Hello, I'm Rob Minkoff, director of Stuart Little...
and sitting with me is Henry Andersen, who is the...
- Animation supervisor. - Exactly.
Hello, everyone.
I suppose you're wondering how Stuart Little made it to the screen.
Well, of course, it started with a book...
written by the noted author E.B. White...
who also wrote Charlotte's Web.
Which is a book, I think, most people, or many people, are familiar with.
He wrote Stuart Little, actually, first...
and it was written in 1945, just after the war.
Now, how it got made into a movie is really, I guess...
the question that I'm going to answer.
Columbia Pictures had been developing the project as a script for many years.
They'd gone through many writers...
who'd written many drafts of different stories of it.
But it wasn't until Night Shyamalan wrote a draft of the screenplay...
which articulated the story of the feature film...
that we're seeing here...
did they actually green-light the picture...
and decide to go ahead with production.
And at that point...
I was hired as the director of the film.
Of course, my background was animation.
The last picture I had directed was The Lion King...
and in that picture, I was actually... I worked as a co-director.
In this picture, I was, you know... I'm credited as the director.
Although Henry here was a director in many respects...
working with the animators on the performance of the digital characters.
We had assembled a team of animators.
Those animators worked collectively as a group, almost like an actor.
So in creating Stuart, we put together our team of animators...
and then, under Rob's direction, we basically performed...
like the other actors in the movie.
That's Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie, who are playing Mr. and Mrs. Little.
Very excited about adopting what they think is gonna be a human child.
What's the difference...
between directing an animated film and a live-action film?
Of course, when you direct an animated film...
if you don't like the expression on a character, you can erase...
which...
It doesn't work with human actors, because, you know, it's...
Because you can't erase their eyebrows, basically.
You could try, I suppose, but I don't think they'd like it.
No, they probably wouldn't.
You know what's wonderful?
What's wonderful...
And Stuart's voice, of course, was provided by Michael J. Fox...
who is a fantastic actor with great comic timing.
Originally, the character was written as a 9-year-old boy...
and we thought, you know, maybe we should have a child play the part.
I think even Jonathan Lipnicki was considered...
to do the voice of Stuart before we cast him as George.
But I think Michael really brought the right quality...
you know, to express this character...
who had to be kind of worldly wise on the one hand...
but then innocent on the other...
without actually becoming, you know, too maudlin or treacly.
So he really was able to bring a great balance to the character...
in giving him, you know, kind of a warmth...
and a wit and a sense of humour and mischievousness...
that really combined to create, I think, you know, a rich personality.
We were trying not only for a ultra-realistic, very believable look...
but we wanted his actions to be very believable as well so the audience...
By this point in the movie, people have forgotten he's animated.
They're just starting to enjoy his performance...
and think about his personality.
And one of the things that we did to help get started in the process...
was hire an actor, Bill Irwin...
who is a pantomimist and a clown.
And he came in, actually, and both Henry and I worked with him...
and videotaped him going through various scenes from the script...
so he was physicalising a performance of Stuart...
to give a kind of a stepping-stone...
to what would eventually be Stuart's CGI performance.
One of the great things about Bill too is his, you know...
Remember how he described it as like eccentric dance?
His eccentric dance style.
And he did a little of that for us too.
And even though Stuart doesn't do much dancing in the film...
There's a certain way of being light on his feet that Bill's so great at...
that, you know, we all studied it as we were working on it.
But animation in general is a very choreographic, intensive art form.
Because what you're trying to do is convey attitude...
and character and thought process through the movement of the body.
And so, what an animator goes through in order to design that movement...
and to convey that feeling and that attitude...
has to go through what a dancer goes through...
in terms of using, really, his body to express these ideas.
Absolutely. And it's also the same, to a degree, as a musician.
Because with a piece of animation like Stuart...
it's really about pose and timing.
So you've got a nice, strong pose, set a certain frame...
and it's very syncopated.
Now, there are other ways that people can actually do these kinds of things.
One of them is called motion capture.
And what that is, is it's a fairly complex technology...
where you attach, I guess, these sensors...
to an actor or a dancer's body...
which correspond to key points on the digital character.
And when the actor or dancer moves...
the corresponding point on the CG character...
will move in a kind of a one-to-one relationship.
And that's how some of this work is done.
But Stuart was handled in a completely different process...
where you can actually create poses...
much the same way that you would do with a 3D animated picture...
you know, like a Ray Harryhausen movie.
King Kong or, you know, Jason and the Argonauts.
You know, all those pictures were done, where the sculptures were moved...
you know, one frame at a time and photographed.
And the difference in the CG world is that...
you can actually manipulate and alter...
once you've recorded those basic moves.
It gives you an opportunity to refine the performance in a way...
that a traditional, like, clay approach...
or traditional three-dimensional approach wouldn't allow you to do.
Now Stuart's home.
Exactly. He's checking out some of his new relatives.
Including his brother, George, played by Jonathan Lipnicki.
It's interesting because before this movie, I actually got to...
We all became familiar with Jonathan...
from his work in the movie Jerry McGuire...
- in which he was just so adorable. - So darn cute.
And we decided, based on that performance...
that we really wanted him to play George.
We were concerned he was too young...
because at the time we started shooting, he was 7 years old.
And what that means is, is you can only use him...
for four hours of the shooting day.
So it's very difficult to actually film with a child actor...
because of the demands that are placed on your schedule.
He's just about to get to meet up with Stuart here.
This whole sequence, the animators had a lot of fun doing...
because it's so emotional.
You know, Stuart's really excited because he came home from...
He's adopted, he's home with the family.
But he starts to get a little confused.
And everybody had a great time animating this.
Yeah, this is Sean Mullen's... Did all this work, the digital...
All the drops that flew off him before...
there's effects throughout the movie. Very subtle in most cases...
but droplets of water, different things with his clothing...
all different effects that, again, try to get Stuart solidly in the movie.
Or did he seem a little disappointed?
Now, one of the things you might notice is the design...
of not only the house but costumes, and of the actors, and the hairstyles.
And all these things were to evoke a kind of period feel in the film.
Something that might have been appropriate in the 1940s or '50s...
around the time the book was written.
And this was to really set the world of this film apart...
from the world that we live in.
Because one of the things that occurred to me...
when I started on the picture...
and one of the, you know, sort of directions...
I wanted to take with the material, was to make sure...
that the world that Stuart existed in...
was a world that was recognisable but different from our own.
Because it seemed to me...
if the film looked too much like contemporary reality...
something that was too recognisable or too immediately recognisable...
that it would be confusing that the people didn't act disturbed...
that he's talking, because he's a mouse.
Which is, you know...
if you actually had a mouse walk into your house and start talking...
I don't think you'd be treating him quite the way the Littles do.
- Or anyone else in the film. - No, not at all.
This scene in which Snowbell confronts Stuart...
was actually created later in the process.
We'd shot the film and cut it together, and decided that we needed a scene...
to establish the comic relationship between Snowbell and Stuart.
So for this scene, we hired two writers...
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski...
who had written The People vs. Larry Flynt, Ed Wood, Man on the Moon.
And they came in and actually wrote this scene...
one of the comic highlights, I think, in the picture.
And certainly gets the comedy of Snowbell off to a roaring start.
And it allowed Stuart and Snowbell to get closer.
Plus, Stuart got out of the bed. In the other, he never got out.
And this shot coming up right now, I'm so glad we got to do this.
Love when he chases him back.
And you'll notice he trips because his tail gets stretched.
Snowbell actually steps on his tail...
stretches it out, and causes Stuart to fall.
One of the things that's fun about a project like this is...
we're all so familiar with the conflict between a cat and a mouse.
