This is Vicky Jenson. I'm one of the directors of Shark Tale.
I'm Rob Letterman, another director.
And Bibo Bergeron, another director.
And we're gonna give you some behind-the-scenes stories
and tales about working on Shark Tale,
which was a really great film for us to work on.
We had a lot of fun,
and, of course, we have to thank the people that made it possible for us.
Number one being, of course, Jeffrey Katzenberg,
who had a tremendous sense of humor, and a long-standing patience
to go through this movie with us.
- And Bill Damaschke and Allison Segan. - Janet Healy...
- Janet Healy. - ...who brought that whole team together.
- Our producers on the movie... - Without them...
...who worked tirelessly with the rest of us to make this thing happen.
- So, that worm. - Tell me about the worm.
Did we ever name the worm? Did it ever happen?
I named him... I named the worm Onil,
because it was based on one of the production supervisors,
Onil Chibás' face.
He's got the same hairdo.
- Yeah. - The same cheeks.
- I did not know that. - I'm seeing it now.
I'm Lenny.
Oh, little buddy, did I scare ya?
Boy, this introduction to Lenny, we tried so many lines there.
- That's right. - And they were all very simple.
It was from, "Hi," to, "Are you okay?"
Or, "Did I scare you?" And then we ended up with all three.
That's right.
My favorite is the Italian version which is, "Ciao."
Yeah.
So, that's Jack Black. This is the voice of Lenny.
It's very funny 'cause he is...
I think he's a bit subversive in this role, in that kids have no idea
that Jack Black is actually lurking behind Lenny.
They won't know till they see his other films, but he's adorable.
He's so adorable in this movie.
And this sequence is one of the last sequences we worked on,
actually, in Animation and Lighting.
And...
It was supervised by Bill Diaz,
who was not a supervisor,
but every other supervisor was busy finishing the movie.
So, we were very grateful to have him, you know,
taking care of that sequence.
Did a great job.
Story-wise, this was a sequence that we had a lot of really fun help
from other board artists.
Some of the guys from Shrek 2 jumped in to help
sort of play with how we introduce the city and the characters.
This was a really fun sequence. But it was one of the last things we did.
You remember how painful it was?
We figured it out probably at the very end, right?
To do this whole pan down into the city,
'cause it always started a little bit different.
And then this song,
this is actually one of the first songs that was created for the movie
when Ziggy Marley did one of the voices for us, one of Ernie and Bernie
and he got paired up with Sean Paul,
a Jamaican rapper that everyone but my mom would know,
and they did this version so long ago, it was great.
- Everybody loved it. - It was the very first song.
- It was. - That's right.
Maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago.
Yeah.
And then, you know, they just juiced it up a little bit
when we put it in the beginning in the movie here.
Hans Zimmer was our composer on this film and,
he really did a great job in, kind of,
connecting all of these different songs along with
sort of the cool, jazzy tone to the film score.
- You can hardly read that sign. - I know.
That's a prawn shop, by the way.
- Get it? - We can pause.
You can pause it when you need it, right?
Yeah. That's right.
And once again, we had a lot of, just like in Shrek,
a lot of our story team and editorial team
jumped in to do voices on the movie,
and we never replaced them because they were real fun.
- Just really fun. - Like Jim who did Oyster there.
- Oyster? - Yes.
Was that Sean Bishop?
No, the Oyster is Jim Ryan.
- Jim Ryan. I feel so bad. - He pops up all over the place.
- Why? - I should know Jim Ryan's voice.
Sean Bishop is a story artist who also was an amazing mimic
and was able to jump in as voices for everybody
and, eventually, some of the characters, too.
- And here he is, Will Smith. - There's Will Smith.
Oscar.
Some people get that reference when he says...
He says, right at the beginning, "And you have no idea."
Right. It's a riff on a show
on BET? Is that the show?
...has to have the basic necessities.
Yeah. Like money.
And that kid.
- He was so fun. - Bobb'e.
Oh, my God, he's so funny.
These kids are adorable.
That's funny. That's very funny.
Hey, Oscar! Oscar! Over here!
How many color combinations did we try on those kids?
A lot, because actually, when we see later in the movie in a flashback
with Oscar's dad,
we reuse them with different colors, so I guess there was, like,
six different colors for each kid, you know.
And this is another story artist as Crazy Joe.
Dave Smith, really funny guy,
makes a little cameo as Crazy Joe.
And it started off as a cameo,
but turned into a bigger and bigger role.
Yeah.
- More of a recurrent character, yeah. - Yeah.
- That happened after... - I loved that crazy character.
Didn't he have him, when, the original,
Oscar's kind of swimming through the city, and he just waves to him,
and he's like, "Hey, Oscar," and that was it, that's where it started.
Yeah, remember the line with Oscar saying to Crazy Joe,
"You hang in there,"
and Crazy Joe was in the trash.
Right, "Every day."
"I do, every day, Oscar, every day."
And then, this is the car wash.
This is the Whale Wash where Oscar works.
