It Was No Picnic for the Artists

‘We are half thinking,” says Rex Grignon, one of two supervising animators on the new DreamWorks SKG release “Antz,” “that it would be wonderful if one of our characters got nominated for an acting award. Because, really, we are measuring ourselves against live action rather than conventional animation.”

This is (if you’ll pardon the expression) a large statement. Ants are, after all, among the tiniest and the least respected creatures on God’s Earth. We poison them, we squish them underfoot, we incinerate them with malignant magnifying glasses, without giving the wholesale slaughter a second thought. Insect holocausts occur daily behind the refrigerators of America.

But if all goes according to plan, the anthropomorphic comedy stars of “Antz,” which opened Friday, will fulfill the outsized hopes that are being pinned on them. (A second computer-generated imaging, or CGI, insect flick, Pixar and Disney’s “A Bug’s Life,” opens in December, and the rivalry is heating up.)

With an acknowledged nod to Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” “Antz” is the up-from-under-the-rock story of the only worker in the teeming colony who doesn’t want to go along with the crowd, who insists he is fed up with “this whole gung-ho super-organism thing. . . . When you’re the middle child in a family of 5 million,” the uppity ant-tagonist, known simply as Z, complains to his ant-shrink, “you don’t get a lot of attention. . . . [My father] flew away when I was just a larva.”

If the characterization and the humor seem a tad familiar, that’s partly by design. Z is portrayed vocally by Woody Allen, and the dialogue was tailored to his persona. “The first time we took the script to New York to show it to Woody,” producer Patty Wooten says, “he was amazed at how much it sounded like him. He said, ‘Somebody knows me very well.’ ”

A lot of people know him very well, which is just what the filmmakers are banking on. Although the aim of “Antz” is partly to push the craft of animation in a new direction, they recognize the need to ease the audience’s transition into this strange realm.

There’s a perfect example in the movie’s opening sequence, which was also the first glimpse offered to the public, when it was shown last year as a teaser trailer. Allen’s inimitable vocal stylings seem to pull us right down through the topsoil into the CGI dimension. With his help, we quickly accept these patterns of pixels, these configurations of coordinates in cyberspace, as living, emoting individuals.

“Somebody does need to wake up the Disney formula a little bit,” says “Antz” co-director Tim Johnson. “Jeffrey [Katzenberg, chief of DreamWorks Animation] was the one who perfected the formula at Disney. Now he sees that animation has grown in 15 years. What has it grown into? Let’s find out.”

The animation in “Antz” is, not surprisingly, way beyond cool in its subtlety and precision. (DreamWorks says the film’s budget is $42 million.) The crowd scenes, which depict up to 80,000 differentiated individuals at once, are almost disorienting: all that roiling detailreceding to the horizon. And there are more than 500 of these shots--many more than the filmmakers anticipated, before the custom-made crowd simulation software flexed its digital muscles.

Like all the other proprietary software systems used to create “Antz,” the crowd simulator was developed at the Silicon Valley headquarters of Pacific Data Images (PDI), which is co-producing the film with DreamWorks. Since its founding in 1980 by “Antz” executive producer Carl Rosendahl and others, PDI has been at the leading edge of developments in whiz-bang computer graphics. One of the first outfits to make a splash with “morphing” effects--in the Michael Jackson rock video “Black or White” and in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” both in 1991--PDI also created a digital stunt double for the Caped Crusader in “Batman Forever” (1995) and “Batman and Robin” (1997), an achievement that earned the high compliment of going unnoticed by almost everyone who saw those films.

The headquarters building of PDI, which occupies most of a city block within walking distance of downtown Palo Alto, looks distinctly more buttoned-down than, say, the cluttered hacker’s haven’t of Industrial Light & Magic, up the coast in San Raphael. PDI looks more like a corporate cubicle cluster out of “Dilbert”--although it’s a safe bet that very few insurance offices or law firms are festooned with this many pop culture trinkets, from Japanese robots and “Star Wars” action figures to space cruisers dangling from the light fixtures.

Working methods favored at PDI confirm the corporate vibe. Unlike the traditional Disney team approach, for instance, which assigns an animation supervisor and crew to one or two characters they stay with throughout the production, PDI hired supervising animators Rex Grignon and Ramen Hui to oversee the entire production. “We really distributed out the shots to all of the animators,” says Rosendahl. “An animator was assigned a certain number of shots out of a sequence, and animated all the characters in those shots. Ramen and Rex made sure that Z is always Z. You can always keep all of your animators busy, whether a specific character is in a sequence or not.”