We've seen that, obviously, with Tom and Jerry and other characters.
- Itchy and Scratchy come to mind. - Natural antagonists.
But I don't think we've ever actually seen a real cat...
and somewhat of a real mouse...
having this kind of a fun, you know, cartoon relationship.
So this was actually... The sequence coming up here...
with the bathroom and everything, was...
as we were talking about, was one of the first things shot...
and one of the first we started animation on.
These shots here of Stuart coming out and then going in the bathroom...
were some of the first shots we did of Stuart. And...
It was also some of the first scenes we shot in the live action.
What's interesting about this is, you have to imagine...
when we shot this originally, there was no Stuart.
So everything was shot as an empty frame.
We had to imagine Stuart's performance.
So when he was walking up the ladder or walking across the table...
you know, the cameramen had to follow an imaginary Stuart...
because there was nothing there to watch.
We did have some little puppets on the stage that we used...
just to block out the action, but then, as you're saying...
the actors had to sort of imagine him. And remember the laser?
Yes, that's right.
- Love the dot? - Love the dot. Exactly.
That was the technique we used, a laser pointer called Synchromark...
that was slaved to the camera shutter speed...
so you could actually point the laser and the actors would be able to see it...
but the camera wouldn't photograph it...
because when the camera shutter was open, the laser would be off.
That was great to get everybody to look in the right place.
Because one of the most important things that you have to deal with...
is the actors shooting the scene...
are not shooting, or not doing the scene with a real character...
but they have to know where to look...
because if their eyes aren't directly focused at the character...
it really destroys the illusion.
Originally, Stuart was meant to be trapped in the refrigerator...
but we decided a washing machine might be a bit more perilous...
obviously since it's going to be filled with water.
That's odd.
We knew we wanted a moment...
for Snowbell to actually come in and see Stuart in the washing machine.
Of course, the comic possibilities were tremendous for this moment...
but we couldn't come up with the right line...
for Snowbell to say to Stuart...
so we turned to Ed Stone, who had written Happy, Texas...
and he came in and in minutes he came up with this brilliant line.
Why would I turn it off?
It's my favourite show.
Which was one of the funniest lines, I think, in the movie.
- You can't leave me! - Talk to the butt.
Snowbell, where are you going?
I've gotta stare at traffic, yawn, lick myself.
Believe me, that could take hours.
There's a shot coming up here...
You know, when Geena's at the door, right here...
she says Stuart's having the time of his life.
This was one of the last shots we did...
because this one, right here, wasn't...
We just got the budget so we could put it in.
And it's one of the best shots in the movie.
It's so beautiful because it was one of the last things...
and everybody was completely working at full capacity.
And we had incredible effects by Rob Bredow added to that shot.
Stuart!
In the original script, there was a line that Stuart said.
You know, he screamed, "Mom, I'm trapped in the Maytag!"
We tried to get the licence to use a Maytag washer but we couldn't.
So we ended up using a Frigidaire, which I think is very important.
Except that we modified it...
because the glass...
They have those new washing machines which look like old washing machines.
We wanted that because you could see Stuart through the window of it.
It's important to stage the scene where Stuart can look out...
and, you know, Ms. Little could look in or Snowbell could look in.
If it was a regular washing machine, most machines are top-loading...
and how would you stage something with a top-loading washing machine?
- You couldn't spill him onto the floor. - Exactly.
- So that last sequence had... - Dabney Coleman.
Yeah. And a couple of the few shots that had puppets of Stuart.
- There aren't too many animatronics. - Animatronics, by Patrick Tatopoulos.
Capital T. But, yeah, they weren't...
We had hoped to do more with animatronics...
at the beginning of the project.
One of the reasons is for, you know, cost, because...
It's expensive to build an animatronic. There are so many moving parts...
and they all have to be machined for the one usage.
You know, if you can actually...
Every scene of the CGI Stuart is so vastly expensive...
- the more animatronic shots you get... - We're not that expensive, are we?
It's outrageously expensive.
- And if I were you, I wouldn't pay it. - That's right.
- But look at what you get. - Exactly.
There's so much flexibility with the CGI character.
- That's the thing. - The animatronic, ultimately...
And particularly one that's so small, is you have all these tiny parts...
and so they don't move very gracefully.
And so we tended to wanna stay as kind of as far away as you could...
or else you could pretty much tell that it was an animatronic.
Stuart is a little embarrassed there that he scurries about.
This is Taylor Negron...
who's a character actor we hired to play the salesman.
I mean, we only use one take...
but remember some of his takes? They were absolutely hilarious.
- And here's Ben. - Ben.
I never asked you, did that name come from anywhere particularly? Ben?
- It must have been a play on Ken. - Yes, that makes sense.
It was in Night's script. I think he invented the idea.
The Ben doll.
It was very important in the first draft, as I recall.
- Might have been his Uncle Ben. - That's right.
- Gentle Ben. - Gentle Ben.
I think I have just the thing.
There they are.
Speaking of Stuart's clothes, one of the gags that we wanted to do...
was to actually have Stuart appear in various outfits.
But it turned out that to create an outfit in the CGI...
you know, to create a digital outfit for Stuart was like...
$100,000, per outfit.
So we couldn't afford it.
So instead we just showed them on the Ben dolls.
- Right. - Is that a boring excuse?
No, that's not a boring excuse, it's a practical excuse.
But, you know, the cost has come down.
We've learned a lot doing the fabric.
Since you brought up the clothes, I wanted to say one thing.
And that it is, you know, the team that worked on it...
headed up by Jim Berney and Mike Travers...
they, you know, it's...
We've seen clothing on digital characters before...
but I don't think with this degree of realism.
And there's a lot of consideration...
not only for the type of weave and things like that, but for Stuart's scale.
He's so small that his clothing's gonna bend differently...
than if he was 6 feet tall.
So these guys worked very hard on trying to...
not only get the fabric to bend and to have the right weave and things...
but also to have a sense of the scale we were trying to get in the animation.
Now we have two favourite little nephews.
Here's the introduction of the Little family...
which is, of course, an important element of the story, thematically...
because the story really is about how Stuart, who's a mouse...
is trying to find his place in this human family.
Attention, everybody.
And, really, when they meet him, no one knows what to say.
- Exactly. - And Stuart, at this point...
I mean, again, as the animation supervisor on the film...
I had to sort of think like Stuart quite a bit.
I mean, Rob's aware that I wrote a pretty long bio of Stuart...
before we started the film...
so that I could get an idea of who this character was.
And it was based on the Stuart character from the E.B. White book...
as well as Night's script.
And so you really have to be concerned at all times...
with doing the right thing for Stuart.
What's he really like as a personality and what is he thinking?
So when he meets the family here, those first few scenes you saw...
and throughout these scenes as he's getting presents...
you feel the sense that Stuart...
What I was thinking he was feeling is, this elation at being adopted...
but he too is not completely immune...
to the sense of awkwardness that's going on there.
So even with what he's having to say...
he's still a little bit unsure of himself.
And I think Michael's performance helped that too. Rob?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
You know, I have to also say...
we've credited the influence that Bill Irwin had on us...
and Buster Keaton also was a big influence...
but Michael too. Michael's voice drives a lot of what the character does.
I mean, his pauses and his inflections, and his feeling for the character.
And he really was a great choice of voice, I think, for this character...
because he has a sophistication...
but at the same time, he's youthful and energetic.
I'm sure you thought about that when you cast him.
Absolutely. One of the most important things, I think...
is the voice of the character...
because the performance starts there and you have to build on that.
If you don't find the voice...
one that's gonna inspire a great performance...
in animation or in movement...
you know, you really won't have a complete character.
When you think of great performances in animation...