And,
we originally had a full-on song sequence here
for the longest time on the movie.
Maybe the first two and a half years we were working on the movie,
we played the full video here.
Our Broadway musical number.
That's the problem. It ended up feeling like
we were gonna head into a musical movie,
instead of, you know, the movie it is, where music is just a, you know,
a support, so we slid the whole video to the end of the movie
where it made sense,
where everybody is celebrating Oscar as the big hero.
This is the place where, actually, we did the first effects tests
on this movie.
Find out how it'd react when you put foam in water
and you put silt off the whale's back,
and, you know, barnacles and stuff.
So, we did a lot of tests on that sequence pretty early on.
Yeah, the funny thing about the film is that,
water is actually kind of incidental.
You know, this is such an allegory to our world that
the characters are...
Generally, you don't see the particulates floating so much.
We don't want you to feel really claustrophobic
like you're underwater but in the case of the Whale Wash,
we had to know
how would it look underwater
with soap hitting a whale and that sort of thing.
Angie needs to get her freak on. Would you hold for one moment, please?
This sequence for me was the trickiest sequence to light.
And, I mean, with the team of lighters
and the art department and all that.
We had difficulties finding Angie's place
because we wanted it to be humble and beautiful, just like her,
so that we represent her.
So, at the end of the movie, when Oscar finds out that she is missing,
then we would drop all that magic
at her place and she represents.
So, you see there's much more shadows,
cast shadows on the characters that represent the humility of the character.
And more magical floaties
like the sparks, the glitter she has on her body as well.
And there's lots of movement behind her.
It's all pretty and you feel safe.
The dappled light is really pretty on the booth.
I brought you some breakfast.
I also thought it was cool that you guys...
You always used to talk about finding a rhythm for Oscar in his character,
just in how you animated him.
Yeah, we wanted to put music in him,
you know, and a beat
and he would actually be on, you know, all the time.
He dances.
Yeah.
- This is the ship where the sharks live. - The other part of our story.
This was a fun sequence to do.
This is one of the few cases
where we were able to get a couple of our stars together in the room
and this was Marty Scorsese and Robert De Niro
recording the sequence together.
We should explain that that's highly unusual in animation.
Usually these people are doing the recording sessions one at a time,
and then it's all cut together in the editing room.
So, to have De Niro and Scorsese in the room together was...
- It was amazing. - ...pretty amazing.
And you can feel it, especially right here when there's a couple of interruptions
that were, you know, obviously ad-libbed in.
The funniest thing just always gets a laugh
is sort of like, "No, it's okay."
- Yeah. - He holds up his hand and, "That's okay."
It's coming up but for some reason, everyone loves that part.
Right?
That one. "That's all right."
I love that. I don't why.
It's just one of those unexpected things.
Maybe we should talk as well about, actually,
how this sequence used to be.
- There was no Sykes, no Scorsese. - That's right.
But there was Don Lino and a killer whale.
- Right. - Far more ominous of a scene.
Yeah, and there was a sequence that was done
and it was called Sequence 650...
- Killer whale was back. - Yeah, killer whale was back and...
And the story, I mean, it wasn't appropriate after a certain time,
but the story of it was a killer whale,
one of the five families comes in to threaten Don Lino,
and that he was going to tell everyone about Lenny's deep, dark secret.
And then Don Lino sics his pet piranha on a killer whale.
- And the piranha is still there. - And whacks him.
They're a little vestigial.
They're still, you know, those are the little animals,
the pets he's talking to in the beginning of the sequence
but we don't really use them other than to sort of
make Sykes nervous and uncomfortable,
but we did use the little one.
That's like a big boss having a couple of pit bulls, you know,
- in the human world. - That's right.
Yeah.
Frankie and Lenny.
This is so cute. I love the scene where he's squeaking in the chair.
You hear me? A cold-blooded killer.
Look at him.
Yeah, I love that animation. It was Jean-Francois Rey.
That's it. That's it!
Good fun.
And we peppered little homages all through this movie.
There's one to the Titanic here. Some people catch right there,
the painting. It goes by really fast. If you remember the painting at all.
Of course, we couldn't do her naked.
- We had to put a little drape over her. - That's too bad.
Yeah, I think millions of people saw that painting.
- Did they? - Yeah.
Yes, only the highest grossing movie of all time.
Ever.
Stop your moaning, Oscar. It could be a lot worse.
This is another sequence that kind of came towards the end of the process.
We always wanted to see Oscar at work
and then we finally got the chance to put this sequence in.
Yeah, we needed to know how he felt about his life,
about his work and why he was always dreaming for something bigger.
Headphone guy. Love headphone guy.
I got you!
Headphone Guy!
I love the score that Hans did on this part.
- Big heroic thing. - Yeah.
- Parody of a heroic score. - Yeah. The action hero.
For a moment, we're Michael Bay.
That's right.
And then, he gets hit in the face by the slime ball.
Y'all funny. Well, see if you laugh at this!
Okay, we were all just watching the movie there for a moment.
We got swept up with it. That happens, that happens.