Still, the one thing “Antz” isn’t (everyone here insists) is a project cooked up just because a backlog of technological tricks had accumulated and was crying out to be used. In fact, the technology has now advanced to the point that, in co-director Eric Darnell’s words, “it’s not a question of what we can possibly do, it’s what would be cool to do.”

At their first meeting with DreamWorks, in November 1995, Johnson, Darnell and the PDI team pitched their one-ant-against-the-colony concept. It was already clear, Rosendahl says, “that the story lent itself to computer animation. But once that decision was made, the directors told the crew, ‘Design what you think will make a great story. Let the guys in R&D; figure out how to get those pictures up there.’ ”

That emphasis on story over technology was a consistent theme, says character designer and supervising animator Hui, who has worked extensively in both hand-drawn “analog” animation and with computers. “Computer animation was just the medium that we’re using,” he says. “The primary concern was not what we could do to make it look nice--even though we did that.”

In fact, Hui says, it was sometimes hard for the animators to forget the people whose voices first brought the characters to life, to focus on them as CGI creations: “The first versions of Z that I drew looked like the head of Woody Allen, complete with red hair and glasses, on the body of an ant. It took about a year to go from drawing a human to drawing an ant that was expressive.”

By all reports, Hui--who ended up doing a lot of the key sequences with Z and his love interest, the uppity Princess Bala (voiced to perfection by Sharon Stone)--fulfilled the promise of the snazzy animation system--and then some. “At the storyboard stage,” producer Wooten admits, “I was not seeing the love interest between these two characters. And then I saw Ramen’s work in the dance sequence in the bar, which is their first meeting, and it made the hair rise on my arms.”

In the casting of voices, actors were favored over comedians or impressionists. Sylvester Stallone provided the chesty tones of Z’s best friend, a burly warrior named Weaver, with Jennifer Lopez and Danny Glover as helpful pals. Animators competed for the privilege of animating the chief meanies, voiced by Gene Hackman (Gen. Mandible) and Christopher Walken (Col. Cutter).

Supervising animator Grignon, who created and mostly animated the sinister general, reports that “a couple of the actors started off doing what they thought a cartoon voice should be, and it was way over the top. The directors’ response was, ‘That might be a certain type of animated movie, but it’s not what we’re doing. Play it as though you were acting the shot.’ ”

It’s all very well for a director to tell his animators, as Johnson did, “Listen to the words, but also listen to the emotion hiding behind the words. Show me that.” The “Antz” animators were prepared for that. It’s something else to create software tools that are supple enough to do the job. The goal was not just to create tools, but to make them as intuitive and “transparent” as possible.

“What we needed in order to generate crowds efficiently,” lead character technical wizard Luca Prasso says, “was to take a normal character and introduce variations. Make it taller, shorter, chubbier. We created a library of shapes, and we can mix and match motions and attach them to different characters.”

The versions of the characters that appear on Prasso’s computer screen as he talks are wire-frame outlines, without color or surface texture. But with the body movements abstracted, isolated from all the other qualities, the effect is even more riveting.

“Then the blending system puts the characters where they’re supposed to be,” Prasso says, “and gives them the right motion. You can tell a character, ‘At this location walk for 30 frames and then break into a run, run over here, stop, and look up in awe.’ And you can direct a thousand physically distinct characters to do that, across variable terrain.”

Prasso has counted 3,600 body types and 2,000 motion cycles, for a grand total of 760,000 possible variations--more than enough to make every ant in a crowd of 80,000 visibly different.

Technical character direction supervisor Beth Hofer says that ants are relatively easy to animate, because they don’t have visible muscles; their hard exoskeletons move in jointed segments. But given the kind of dramatic texture and acting depth the filmmakers wanted, the faces couldn’t be simplified to the same degree. They had to be fully expressive. So Hofer and her colleague Dick Walsh created a system of 300 individual muscles, based on a close study of human anatomy, layered over an ant “skull.”