I think you definitely... The voice goes hand in hand with it.
And in the case with Stuart, for me...
I felt like we definitely got a blend of the two.
Sometimes with an animated character, the voice will overpower it a bit...
you might see that actor every time you hear the voice...
even though the character is animated.
But I think with this one, Michael is just a good blend...
because his voice is characterful and, you know, expressive...
but at the same time, it doesn't overpower.
It sort of blends and really becomes Stuart.
Right.
Yeah, what do you say, George?
At first we weren't sure whether we were gonna cast a child...
because in the script, he was described as a 9-year-old.
We thought, well, if we actually got a 9-year-old to play the part...
would that be really appropriate in terms of how to tell this story?
And my feeling was, is I wanted to...
I wanted Stuart, actually, to feel, in a sense...
like an older brother to George.
Even though he's physically smaller...
I wanted the relationship to be of an old...
Of kind of a mentor, you know, for George.
That George was the one that needed guidance...
and Stuart was able to actually help him...
by giving him good advice.
This also was... Just back with animation for a second.
This was one of the first things we did.
That's Todd Wilderman, animated that shot.
These were some of the first shots we did.
And it's really interesting how Stuart really changed his physicality.
Even though I actually thought when we started this project...
because it was a digital character...
and that it was physically three-dimensional sculptures...
that you'd make in the computer, he would look consistent, the same.
That was one thing you always had to worry about in traditional animation...
was how the drawing was gonna look because different artists...
just physically draw differently...
and it's difficult to make the drawings look the same.
Well, with Stuart, he'll have to look the same...
because he's the same in every shot.
But it's amazing to me that, depending on the animator...
- he'll take on a different appearance. - The animation and also the lighting.
The lighting makes a huge difference...
because just like when you're lighting an actor, it's...
Stuart, you'll see throughout the movie, even if he was just standing still...
you would see a different mouse in some lighting setups.
Like, this one's kind of nice.
Stuart actually looks the best to me when he sort of gets a glancing light...
because it brings out his brows and a lot of the structure in his face...
that when he's lit a little more flatly, disappears because he's all white.
It's like trying to light a golf ball and be able to see the dimples.
If the light doesn't hit at an angle, it's really difficult to see.
I think in some of the scenes...
he's a bit flat because we were having to match lighting...
that was coming from all over the place.
The ones where it's kind of source light coming from one side or the other...
where there's a stronger source light, he really looks great.
And those shots we saw there with the empty space sequence...
those were some of the first close-ups we did.
I don't know if you remember that, Rob. When he was looking over the knees?
I'm so used to seeing this with the fur and everything...
but it was just astounding to see those shots a year and a half ago.
And to see those first close-up expressions.
I think, actually, Jason, the producer, those were the shots he talked about...
when he wasn't sure how it was gonna actually look...
and then when he saw those, he was sort of able to relax and say:
"Wow, you guys are gonna be able to pull this off."
Now, this scene is a great example of the work...
that was done by the animal trainers...
whose job it was to train the cats and get them to do a performance.
Because, just like Stuart...
they had to appear to be thinking, you know, talking characters.
And when you think about what it takes to get a cat to do this stuff...
it's mind boggling...
because cats are almost impossible to train.
And Boone Narr and his group...
did just a marvellous job, with this scene in particular.
But this was a case of actually creating a lot of this choreography...
once we got into the kitchen.
We had the set built and we discovered using different levels of the kitchen...
actually helped define the performance...
so that all these moments between the characters came across clearly.
If you have cats just standing and staring at each other, talking...
really, nothing happens.
And, you know, there's no impression of life...
which you could get with live actors...
you know, doing a performance, but not with cats.
So all of this stuff, this movement, you know, that was designed, really...
to try to convey the different emotional beats, was really critical.
And then it just takes so much painstaking attention to detail...
to get these cats to try take after take...
to get these cats to do what you want them to do.
You fool the cats into doing it...
because, you know, you can't... They won't...
You can't just ask a cat to do something.
You have to, you know, you have to guide it or trick it.
One of the techniques that they had was...
Which was interesting, was similar to the actors'.
We had was the laser pointer for the cats to look at.
So that in a scene, some of these scenes...
they would shine a light on the door or on the floor...
and get the cats to look at it and stop and react to it.
Other times they would have a light wand...
they turn on and get the cat to pay attention.
So here, like, the cat has to go from looking one direction to another.
It requires two trainers, generally, to get the cat's performance...
or get them to look back and forth.
But all of these moments which are expressing this kind of...
vital personality...
it's amazing even to me...
even though I've seen it every step of the way.
When you look at it all together and when the cutting is finished...
and when all the bits and pieces that you find are all put together...
and you believe these cats are thinking and talking.
And he is talking to this mouse that wasn't there.
That's right. It's amazing.
And I think we also should give some credit to Tom...
Tom Finan, the editor. He did a fantastic job.
Yeah, because he had to sift through...
however many tens of thousands of feet to try to find things.
Because, as you were saying, the movements of the cats...
to get them to synch up with dialogue so it looked like they were acting...
Tom had to go through thousands of feet...
and try to get bits of action that had been shot, that would line up.
Because the guys at Rhythm & Hues doing the facial animation...
one of the frustrations for them is they can't move the whole head...
and they can't move the torso...
to get the acting into the reading of dialogue.
So they really relied on Tom's choices.
- And Centropolis'. - And Centropolis, yes.
Centropolis and Rhythm & Hues.
No mice were injured in the production of this motion picture.
The other thing that you might notice is that some of the cats are different.
In this shot this is Rocky, the crazy cat...
who would go running, you know, at the drop of a pin.
There are other cats.
Prince was the star cat, who did all of the close-up work...
where we had to get close and see his expressions...
because he just actually had a more intense gaze and stare.
So throughout the film, there were several different cats...
playing each one of the roles.
Interesting how they had different motivations.
- Like, Prince was so calm. - Yeah.
He was very calm. He'd just sit there for 15, 20 minutes if asked to.
And so now Stuart's fallen into the basement.
He's met up with George again, his old pal.
This was actually the very last scene that we shot...
in principal photography.
This was something we all dreaded.
We didn't wanna go to the basement.
- It was dark down there. - It was really, really complicated.
It was probably the most complicated thing to shoot...
because Jonathan, who is 7 years old...
had to play this whole scene with so many dramatic turns in it...
with a mouse who wasn't ever there.
And, you know, just the demands that we had to place on him...
were so incredible that we all...
were just worried, not only for him but for ourselves...
about how long or how difficult it would be to get some of these shots.
Stuart was very concerned about having to do this shot.
- Absolutely. - He was afraid of that train.
But you know what? Stuart does all his own stunts.
Except those that Delio Tramontozzi animated for him.
I have to say we had one animator who did most of the shots...
where you'd say Stuart was doing something death-defying, like climbing.
- And he did them all? - He did all of them.
He sort of became Stuart's stunt double.
See now, this is Stuart's car.
It's actually George's car but it becomes Stuart's.
But this was based on a scene from the book...
in which Stuart visits the dentist, I believe.
- Is it the dentist? - Yeah. The dentist.
- The dentist has a little car like this. - That car could become invisible.
The one difference between that car and this car it could become invisible.
But we really were inspired by the idea of Stuart being able to travel...
in these different, like, you know, miniature things.
Not only the car but the Wasp.
At one time, early in the development of the project...
we were contemplating the idea of a toy airplane.
Of a kind of remote-controlled plane that Stuart would fly over Manhattan.
That was something that we had wanted to do...
and, ultimately, we abandoned that idea.
You know, with each of the animators, there was a...
I sort of worked with Rob. We'd cut the movie, I'd look at the shots...
and then I would cast the animators, depending on which animator...
