Horton Hears A Who!
NG Kids: Hi guys! We love the movie, can you tell us about the film's hero, Horton?
Chris: Horton's not your typical hero. He's an elephant but you've got to think of him more like a guy in an elephant suit. He can do more stuff. He can dive off trees into the pool in the Jungle Of Nool, jump around and do kung-fu. He's a very physical character and a great storyteller.
Chris: There's Morton The Mouse, who's like a little Jiminy Cricket on Horton's shoulder. Kangaroo, she's a narrow-minded, busybody. And the Mayor Of Who-ville, who's a pretty normal guy, except he's got 97 kids. When he has breakfast, he tries to go through everybody's day, but he's only got 12 seconds for each kid!
NGK: The Whos in Who-ville are great. How did you come up with their look?
Mike: A lot of it was inspired by the Dr Seuss artwork and classic Looney Tunes kind of cartoons that we all love. It's really fun stuff!
Chris: We spent a lot of time thinking about how to express Who-ville in computer-generated (CG) animation. The Whos are tiny and kind of fuzzy. They use their fur to create their outfits. When they want to change to the latest style, they just go down to the barber and have their fur snipped and dyed into the latest style!
NGK: So how did you create such cool animation?
Mike: Drawings and sculpts were made to illustrate the range of expression we wanted to get. I wasn't sure that we'd be able to achieve it because this kind of stuff is really tricky in CG animation. Drawing stuff is easy but, when you actually have to make a 3-D model bend and look good, it's kind of tricky.
Chris: One of the many technical challenges on Horton was the fur. We put a "fur team" together, who were responsible for creating the look of the fur and the way it bounces when the Whos walk, or the way it blows in the wind.
NGK: What was the hardest thing to animate in the movie?
Mike: The clover field was one of the film's biggest technical challenges. There's something like 800,000 individual little hairs on each clover. It took about a half billion clovers to fill the clover field. If you times that by 8,000,000 hairs on each one, it's staggering!
Horton Hears A Who! is out on DVD in October