“But we didn’t want the animators to have to manipulate all those muscles individually,” Hofer says, “so we put controls on top that are expression-based. There’s a sneer and a smile and a frown, and continuous controls for the degrees of those expressions. The animators could also put a smile over a sneer or a frown over a smile.The point is to be able to add effects in layers, so that, for instance, a character’s facial expression could be changed even after their lips have been synced to the dialogue.”

This function was usefully applied to a shot of thousands of soldier ants marching off to battle, singing a martial tune. The faces of the soldiers were first deployed by the crowd system. Then the pre-synced lip movements were added to all of the faces at once, like a single mask worn simultaneously by 60,000 individuals. “We couldn’t afford to store that many variations,” Prasso explains. “This was an interesting way of optimizing the data that we had.”

In the end, the intended transparency seems to have been achieved. According to Hui, “animation is the same kind of thinking process in both mediums. In terms of timing a performance, it’s still very much the same. The difference is that in one case you do it with a pencil, and in the other you do it by typing. It’s like you are drawing through a stick or a remote arm. You move your hand and the drawing appears over there. But by now I don’t feel that distance. I just do it.”

A few weeks before “Antz’s” first public screening, at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, directors Johnson and Darnell are still at work, on a sound-mixing stage at Universal. With a crack team of editors, they are scouring the soundtrack for clicks and pops and infinitesimal imbalances that people with untrained ears would probably never notice.

The directors are in a reflective mood. They are looking ahead not just to their own immediate futures, but to the future of the medium they’ve been working in, with tunnel-vision intensity, for 2 1/2 years.

“I hope people won’t focus on computer animation as a way to duplicate reality,” Johnson says. “You hear these horrifying rumors that someone’s going to synthesize Marilyn Monroe. It’s as though we were judging oil paintings by saying, ‘He’s the best because he paints the most realistically.’ ”

Nevertheless, Johnson asserts, “there’s a real aesthetic to the computer. It changes all the rules. You can’t get away with the exaggeration of a ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ or a Tex Avery cartoon. It would feel like parody, like the Avery effects they copied in ‘The Mask.’ I think computer animation is the marriage of the best of live action and the best of hand-drawn animation. What animation has is fantasy, creativity and a certain liveliness and exaggeration that is just fun to watch. From live action, you get a more dramatic sense of lighting, of physical depth, a tactile awareness of the world.”

From the beginning, Johnson says, “there was something about adopting an ant’s point of view, and presenting it in the kind of heightened reality that CG brings to the world, that really appealed to us.”

The most dramatic collision of man and insect occurs in a scene the animators call the “shoe-to-shoe”: Z and Bala, on a sojourn beyond the colony, stumble on what looks to us like a picnic lunch spread out on a checked table cloth. To the bugs, it’s the fabled lost city of Insectopia, where all good things come in skyscraper-sized, 16-ounce plastic bottles.

Insectopia is depicted exclusively as the ants see it. The jeans-clad legs of an oblivious boy seem to go up and up forever, until they recede to infinity. Time distortions also come into play: The boy’s bug-crushing sneakers glide past overhead with ponderous slowness, like a matched set of flying saucers. The ants, moving at what looks like normal speed, run around inside the human-scaled movements, with plenty of time to plot maneuvers, like swinging on a shoelace from one moving sneaker to another.

“That was something we talked about a lot,” Johnson says. “Ants only live for eight weeks--all the time references in the movie are keyed to that. We didn’t quite stick to the exact math of it, but it was always part of our thinking. Plus, if you had the shoe going by at normal speed it might look huge, but you wouldn’t feel it as huge. The audience has to believe that the other world out there is really big.”

The directors revert to their claim that CGI has now advanced to the point that film material will never again need to be tailored to its limitations. In effect, they insist, it has none.

“The exciting thing,” Johnson says, “is that stories that once could not have been effectively told are now available to the movies. You can tell stories that have a certain mythic weight to them, certain kinds of science fiction or fantasy material, that always looks a little cheesy in live action.”

The tools are bound to get even fancier. Software engineers like Hofer and Prasso are working under the hood even now, souping up the engine for its next outing. But there will always be a need for a “human interface,” for artists who can use the technology to make magic.

“With every art form,” Johnson says, “there’s a creative leap that we normal humans can’t do. But with animators it’s more bizarre than that. At least dancers move their bodies and create the motion for the audience. But an animator creates a still frame that will eventually become motion, and that is like no other art form. And as an animator I can tell you, there is no other rush like it.”*