I thought had the right sensibilities for that shot.
A lot of stuff we just went through was done by Pepe Valencia...
and had to be done very, very carefully...
very subtle, very, very subdued. The acting in a lot of this...
This one's very nice too. This is Kelvin Lee's shot.
And this next one coming up...
can kind of go from being subdued to being a little more enthusiastic.
What do you say?
Let's get started.
You know...
I'm not really sure I want a brother.
Well, how about a friend?
I guess I could always use a friend.
- George? - Yes, Dad?
Have you seen Stuart?
He's down here with me.
What are you doing to him?
This scene was Hugh Laurie's very last scene.
Just after we shot this scene, he went back to London.
That was actually an interesting thing. Hugh Laurie is a British actor.
And although he was playing an American...
he had to adopt an American accent to do it.
And in our first audition...
I actually held the audition over the telephone...
because he was in London and I was in the United States.
And I needed to hear what his American accent would be like...
to know that it was gonna work for the film.
And it was something that he, you know, focused himself on...
and he did a remarkable, remarkable job...
nailing an American accent...
which is not easy at all. It's very difficult.
A lot of British actors try to do it, some more successful than others.
But Hugh did a tremendous, tremendous job.
And then later on when he came back in...
once the film was shot and was finished...
he had to come in to do some loop lines.
And we set up a telephone session.
It was an ISDN session where he was in London and I was here...
and we were going through the ADR. loops...
and because he was in London...
he had a whole crew of British people surrounding him...
and his accent was just not as good as what he did in production.
Ultimately he flew to New York where we went through the session again.
And in those circumstances, in that environment...
it made it easier for him to focus and concentrate...
so that he could recapture something...
that he had actually done almost a year before.
So that was quite a challenge.
And one of the compliments paid to his performance was...
that someone was sitting in dailies one day and said:
"Gee, I thought he was British." I said, "Well, he is British."
And they were amazed he did such a credible American accent.
That's a beautiful painting. You're, like, right there.
Pork chop lake.
If you're listening to the audio track...
I guess you won't be listening to us. But if you switch over...
you'll be hearing Stan Freberg...
who's doing the announcer for the boat race.
And Stan Freberg is famous for doing many, many...
Not only his own radio shows and records...
kind of and comedy records. He's the original "Weird AI" Yankovic.
But he did a lot of cartoon voices. He did Pete Puma.
He did the beaver from Lady and the Tramp.
He did the baby from the three bears cartoons.
One of my favourite series of cartoons from Chuck Jones.
He was doing that the night we recorded.
He can still do that voice very well. It was pretty funny.
But to be on the safe side, I better check the hull for leaks.
Whoop, there goes Stuart.
Down the hatch.
Now this scene also was shot indoors, on Stage 30.
And what we had to do was convert...
what was originally built as Esther Williams' swimming pool...
and we turned it into the boat pond in Central Park.
But all of these shots were done indoors on that sound stage...
which made it very difficult to light properly...
so that it would look believably outdoors...
even though it was shot indoors.
So there were huge banks of lights in the top of the set.
Coming up here is one of my favourite sequences of Stuart...
where he's carrying the remote.
And this is one of the sequences where we used a digital prop.
This is a digital remote control, as opposed to a real one.
And most of the time, to try to integrate...
a CG character into a live-action world...
you try to have that character interact with the environment.
Whether it means bumping it or... See those pebbles?
That was another effects animation.
There are little pebbles skittering as Stuart runs around.
They try to include those things...
just to really solidly put the character in the scene.
Most of the time that stuff isn't gonna draw attention to itself...
but it's picked up by the audience.
You can see the reflection also. Stuart's reflection in the remote.
There went some more rocks. Saw those going there.
And Eric Armstrong did most of these.
Remember that? He did that whole sequence, Eric.
I know how worried you are about losing, believe me.
But you know what we say? The thing that really matters...
This scene is very interesting.
The history of this scene, George and Mr. Little talking.
When we blocked the scene...
we did not have a scene written in the script that existed in that spot.
And as we blocked the scene, it was obvious to me...
that there was an important moment of storytelling...
that was necessary for that moment between George and his dad.
The night before we shot the scene, I jotted down some ideas...
and then the following morning, before we shot the scene...
I called Lowell Ganz...
who was one of the writers who was doing work on the script.
And I said, "You gotta help me." This was his day off.
I said, "Please, I'm supposed to shoot this scene...
and I have this idea but it really needs a writer's polish."
So I was literally on the phone with him as we were going through the scene...
and he was giving me lines and stuff and I was taking dictation...
and about half an hour later...
I ran onto the set with the scene for the actors to do.
And it became a very important scene in the storytelling...
because it's where Mr. Little gives George the advice to never give up...
which is kind of a critical thematic element through the story.
And it's something that Stuart actually embodies.
Well, that's the thing. It was really great how it worked out...
because he's saying that at the same time that Stuart is...
never stopping trying.
Exactly. He's struggling with the remote but he doesn't give up.
- Till it gets crushed. - Right.
So, what does that say about Hugh's moral lesson?
- The point is, the remote gets crushed. - That's right.
And Stuart doesn't give up...
and the next beat of the scene is that he ends up...
- on the boat. - Exactly. He really doesn't stop.
He doesn't give up. He's a plucky mouse.
He absolutely is. That's Stuart's character.
He really doesn't see his limitations.
I have to say, even though the script mentions him as a mouse...
for me, Stuart the character, I never thought of him as a mouse.
He's a character who happens to have some of the characteristics of a mouse.
- He looks somewhat like a mouse. - Somewhat. Just like George said.
All of this material on this side of the bridge...
was shot indoors on Stage 30 at Columbia.
But once they get out beyond the bridge...
they're in the larger pond, where, really, the race takes place.
And all of that material was shot in the tank.
It's an outdoor tank at Paramount Pictures.
- Most of the year is a parking lot. - Normally a parking lot.
But they got rid of all the cars and filled it with water.
And then they turned it into the boat pond.
Some of the boats, interestingly...
We actually had to design each one of these ships.
Give them all names. And one of the things that we did was...
create over-scaled ships so we could get some of the shots...
that you're seeing here. If the boats were too small...
you couldn't get close enough to the ships with the camera...
and the depth of field would be a problem.
So some of the boats are actually twice as big as the regular boats.
Then all of them are being pulled along tracks...
you know, so that you could do a shot...
and the choreography would be established by the tracks.
And then if you needed to redo the take...
you'd actually be able to pull the boats backward...
back to their original position and then rerun it.
As opposed to doing it all with just free remote-control boats...
which would be almost impossible to repeat any kind of action.
The photography of those boats...
the plates, all the boats were match-moved...
where there's a computer version of the boat...
which is lined up with the live-action version.
I love this shot where he gulps. You can see the blowing fur on there.
That's very nice. And his clothing blowing.
All that's match-moved...
and then Stuart is put into the boat and tracked with the shot.
- What is he doing? - I think he's hiking out.
I like shots like this. There he goes. He brings himself up.
In a lot of the close-ups in the boat race...
you will see the blowing fur and blowing clothing...
as well as the animation...
the normal animation that we did on the clothing.
This was another scene that was inspired by the book.
There's a very important scene where Stuart sails the Wasp...
although the Wasp in the book is owned by...
By the doctor?
I think so. I think it is. Yeah, it is.
- But we decided to try... - That's how he meets him.
Meets him in the park with the boat.
He sails the boat to victory, the doctor brings him back, gives him the car.
So we knew we wanted to use that...
because it's a very important set piece in the book.
And it's something people who have read the book remember distinctly.
And yet we incorporated that into our story about the family.
