. He is the voice of a local bird called Pedro, and co-wrote one of the featured songs with Sergio Mendes, the Brazilian musician who is Rio's executive music producer. In Brazil, the national obsessions are 'music, then football!' Mendes says. 'Carlos wanted me to bring the
flavour, the perfume, the essence of the music that comes from Rio. The rhythms, carnival songs, romance, sensuality – everything I was born around. And Will brings the urban part of Rio, the dance clubs.'
Jemaine Clement is another multi-tasker on Rio, singing and co-writing a Flight of the Conchords-esque song for his character, Nigel, 'who's a traitor to birds,' Clement says. He wryly admits that he was heavily wooed by Blue Sky to participate in Rio. 'They'd animated a scene to a bit of my Conchords dialogue, and they set up a whole movie theatre [to show it in]. I couldn't really say no – I felt it would be rude after the effort they went to.'
Generally, Saldanha says, actors are keen to work on cartoons, 'because in animation the scripts are usually good. We have time to work on them, so we make them polished and well-executed. And actors really appreciate the effort and the art put into making these movies. It's so elaborate and sophisticated and so global in appeal.'
Fox is taking no chances on a film that is being released at a crucial time in the film calendar, the Easter school holidays. It has signed a cross-promotion deal with Rovio, the Finnish makers of the hugely successful iPhone application Angry Birds. 'We went over to Helsinki and showed them clips and they loved it,' Andrew Stalbow of Fox Digital Entertainment says. 'Rio was the ideal platform for Rovio to build a spin-off, new version of its game that we could tie to the movie. We're going to promote the availability of Angry Birds Rio, and we'll integrate the marketing of that game alongside the marketing of the film. It gave us a way to reach the 75 million Angry Birds fans.'
Saldanha is pleased at how far he has managed to integrate music into his narrative, while also promoting the film's ecological message. To Chris Wedge – currently overseeing production on a fourth Ice Age film (scheduled for summer 2012), and preparing to direct an adaption of the children's book The Leaf Men – Rio is about stretching his studio's skills: pushing Blue Sky's teams to constantly better what they can offer. 'I think this film has one of the strongest stories we've ever done – and the most appealing and obvious music focus. And also because the technology evolves every year, it's also the slickest film we've made. As an audience member it feels bigger but easier, somehow. It just feels more natural. And it looks beautiful.'
'Rio' is out on April 8
Pre-production on Rio started almost four years ago. When I visit the 'set' in November 2010 Paquette and the other 54 animators have the finish line in sight. Their expected weekly quota of completed animation amounts to 90 frames per animator. 'I think realistically we hit about 75,' says Paquette, a computer animation graduate of Florida's Ringling College of Art and Design. 'That's just over three seconds a week.'
Luís (voiced by Tracy Morgan of the NBC television series 30 Rock) is the film's bulldog character, sweet-natured but afflicted by an excess of saliva. 'We tried doing "real" versions of the saliva, where the animator hand-keyed each droplet," Paquette says (already, five minutes after sitting down with him, the complexity of his work is baffling). 'But it became too labour-intensive and we didn't have the time.'
Paquette had to solve that problem and move on to the next one: how to make Luís dance the samba with bowl of fruit on his head while evoking the spirit of Carmen Miranda, yet retain his essential 'bulldog-ness'.
In the lucrative world of computer-generated animation, realistic anatomy is everything, whether it is human or inhuman, animal or bird, alive or extinct. 'We had an ornithologist from the Bronx Zoo in New York explain how birds move, and discuss their anatomy and mannerisms – especially macaws and cockatoos,' Saldanha says. 'We have a lot of video footage.' Blu alone has 2,000 points of articulation.
Feathers, too, obviously have a huge presence in Rio. Rendering them in a realistic fashion has been another challenge. Not least because they have to stand up to the scrutiny of 3D, in which the film is being released. 'The use of 3D is pretty impressive,' Jemaine Clement says. 'A lot of 3D movies I've seen, you almost don't notice it's 3D. But with Rio they really went for it. I think they amped up the colour to make up for wearing the glasses in the cinema – because they're dark, it can dull the colour. So they've really pushed that.'
Over in Blue Sky's sculpture department, Alena Wooten shows me the ultra-detailed character models she has made using a wire armature and clay. They are based on drawings from the design team. Once modelled, the characters are laser-scanned into the computer, then passed to Paquette and his colleagues in other technical departments – rigging, lighting, fur, materials, special effects – to bring the idea, script, designs, storyboard and models to life.
Human characters, their shapes and their movements, are no less challenging. Saldanha took six members of his team on a field trip to Rio during carnival season to soak up the experience and learn about Brazilian dance – they even joined a samba school, Mageira, and took part in the city's famous parade.
Blue Sky opened its doors in 1987. Wedge, who had created graphics for Disney's Tron (1982), and his founding colleagues were there at the dawn of computer-generated animation. 'We did have a vision for the company, but it had very little to do with how we were going to make a living,' Wedge recalls. 'It had mostly to do with how we wanted to make images and what we wanted them to look like. This was 24 years ago, and very few people knew what computer animation was back then. You certainly didn't have people coming out of colleges ready to come and work for you. We had to develop our own technology.'
