Sun, Dec 11, 2005 page12

• Upstarts taking on Hollywood's animation giants

  • AP
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  Genndy Tartakovsky is a 35-year-old man who still wakes up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons. He confesses: "I can't outgrow them."

  Even a night of hard drinking when he was younger wouldn't keep him from dragging himself out of bed the next morning to watch his favorite shows.

  "I'd be so hung over," Tartakovsky said. ``But I loved them.''

  That passion and persistence has paid off for Tartakovsky, whose list of credits includes hit animated television shows Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars.

  As creative director at Orphanage Animation Studios Inc, he now finds himself among a small group of northern California artists hoping to rival the towering frontrunners in Hollywood computer animation: Pixar Animation Studios Inc and Dreamworks Animation SKG Inc.

  While the Bay Area upstarts have yet to make a feature-length film, firms such as Orphanage, Wild Brain Inc and CritterPix Inc have recently announced separate plans to make computer-animated feature films with characters they hope moviegoers will embrace as fondly as Pixar's Buzz Lightyear and Dreamworks' Shrek.

  The rub is that the new players find themselves working on shoestring budgets, often with hand-me-down technology, and working under noose-tight deadlines.

  "You can't look at Wild Brain in its current state and say we're going to be competitors to Pixar," said Charles Rivkin, who was named CEO of the San Francisco-based company in September. "On the other hand, we would hope in the near future we make it into their rearview mirror."

  Pixar and Dreamworks, whose executives declined to comment for this story, benefit from technological prowess that cost them millions to develop. Their rendering software allows characters to interact in three dimensions, adding lifelike qualities that wow audiences.

  Wild Brain and the Orphanage lack such resources, relying on off-the-shelf software and building other digital tools to enhance the quality, said BZ Petroff, Wild Brain's production director, who worked on Toy Story while at Pixar.

  Wild Brain has the same improvisational spirit that Pixar had before anyone had coined the term computer animation, she said.

  "Pixar had practically nobody who had worked on a motion picture before," Petroff recalled. "They had an industrial designer who worked on cars. Not Cars the Pixar movie but cars in Detroit. He worked in the automobile industry ... Nobody was doing this kind of work then."

  When it comes to computer-generated short films, Wild Brain's system has proven successful.

  In 2001, the company released Hubert's Brain, a dark comedy about a lonely boy who finds a talking brain. The 17-minute film won Best Professional Computer Generated Short Film at the 2001 World Animation Celebration in Los Angeles.

  "The 3-D works, and it's a lot of fun," Karl Cohen, president of the Bay Area Animation Association, said of Hubert's Brain. "Whether they can turn that into a full-length feature is another question."

  The Orphanage, founded in 1999 by three former employees of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, is further behind Wild Brain in its evolution. The company is best known for supplying special effects for live-action films, such as The Day After Tomorrow and Sin City.

  Hiring Tartakovsky, a golden boy at the Cartoon Network who will anchor the company's foray into features, has given Orphanage credibility within animation circles.

  That these digital animation companies are cropping up in the Bay area is no accident. Civic leaders here are rolling out the red carpet for computer animation firms.

  Computers, however, have done little to speed up the process or reduce the costs of making animated films. Pixar has produced only six films in 11 years and spent an average of US$77 million per movie, according to Bruce Nash, who runs The Numbers, an online movie information-data tracker.

  Lacking those kind of resources, Wild Brain and Orphanage plan to leverage their expertise animating television shows, which require a faster turnaround, to produce films for about half as much money, executives from both companies said.

  After spending 11 years producing mostly commercials, Wild Brain made its first significant strides toward the big screen when it penned a five-picture deal last year with Dimension Films, a unit of Walt Disney Co's Miramax Films.

  Based on their agreement, each company will co-finance and co-produce films that Miramax will distribute.

  Orphanage, headquartered in San Francisco, will seek a similar financing and distribution partnership once the company's story ideas are ready for production, Tartakovsky said.

  Wild Brain plans to keep its costs down by contracting out the work to artists overseas, such as South Korea and China, to draw background and other scenes that can be easily mass-produced.

  Some of the work for Wild Brain's Higglytown Heroes, a daily Disney Channel show, is done in South Korea, Rivkin said. Sending work overseas doesn't hurt the quality, he said.

  Others aren't so sure.

  Pixar and Dreamworks do all their work in-house.
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