So, of course, we gave the Wasp to George.
And here you'll get to see Stuart's teeth.
Because he has a real set of human-modelled...
Human teeth.
Actually, one of the executives at Sony Pictures Imageworks...
provided Stuart's dental work.
- That would be Barry. Barry Weiss. - Barry Weiss.
Something's wrong.
So, meanwhile, Stuart's struggling with the boat.
We're about to see... I think this one was kind of our tribute...
to Douglas Fairbanks here, when he slides down the sail.
Sort of like The Thief of Bagdad.
Yeah!
Of course, the Manhattan skyline is a matte painting that was added later.
So all those shots... Many of the shots done on the bridge...
facing the crowd on the bridge, were done against a blue screen.
Now here we're about to the point where one of the shots that we had...
That we cut from the movie. We went directly here to the trophy.
- Remember the...? - Exactly.
- But then it made its way back in. - Right.
- But I think it was a good decision. - Yeah.
The family is actually made up of a bunch of great character actors.
I wanted to point some of them out.
Besides Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie...
we have Harold Gould, you'll notice, with the white hair.
Next to him is Allyce Beasley.
That's Jeffrey Jones...
who you'll recognise from Beetlejuice and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
- Amadeus too. - And Amadeus. Exactly.
And Connie Ray's in the background.
That's Patrick O'Brien with the camera.
- Brian Doyle-Murray. - Brian is on the left.
Brian Doyle being the brother of Bill Murray.
This is the happiest moment of my life.
And they really made a wonderful, sort of quirky family...
which is the quality we were trying to convey for the Littles.
We thought, "What kind of family would want to adopt a mouse as a child?"
We needed to come up with some eccentric characters...
to make that believable.
And just when Stuart is at the pinnacle of his happiness...
- The rug is pulled out from under him. - Fate rings his doorbell.
In the form of two little mice played by Bruno Kirby and Jennifer Tilly.
- Bruno being the short one. - Wonderfully played, I might add.
Jennifer, actually, when we were modelling the mouse...
the Camille Stout mouse...
we actually made some modifications to the model...
to make it look a little bit more like Jennifer.
Took one of her headshots and sort of made some modifications...
You see that peanut? They spent a great deal of time...
trying to make that digital peanut look like a real peanut.
With little particles breaking off when he bit it.
And this was a... When we got into doing this section...
I think for the animators, this was a lot of fun.
Pretty much all the animators wanted to do the Stouts...
because they loved the voices, they gave a lot of character.
And also, it was great having two characters to react.
See how she puts her arm up on him and reacts?
It's really great to have two or more characters in a shot...
so you can get them to play off one another.
You can touch one another.
They can help direct your eye where you're supposed to be looking.
One can move and the other one can kind of stop, go back and forth.
And through this whole thing we wanted Reginald Stout...
to just keep eating peanuts. That's his theme.
One thing about how this scene was created...
when we shot this scene on the set...
Jim Doughan, who actually appears in the film as Detective Allen...
You'll see them later in the film.
And he's one of the voices of the cats, Lucky.
He was reading all of Stuart's dialogue on the set.
That was his original job.
When we went through the scenes with the actors, he'd read lines off camera.
He did the same for the Stouts in this scene.
And he got a barrel full of ice cream cones...
that he was using to make the sound of the peanuts.
As he would deliver the lines, he was chomping on the cones...
and making a pig of himself.
And that's what Geena and Hugh are reacting to...
to give all those great, wonderful reactions to Mr. Stout eating peanuts.
And this shot here was one of the most difficult shots in the movie...
coming up when the Stouts are gonna come in and join Stuart.
Because the...
Not only are there three characters in the shot and each one of them was...
a fairly heavy character on the computer to deal with...
but also it's a really long shot.
It's one of the longer shots in the movie.
- Here it comes now. - This shot?
Yeah, this one right here.
And again, I'm sure you, you know, had to do a lot of this on Lion King...
but the choreography of a scene like this is really important.
When a character is talking and when another character is talking...
we're directing the audience where to look.
So I think that one... I was very happy with that shot.
Hey, taxi!
What's a mouse have to do to get a cab in this city?
And now we're outside.
This is another really nice shot. The weight of the bag.
Yeah. And the reflection in the water of Stuart.
But everything. I think the lighting in this particular scene...
the way it was photographed, is very successful...
in conveying the mood and the atmosphere for this...
very critical, emotional scene in the movie.
And it helps bring out the contours in Stuart and in the Stouts.
Because when they are, you know, those light colours, it's really hard.
The shot where she's gonna pick him up...
this is all another big tracking job.
Just speaking technical for a minute, to track Stuart into the hand...
and to get him to feel like he's truly in the hand...
and she kissed him, a lot of lining up.
But in that shot, what's interesting is that...
Stuart was added but the actual bag, the suitcase was physically there.
That was a prop that was built for Hugh to pick up.
Like this one coming up as he goes down.
- This is a long shot too. - The bag is real but Stuart is not.
See how Stuart keeps trying to look at Mom? This is one that was...
There's one thing at the end of this animation.
It's not really that noticeable, but something we added last minute.
Watch how he will... Dave Mullins animated this shot.
Watch how he'll put his hands on the bag...
and he looks down and just lets it... drop off.
It just says everything. He's so crestfallen and heartbroken.
Boy, that looks heavy.
See, they just fit.
Camille?
The other kind of liberty we were taking...
was this whole notion that Mr. Stout hails a cab.
How do mice travel in Manhattan? I guess they travel like everybody else.
It's funny because the whole world they live in...
is just where talking animals are just a part of life.
I mean, no one seems to really bat an eye.
If a mouse comes and sits down at a diner for a cup of coffee...
- they bring it to him. - Exactly.
But you're not.
She is.
Stuart!
Here comes George with the car.
George?
See that little animation in the back between Reggie and Camille?
We sort of play... It's very subtle. We played that like, "The jig is up."
Only after you've seen the film...
do you recognise that the Stouts are not really Stuart's parents.
And there's a whole reality that has to be played...
about what they're thinking as all this stuff is going on.
Just like Stuart...
the animators had to understand who the Stouts were...
a little bit about their background and their motivation.
In fact, we sort of played it...
that Camille really did want to have a child and she couldn't.
- So this was her opportunity. - One of my favourite shots.
- I kept making Henry redo it. - He did, he did.
Initially, we were doing a waving thing.
And Rob kept saying, "No, put the hand up. Just leave it up."
- And you were right. - That's a thing about performance...
in this medium, is that...
the tendency to overdo things is common among animators.
I think they get excited they can move things around.
- Certainly, I'm not guilty of that. - No, no, no. Never.
But that's always... The temptation is to do as much as possible.
Is to make everything moving at the same time.
I think the difference between the better-quality animation...
is that there's a simplicity to it.
That there's a directness and a simplicity.
That's what Henry and I talked about when we were starting on the project.
To try to make sure that the sensibility of the performance...
- was really in line with that. - I think the animators, by and large...
I mean, we did have some experienced animators on our crew.
We also had a lot of young animators who hadn't been doing this for long.
And I think that being able to focus on one character...
for this many shots...
I think all of us learned a lot. And they certainly learned.
By the time we got to the end of the film...
I think we were...
We'd like to have gone back and redone a few shots.
The bridge shot, the Brooklyn Bridge shot...
was actually one of the few things that was shot on location.
So that was actually shot in New York.
The first shot being, you know, achieved on a helicopter.
And then the other ones done actually on the bridge.
Which if you haven't been to Manhattan, there's a walkway...
a pedestrian walkway in the bridge...
which is where we ended up putting the car.
This shot coming up, I like very much as well...
because the lighting on this...
also gave really nice form to the characters.