Blue Sky's first few years were spent writing software, acquiring new equipment, 'and starving. We were all very early in our careers and we all had big dreams. We knew that some day someone in the world would be making movies with computers – and we were hoping we would get there, too.'
The wolf was kept from the door by taking on commercial work – Blue Sky's first commission was an animated laxative advertisement. Its reputation grew. It created a talking fish for an episode of The Sopranos, and animated singing cockroaches for MTV Films' Joe's Apartment, a comedy about a penniless musician sharing his New York flat with thousands of the bugs. Its breakthrough, though, was Bunny, directed by Wedge. It won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Bunny served notice of the arrival of a new animation house, located, against industry type, on America's east coast, as far from Hollywood as you can get, to challenge Pixar and DreamWorks.
'We worked on Joe's Apartment for about a year,' Wedge says, 'which kept the bills paid. The fish for The Sopranos was the kind of little job we would take just so we could say we'd done them, little loss leaders. And Bunny had been a passion project for years. We took a bath financially on that,' he laughs. 'But at the end of the day it gave us the kind of recognition that led to us making movies. Once people saw that we could make short films on our own and win Oscars with them, maybe we could do a feature film, too.'
In 1997 20th Century Fox bought Blue Sky, and the animation studio began work on its first feature, Ice Age. It was co-directed by Saldanha, who has been with the company since 1993.
'We have a slightly different look to our movies,' Saldanha says. On a Blue Sky film, 'you almost feel like you can touch the picture. And also our animation style is not specific… We animate how it feels right. We are not bound by Disney rules or Warner Bros rules – studios that already had a reputation in animation. We are more independent. So we are able to use elements of all animation traditions.'
'From the beginning,' Wedge says, 'as soon as we were able to start making animation, there was always a focus on character. When we went to make the first Ice Age film, we knew characters were going to be the most important aspect of it.' To play his lead characters in Rio, Saldanha cast his voice talent two years ago. Jesse Eisenberg is Blu because 'I always felt that he had this awkwardness and hesitation in the way that he talks – it felt very much like the way Blu is. Book-smart, but in a way, caged.'
Don Rhymer, the writer of the Rio screenplay (he also wrote Surf's Up), says that when Eisenberg was cast, 'I immediately got all of his films and watched them two or three times, trying to get the rhythm of the way he speaks and incorporate that into what Carlos was doing with the character.'
Hathaway was also a good fit 'because Anne is a very high-energy actress,' Saldanha observes. 'She's super-smart and she has this great clarity in the way she delivers emotion. I needed that contrast – I needed a more mellow character and a very passionate figure. And I thought the two of them would work well for that. Also, Anne can sing very well.'
The Black Eyed Peas' singer will.i.am performs a similar double duty. He is the voice of a local bird called Pedro, and co-wrote one of the featured songs with Sergio Mendes, the Brazilian musician who is Rio's executive music producer. In Brazil, the national obsessions are 'music, then football!' Mendes says. 'Carlos wanted me to bring the
flavour, the perfume, the essence of the music that comes from Rio. The rhythms, carnival songs, romance, sensuality – everything I was born around. And Will brings the urban part of Rio, the dance clubs.'
Jemaine Clement is another multi-tasker on Rio, singing and co-writing a Flight of the Conchords-esque song for his character, Nigel, 'who's a traitor to birds,' Clement says. He wryly admits that he was heavily wooed by Blue Sky to participate in Rio. 'They'd animated a scene to a bit of my Conchords dialogue, and they set up a whole movie theatre [to show it in]. I couldn't really say no – I felt it would be rude after the effort they went to.'
Generally, Saldanha says, actors are keen to work on cartoons, 'because in animation the scripts are usually good. We have time to work on them, so we make them polished and well-executed. And actors really appreciate the effort and the art put into making these movies. It's so elaborate and sophisticated and so global in appeal.'
Fox is taking no chances on a film that is being released at a crucial time in the film calendar, the Easter school holidays. It has signed a cross-promotion deal with Rovio, the Finnish makers of the hugely successful iPhone application Angry Birds. 'We went over to Helsinki and showed them clips and they loved it,' Andrew Stalbow of Fox Digital Entertainment says. 'Rio was the ideal platform for Rovio to build a spin-off, new version of its game that we could tie to the movie. We're going to promote the availability of Angry Birds Rio, and we'll integrate the marketing of that game alongside the marketing of the film. It gave us a way to reach the 75 million Angry Birds fans.'
Saldanha is pleased at how far he has managed to integrate music into his narrative, while also promoting the film's ecological message. To Chris Wedge – currently overseeing production on a fourth Ice Age film (scheduled for summer 2012), and preparing to direct an adaption of the children's book The Leaf Men – Rio is about stretching his studio's skills: pushing Blue Sky's teams to constantly better what they can offer. 'I think this film has one of the strongest stories we've ever done – and the most appealing and obvious music focus. And also because the technology evolves every year, it's also the slickest film we've made. As an audience member it feels bigger but easier, somehow. It just feels more natural. And it looks beautiful.'
'Rio' is out on April 8
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