Here’s to one very fine degree of separation. On one side you have a zany lemur by the name of King Julien. The monarch, his retainer Maurice and tiny subject Mort take scene-mugging turns in “Madagascar,” which opens today.
On the other side stands filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Until his death in March 2003, Brakhage shaped and ruled a different kingdom – that of experimental and avant-garde cinema.
A DreamWorks character rendered by strings of computer graphics code. And a maverick director who shot, scratched and painted his way into cinematic history. Who could unite them so effortlessly?
Eric Darnell, that’s who. The University of Colorado graduate who studied with Brakhage has, alongside Tom McGrath, written and directed “Madagascar.”
The Brakhage connection may explain some of the mystery of why McGrath and Darnell, who studied animation at the California Institute of the Arts at the same time, never met there.
“(McGrath) was in character animation,” said Darnell, sitting with McGrath in a Denver coffeeshop on a recent publicity jaunt. That means McGrath was working within the Disney tradition. “I was in experimental animation.”
“We’d do sand on glass,” said Darnell, “or direct animation, which is a term for writing, scratching or painting directly on to the film itself.” Brakhage would be proud and perhaps even touched by the magnificently trippy and mesmerizing images that burst onscreen when Alex the lion gets dart-gunned in “Madagascar.” Darnell also was at the forefront of doing animation with computers.
“We joke that all our lives we’ve been passing each other in airports,” added McGrath.
Given what joyful fun their collaboration has turned out to be, it’s tempting to complain that these opposites didn’t attract quite fast enough. Like the very best comedy, timing is everything.
Nearly five years ago, the two met. They bonded over penguins.
At the time, Darnell hoped to make a rockumentary version of “A Hard Day’s Night,” with penguins starring as the Fab Four. McGrath was pondering his own penguin project.
“I went to DreamWorks and they showed me a short Eric did with penguins,” McGrath recalled. “I met Eric, and we clicked. We had a similar sensibility, and I really wanted to work on the rockumentary.”
In the end, the music rights and clearances were impossible to secure. Penguins live on in “Madagascar,” with McGrath voicing the lead penguin, Skipper.
Initially, McGrath was just providing a temporary voice for the movie. “I was working on early scenes with the penguins, so I would just pitch that voice, put the drawing on the wall and do a bit of performance art,” he said.
“We thought we’d get someone like Robert Stack, a tough guy. But he passed away,” McGrath said. “You’re a great Skipper,” Darnell said. He is.
“Madagascar” has taken about four concentrated years to bring to screen. McGrath and Darnell spent the first 2 1/2 years on the story.
“We didn’t necessarily have a script that had been greenlighted,” Darnell said. “We’d have a script we felt was in the ballpark, that had the right tone. Then we’d storyboard.”
Those elaborate drawings got photographed. Then they began recording their actors, music and sound effects. This became the movie before the movie. “We’d watch our movie beginning to end in the theater, before we animated a single frame,” he said.
“For a long time, animation was pushing for the Holy Grail of the realistic,” Darnell said of the resurgence and ambition in the animation world. “Everything had to be photo real.”
It’s a noble goal, he thinks, just not the one he and McGrath are that interested in pursuing.
Instead, the two have used the tools of a trade that continues to advance jaw-dropping technology to create something rather old school.
“The thing about animation that we love has been there almost from the beginning,” Darnell said. “It’s about caricature and stylized or exaggerated motion.”
McGrath and Darnell are fans of Tex Avery’s Looney Tunes extravaganzas.
“We wanted to take the best of what traditional animation had to offer and what CG had to offer,” Darnell said. “There’s a parallel path Tom and I are pursuing. How can you use computer graphics to create these alternate realities that feel as real as something that might be described as photo-real but are also completely fantastic and magical and transport you to some other place?”
One of the appealing things Darnell and McGrath pull off in “Madagascar” is putting their fairly cartoony characters into some remarkably detailed environments.
Anyone who has ever visited New York will swear they’ve been on the same subway car Melman the giraffe folds himself into.
OK – the movie version is a bit cleaner.