The light coming from up there and the interaction...
That's all CG. CG suitcase, CG cloth on the bed.
If you look in the background, you'll notice a baseball card...
and it's Willie Mays.
- Was that from your collection? - No, but I grew up in the Bay Area.
So the San Francisco Giants were important in my youth...
and Willie Mays was, you know, a hero.
I think Stuart might be more of a Yankees fan.
Possibly.
There he is.
Now, this was where the "have breakfast" sequence used to be.
Yes, the "have breakfast" sequence.
There was a whole scene where Stuart...
was sitting at the table with the Stouts...
where they we talking to him about what they were gonna do.
Later on, Stuart was interested to find out more about his mouse family...
and Mr. Stout suggested...
they go to an Italian restaurant and forage through a dumpster.
Which didn't make it in the final cut.
He also told Stuart, "Never trust them."
- "Never trust family." - Yeah. "Family. Never trust them."
But first, how are things going?
- Oh, it's been difficult. - Difficult?
No, very difficult.
This is one where there's some good editing on Snowbell.
So that Snowbell appears to be hearing what's going on here.
The interesting challenge about the movie in general was...
how to treat the cats.
Because Stuart can talk to the people...
but you'll notice that the cats never talk to the people.
The logic there, which is sort of a logical illogic...
is that the cats, being real cats, act as pets in the family.
And that they could talk with Stuart, Stuart could talk with them...
but Stuart was the only one who talked to humans.
At first, when we were talking about this idea...
everybody was a bit nervous about how that would come across...
and whether people would question it.
And what we found is once we established that rule...
that pattern of behaviour...
that people just didn't even recognise it.
People don't even notice it.
Two-for-one sale.
That's a very heavy soup.
That, of course, is Julia Sweeney...
who you might remember from on Saturday Night Live, who played...
One of her most familiar characters is Pat...
the gender-confused character.
But they've been gone for years.
Years?
And coming up is the one place where we kind of bent the rule a little bit...
because you'll hear a vocal performance by Nathan Lane...
who plays Snowbell...
in that shot where he reacts to the fact they're gonna call in the police.
Dear, we have to take this up with the police.
So in this scene, the police detectives arrive.
And you'll see that's Jim Doughan getting out of the car.
And with Jim is Jon Polito, who's a great character actor.
I'm Detective Sherman.
- Allen and Sherman. Allen Sherman. - Exactly.
Detective Sherman and Detective Allen, which is a tribute to Allan Sherman.
Slightly obtuse reference.
I don't think we've talked about Steve Zahn yet, who's just amazing.
Oh, yeah, Steve Zahn, who is just an incredible, incredible comic actor...
did the voice of Monty.
The voice of Smokey is done by Chazz Palminteri...
who I'm sure you're familiar with. He plays a lot of gangsters.
That was the quality that we wanted to convey with Smokey...
who's the leader of the underworld cats.
And Nathan Lane. Nathan, of course, playing the part of Snowbell...
and playing it quite brilliantly.
And Monty, who is kind of Snowbell's goofball sidekick.
The cat who played Monty...
those particular markings, I think, were...
Really worked well with the animation.
He has probably one of the more expressive faces.
I think when the guys at R&H and Centropolis...
shifted the area around the eyes, they really got a lot of acting out of it.
The natural fur colours around the face...
really lent themselves very well to animation.
And since both studios were using virtually the same technique...
which is that they were...
What's called match-moving. Taking a computer-generated object...
and then matching the movement of a live-action object...
or, in this case, live-action character, the cat...
and they match it up and they actually replace the cat's face...
with a computer-generated face. They add the fur and the texturing...
and that allows them to do all the subtle animation you see.
And that was something that, again...
was a technique perfected in the movie Babe.
Rhythm & Hues, who did quite a bit of work on this movie...
did all of the work, I think, on both Babes.
They did.
Babe and Babe: Pig in the City.
And, yeah, they did that.
And a project I worked on over there...
was the first few polar bear commercials.
And we used a lot of that same technique to do the face.
It's a very similar type of face.
But, again, when you do that, what you're doing, really...
is cutting together the dialogue that you've recorded in...
On a studio. On a studio?
You don't record on a studio, you record in a studio.
- You could be on the studio. - I guess.
So once you've actually recorded the dialogue...
And normally you record the actors separately...
so that they'll come in in a separate session and do the dialogue.
You get all those bits and pieces together, all the dialogue...
and then you select the different bits of takes from the cat's performance.
And then once you've finished all that, then you turn it over...
to either Rhythm & Hues or Centropolis...
take the cat's performance or the cat's physical acting...
and then do a facial replacement...
so that they're manipulating the eyes and the mouth...
and trying to, you know, make it believable.
I think Bruno and Jennifer were the only ones we recorded together.
There were sessions we were able to get them together...
which was great to establish, again, a rapport between those two.
As husband and wife, they had to have a kind of...
you know, intuitive aspect to each other to know...
what each other were gonna say and do.
I love this exchange that's just about to occur between Mr. and Mrs. Stout.
Mrs. Stout's had a costume change, you see.
She's no longer wearing her coat.
That's gotta hurt.
That was really fun to animate.
See that little Bill Irwin-inspired walk? See how he lifted his foot up?
Did a lot of that Bill Irwin, Buster Keaton kind of stuff.
Lifting his feet up and landing on his heels as he walks forward.
When we were all so happy?
- Yes! - Yes!
And one of the shots coming up here in a minute was very challenging.
You can see Mr. Stout's arms are really, really short.
In fact, without scaling them up in some shots like we did...
he can't cross his hands in front of him. His arms are too short.
But look what he's supposed to do here.
Rob, you wanted to have him grab him around the face?
- Right. - Which we really couldn't do.
I remember when we came up with the idea of doing it...
as this kind of an over-the-shoulder shot from Stuart...
so that it appears that Mr. Stout is grabbing Stuart's lapels...
when in fact he can't reach them.
But it works. And I love this.
That was all done at Imageworks, that pullback there.
That was originally a locked-off plate.
And we were able to get that whole sort of...
start on Mr. Stout and pull back as Mrs. Stout comes in.
Bye, fake father! Goodbye, fake mother!
There he goes, off in the car.
Again, a CG Stuart match-moved into the car...
so that he could wave...
and act.
- George. - Well, I think we have to...
- Tell him. - Yeah.
Now, in this scene, the Littles have come back...
and they're going to break the news to George...
that the police have, you know, told them that it seems hopeless...
that they'll ever find Stuart.
And the family is, meanwhile...
carrying through on the theme of never giving up.
They've rallied around the idea of making these posters...
to put up all over the city to see if they can locate Stuart.
And, again, this was an element, a thematic idea...
that was incorporated fairly late in the process of making this movie.
This wasn't a scene in the original script...
but as we were going into production...
a lot of work was continuing...
you know, and continued to be done...
in terms of adding extra scenes and ideas...
that would flesh out the end of the movie.
It dovetailed so well...
taking the photograph of Stuart and cutting it out...
so that later that gives Snowbell just that little bit of ammunition...
which he uses against Stuart.
I love this shot because it really takes, I mean...
Rob and I both have roots in 2D animation...
and this sort of is the only shot in the movie that's sort of...
You know, it feels like an old-fashioned kind of shot.
Hey, moron!
But it was also done just to find some variation...
in the approach to visualising the story.
Because if you did everything the same way...
with the cats particularly...
it, you know, might get a bit dull.
That was the real Times Square.
Nice shot. That is another location shot.
- That was done on location. - John Dykstra.
You'll notice in the background there's a billboard...
for The Lion King stage play.
I hadn't seen that.
But this of course was the shot that was created in the...
I love this.
You were talking earlier about the shot on the doorstep.
This one also has great mood lighting.
And, again, all these are...
Most of these shots through here...
- I think this one might have been... - This one is an animatronic Stuart.
The first couple you saw there were CG Stuarts.
And then here, this one is just great.
I mean, the lighting on this whole sequence is terrific.
And you see the reflections on the car...
are done with an interesting process called...
- Ray tracing. - Ray tracing.
And what that means is that...
through a complex mathematical formula...
they're able to project the light that would literally hit Stuart...
and bounce off the car. So you'll see in the reflection...
that it's actually Stuart's back and his side being reflected in the car...
which are angles that you're not physically seeing on Stuart.
They're the true reflection of what would be there if Stuart were there.
And those are the only ray-traced shots in the movie.
What's your hurry, Murray?
Yeah, where you going, Murray...?
There's Red, who is a new cat character played by David Alan Grier...
who you might know from In Living Color or Jumanji.
Lucky, Red, get him. Come on!
And now we're off and running on our chase.
In these shots here, this one was a digital shot.
We tried to have Stuart react to the things that he bumped into...
so he wasn't just locked to the car.
It was great that we got to add a shot here too...
which was this finger-pointing shot coming up.
Actually, he's trying to start the car here.
That really helped heighten the excitement.
- Pretty exciting. - Yes, exactly.
Well, we wanted to capitalise on the idea...
that Stuart could be driving in a high-speed chase.
You know, it seemed like a fantasy wish-fulfilment thing.
If you owned a little car like this, you'd imagine being able to do it.
And we wanted to convey a sense of danger with the cats...
because, generally, cats are fairly benign, you know, creatures.
- Generally. - Unless you're four inches tall.
And look somewhat like a mouse...
in which case, cats spell danger.
There's our stuntman shot, arms and legs wiggling.
A great splash from the effects team...
sort of matching Stuart into the shot.
So here we turn to doing a lot more, quite a bit more with the wet fur.
This is probably the most extensive.
We had some earlier in the washing machine...
but this is wet fur combined with effects.
There's lots of drips coming off Stuart when he shakes his head...
coming up here.
There it is. And all the drops flew off.
He's dripping through this whole thing. There's a close-up coming up...
and of all this fur is clumped. These are individual hairs...
that are controlled by what we call control hairs...
and they're all clumped together and appear wet.
And some of these shots were done...
with an actual three-dimensional suitcase...
that was shot and then match-moved for Stuart to be riding on top of.
Here we are with family. Jeffrey Jones, Connie Ray and Patrick O'Brien...
- playing members of the Little family. - The ads on the taxi cabs were fun too.
Brian Doyle-Murray, Allyce Beasley and Harold Gould...
who you'd know from The Sting many years ago.
Favourite film of mine.
And Estelle Getty, who was one of the Golden Girls.
Where do I go?
You come with us. We're gonna circle the park.
Now, again, this whole throughline of the story...
where the family's going out to do posters...
came fairly late in the production.
And, in fact, many of these scenes were written...
while we were actually shooting the movie.
So I remember having many late nights in the trailer after shooting...
talking with the writers and the actors...
about what these scenes would be.
And, in fact, it was Hugh Laurie's contribution...
a very important story contribution...
that becomes important in this next scene...
when Stuart comes home and then Snowbell...
you know, fools him into thinking that the Littles don't love him.
That little hatch door there was a real one.
Mom, Dad, George!
Now, this scene, again, this actual scene was shot, I think...
at the very end of principal photography.
And the original cinematographer, Guillermo Navarro...
who did a wonderful job...
couldn't shoot this because of a conflict in his schedule.
And so we brought in another DP named Matt Leonetti...
who came in to shoot this and, of course, he had the challenge...
of matching the style and the lighting...
that Guillermo had established through the rest of the picture.
But, again, all these shots were done with, you know, the real cat, obviously.
He wasn't acting with a real mouse. The real mouse had to be added later.
So there was a tremendous amount of, you know, imagination...
that went into shooting this scene because Stuart wasn't there.
Little camera moves like that had to be created...
for a character that would be brought in later.
Look up there.
And the other thing is, again, the choreographing of a scene.
It was very important to keep the characters moving.
So you'll notice in the scene, Snowbell starts on the highest step...
and he walks down and jumps to the floor...
and ultimately gets up onto the table...
where this very critical story beat takes place.
Nice bit of acting here. We don't see what Stuart's seeing yet.
And Todd Pilger animated that shot.
That's just...
I think it's great that you see on his face...
that there's concern and alarm before you actually see what's there.
And then here's where Snowbell really starts to lay it on.
He's so darn evil.
But this is one of the most successful scenes...
in terms of performance, I think, from both the cat and from Stuart.
And, you know, the fact that audiences so completely accept...
who these characters are and what's going on...
that you really identify, you know, with Stuart...
and completely understand, you know, his emotional state.
And it makes it very affecting.
And here he just goes, again, from being so emotionally high...
He's made it back home.
He doesn't realise he missed the cab, but he's made it back home.
And then he gets this devastating news...
with evidence, he thinks.
And then here we're about to see possibly a digital first? I don't know.
Not too many crying digital characters have been done.
I think it's interesting to point out is that...
there are three critical scenes that take place on that table...
the photograph table, which represents all the family members.
The scene when Stuart comes home and is introduced to the family.
The scene when Gina and Hugh tell him that they want...
you know, what's best for him...
which is to go with the Stouts, who they think are his parents.
And then when he comes home and sees his picture having been cut out...
and Snowbell tells him that the Littles don't love him anymore.
And that was a classic blue-screen shot here, I think.
Again, this fit the style of the picture, which is an older 1940s, 1950s...
style of moviemaking. Something we were trying to convey...
in the, you know, just the approach, stylistically, to the picture.
This one I also like very much.
I think this is a really successful, little sad walk going away.
And he sort of goes around.
There was manipulation on those leaves...
so that it appeared that he stepped on them.
I think Bill Diaz animated this shot.
The other challenge was that when we shot this, Stuart wasn't there.
And the focus was actually too far in front of Stuart...
and we had to really work hard to get it to look like this.
Camera fades, or the scene fades to black...
which is a classic end to a second act.
And this begins the third act.
George waiting...
hopefully by the phone.
This was a scene that was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.
Again, they were both working on the script, doing polishes...
because Night, who had written the original draft...
which got the movie green-lit, had actually been called away.
He couldn't continue to work on the film.
He sold the script for The Sixth Sense...
which he was about to go into preproduction on...
early in the process for us. So we lost Night...
and then had to bring in other writers to continue working on the story...
and on the characters and the scenes.
Come on! I think we're getting closer. I can smell him.
Sorry, Smokey, that was me.
- And this is just some of... - The cats?
Yeah.
Speaking of fast cats, now, it's interesting...
because most of the shots of the cats...
were shot at 30 frames per second...
because the cats tend to move so quickly.
So we, in fact, just subtly slowed down their speed...
and this is an example of that.
Although, at the very beginning of the sequence...
when the cats were running past, those were at 24 frames a second...
which is what makes them appear to be moving so fast.
And here, this was a tremendously challenging scene to do...
because it was all cats and Stuart.
And so we had to choreograph all of this action...
around this and on this tree...
to convey the dynamics and the dramatics of the storytelling.
You got to get out of here. This is Central Park. It's dark out.
There are hungry cats all over.
- Where are you? - It's your pal, Monty.
What's he doing here?
- He'll hear you. - Why shouldn't he hear me?
Snowbell! Buddy! What are you doing up there?
Oh, no. Perfect.
Hey, you found him. Attaboy!
Hey, everybody! Over here!
The interesting thing story-wise is that...
Snowbell, who has hated Stuart all along...
is confronted with the circumstance of being responsible for his death...
which is, you know, the murder...
which is a bit too much for Snowbell to take.
And what we discover about Snowbell is that he has a heart.
He's not really about killing Stuart...
so much as he is about he doesn't want him in the family.
He doesn't want him to have a position in the family above his.
So, of course, his jealousy leads him, you know, to this...
you know, to Smokey and putting this whole plan in motion.
When he's confronted with the idea...
of actually physically throwing Stuart to the other cats...
Of course, you know what cats do with mice. They eat them.
It's sort of too much for Snowbell to take...
and so he has a huge change of heart here...
where he attempts to rescue Stuart.
The other cats at this point think he just wants to eat him all himself...
which is pretty funny.
And all this material, we actually built the tree...
in two giant pieces...
because we couldn't really put the cats up so high...
because we had to have a huge number of trainers up around the tree.
So when we shot some of these scenes, when there are cats up in the tree...
we'd have them surrounded by trainers...
who were all harnessed to safety rigs to keep them up in the air.
And it was just so challenging...
to get the cats to do what we needed them to do.
Particularly this scene where we needed Snowbell to react...
as if Stuart's hugging his leg...
and do this sort of sidelong glance, this Jack Benny take.
And the way we got the cat to do it was...
they would take the light stick to get the cat's attention...
and then move it and then they turned the light off.
And we actually hit upon that idea as we were shooting the scene.
The other thing is, when we shot a lot of this material up in the tree...
because of the nature of getting these takes...
we would just literally shoot an entire magazine of film...
to do one take.
So we'd set up the camera and shoot and go through this action...
and I'd be yelling at the trainers:
"Get the cat to look left! Get him to look up! Look down!"
Until we could get enough moments of expression and attitude...
that would convey these moments so you'd believe these cats...
were really doing these things.
That scene of Monty, where he laughs...
was something we came up with on the spur of the moment...
because we couldn't get him to do just this head bob...
necessary to make him look like he was laughing.
So I had actually seen at one time in the rehearsals...
the trainer feed the cat, and when this particular cat ate...
he did this weird jerky head move which looked like he was laughing.
When we were doing the shot, I said, "Feed the cat!"
They did it and the cat looked like he was laughing.
- Maybe "family" is too strong a word. - Scratch them both.
One of the most critical things about successfully achieving this illusion...
where a character is believably, you know, acting...
and moving in an environment, a live-action environment...
is how the character interacts with physical objects.
So you'll notice as Stuart is swinging through...
Across the branch, holding onto the collar...
that the leaves are moving, that the collar is moving.
Some of the shots of the collar are of a real collar...
that was puppeted on the set.
And a couple of the shots of the collar were created as a CGI element.
- So it's a digital collar. - If we went back and did it again...
I think I would have done digital collar on every shot...
because it's just the interaction with the...
It's great to put the interaction in there and we could add that...
and then put in the digital collar over the top of it.
Once we were able to add the digital collar...
it gave us a lot more flexibility.
And just as a general rule of thumb...
I really like adding digital props as much as I can...
because then the character sort of is the primary focus of the shot.
We don't have to worry about timing the character to match a physical prop.
Lowering this branch is one thing. This is great to do with a physical...
The actual branch on the set and we're matched up to it.
But with things that Stuart hits or bumps into or carries...
it's much better to do those as a digital prop...
because then Stuart's timing, Stuart's acting drives the props.
See that little slip there?
There's a technique in computer graphics with a character...
which is called parenting...
where you can attach one object to another.
And normally, Stuart's hierarchy of the way he's animated...
his is from the bottom up, so that he sticks to the ground.
But in these shots, we had to go in and reverse a lot of the ordering on Stuart...
so he went from the top down so that his hands would stick to the branch.
That acting on Monty back there was really good too. His faces.
We actually were able to raise and lower that branch...
which made the cats a little nervous. But no cats were harmed in this.
In fact, the cats didn't fall in the water. Those were puppeted cats.
Those were dummy cats.
But these cats were literally carried into the water...
by the trainers and then released...
so that they would actually be able to climb out.
And there was a buzzer going on. That was another technique they used.
They would buzzer the cats to a location...
where they would feed them.
And food is actually how you pay a cat.
So all of these cats are working for scale.
They're doing what they do...
because they get to eat, you know, basically.
If they...
don't finish the amount of food that's allocated for them...
because there's a certain amount that they get every day...
if they don't finish it doing their work...
the trainers give them the balance of the food once the cats are finished.
The trainers are very sensitive about that...
because they wanna make sure the cats aren't overworked...
or, you know, once the cats basically get burned out...
just like people do...
they need a break the rest of the day.
When Smokey got hit in the face with that branch...
he also never actually got hit with that branch.
That was composited.
It was done with a little canister of compressed air...
that we blew on the cat's face.
And then later, we shot the branch swinging towards a blue screen.
Then we composited those elements to make it look like he gets hit.
So Boone didn't actually hit the cat?
- No. No cat hitting. - No cat hitting allowed.
This was a fun shot to animate...
with Stuart stuck on the back of the cat.
Stuck.
- That one really is stuck. - He's actually a puppet in this shot.
That's a puppet. The other one was a digital Stuart.
- Yeah. And in the one coming up too. - I love this shot.
And the way he slides off here. That's nice.
Don't mention it. Ever.
See that? Even though his face is away from you...
you could see his cheeks puffed out when he smiled and just how...
His warm feelings toward Snowbell now.
And here we are. He's back home and it's nice.
Stuart's just savouring the moment. He's happy to be home.
This was, again, a scene that was written in the original script.
And when it came time to shooting...
it was complicated by the fact on one set...
you could look into the Littles' house and the other you could look out...
because the big street...
wasn't actually built on the same set as the interior of the house.
So we were limited in some sense...
to what we could shoot, based on those two circumstances.
So these shots of Stuart looking in this direction were shot on one set.
And then the shots of the Littles were shot on a different set...
at a different time.
What's the matter?
And here Stuart gets his last close-up in the movie.
It was actually funny because the laser pointer was being used...
to point out Stuart so everybody would look in the same place.
But you'll notice that Snowbell is really riveted to where Stuart is...
because he was really focused on that laser dot.
- He was waiting to get paid. - Exactly.
- Here we have the end to the movie. - There it is, our animated "the end."
- And then? - But wait, there's more!
That's right.
This actually was a scene that was conceived...
as a scene to express the bonding between George and Stuart.
But we could never quite make it work in the middle of the film.
So we ended up deciding that we would use this at the end of the picture...
really as a finale to the movie.
And to give the audience something extra.
It was a long road, and it's amazing at this point to see...
how so many disparate elements can be pulled together...
and appear to have come fully formed.
It took the labour of so many incredible, talented artists.
Not only the artists who shot the live-action portion of the film...
but all the animation artists and digital artists and everyone.
And you really feel that the sum total of all of that work...
came together to create, you know...
what is hopefully a new character that will, you know...
be loved by millions.
Well, certainly by the two people in this room.
But it was great to actually be able to work on...
For me, to be able to work on one character for almost 500 shots.
You really get to develop that character and I think we...
We really... Speaking for myself and the animation team...
we really were able to sink our teeth into that and really develop Stuart.
And as we talked about, Rob, I think there's a whole new genre...
of filmmaking out there that is not very explored...
which is these digital, realistic, believable characters with live action.
Yeah, I think that Stuart Little represents one further step...
into a kind of fantasy filmmaking...
which I think we'll be seeing more of in the near future.
- And that's very exciting. - Nudge, nudge.
Wink, wink.