"Soap in the eye." Oh, boy.
That's graffiti all over the whale. This is really funny.
We had so much graffiti in this movie.
We found great references of, just, it almost looks like artwork,
- the graffiti. - Yeah.
And we really fell in love with it to give the movie an urban flavor
but we started to learn a little later through the process that
maybe glorifying graffiti
is probably not the most responsible thing for us to do.
Kids, do not do graffiti. Please.
No tagging.
It looks good on whales.
- It looks good on whales. - Yeah.
I remember that Dan St. Pierre brought all these
boards of, you know, hundreds of types of graffiti and,
- it was fascinating, yeah. - That's our production designer.
Ernie and Bernie.
By the way, Will actually ad-libbed the beatboxing of that song.
Remember in the recording session?
Is that what led to us using...
No, we were gonna, we asked him to do the song,
and then,
to just get out of the sequence and then
- he made it the beatbox version. - That's true.
That's right. It was a storyboard idea to have him sing that song.
Every little thing.
You guys got to direct Ziggy and Doug E. together.
That was huge fun.
That was another one, yeah, we got to do together.
- That was a lot of fun. - Yeah. It was very cool.
Nobody knows what they're saying but it's so fun.
We don't know what they are saying.
I don't know what they're saying...
I kept going to Ziggy asking him, "What does that mean?"
And then he would say something to me which again I didn't understand,
and so then it finally came, "Can we say that in a kid's movie?" He said, "Yeah."
- It was something like "blood fire." - Yeah, I don't know what that is.
"Okay, sounds poetic."
It was great, so, yeah.
Whale poo, you know, this is a funny fact.
We discovered whales don't poo.
Even though there's a drawing of it, of whale poo.
But we found out that whales actually create something called "ambergris,"
and they, sort of, spit up this ball once a month,
and it floats to shore and we make perfume from it.
I kid you not. Go, look it up on the Internet.
- It's true. - Did not know that.
Whales don't poo.
- But poo is so much funnier... - It is funnier.
...than perfume.
Well, this isn't a National Geographic film,
so we are not trying to teach anybody about these species.
Whales also don't talk.
Right.
- How am I suppose to do that? - That's your problem.
Marty is so good.
You know, this character started off as a much tougher character,
who Oscar owed a tremendous amount of money to, called Polly.
He was an electric eel.
Then he also had this boss named Mr. Sykes,
who was this little pufferfish that ran the Whale Wash.
We ended up combining those two characters and obviously falling more in love
with the more playful, adorable,
almost father figure character of Mr. Sykes.
That also came out of Marty's voice though.
- Don't you think? - Yeah, yeah.
Like when he started performing him,
it was just, there was something fun and warm about the way he did it.
So, the character changed as a result.
So much fun to animate as well, a character that speaks like that,
with a very unique, you know, delivery of the lines.
And he speaks so fast that the animators had to draw up syllables,
you know, the lip sync.
There's no way that... Twenty-four frames a second is not enough...
- To capture all the... - To capture all the words.
- Everything Marty can squeeze in there. - Yeah.
I love Angie's balcony. This is such a pretty-looking scene
with the light spilling in from her apartment.
Yeah, something here, we tried to get Angie's spirit
in the place and in the lights.
- This is one of my favorites. - Oscar's dad.
- That's my favorite bit. - Yeah.
- Although, the afro... - It's so funny.
It does verge on the brain-tumor look at some point.
- It's a sponge. - Yeah.
Everybody gets it, like a fish with an afro, go figure.
- So funny. - Show-and-tell. I love this stuff.
I love the treatment, you know, the sepia tone, whatever it is.
There's a creepy kid in the back, the green kid.
If you go back, you see the green kid, he's kind of creepy.
He's laughing like a little creepy robot, you know.
So, this is all explaining Oscar's dream about why he wants to be a somebody.
These kind of scenes, you know, we end up trying over and over again
just to make sure we are not hitting people over the head,
or being too subtle or too clever.
But it's important to understand that character's heart.
It's really important, you know, especially in a comedy,
to have something that grounds the characters.
I think everybody can understand that feeling of wanting something
that they think is, you know,
the grass is greener on the other side of the fence
and in this case, the kelp is denser on the other side of reef, I don't know.
- Sorry, we should erase that one. - What?
- I don't know what I said. - No, keep it.
- Very profound. - Top of the reef.
Angie's grandmother and her pearl.
I always wanted to actually have a flashback of the grandmother,
I don't know, on her deathbed giving the pearl to Angie,
after Oscar's dad's flashback.
- Just endless flashbacks. - It would be funny.
That's what those guys did in Being John Malkovich.
When we go in for the monkey flashback,
you know that you've just, you've gone too far.
That's funny.
This is one of the most beautiful sequences.
I have always loved the restaurant for its color.
You know, I hope on the DVD, they put the full shot
because it started as a crane shot from the chandelier.
- Yeah, exactly. - We should.
Well, we'll see what we can do, and try and show you that full shot.
Yeah.
Actually, that was the first painting that Sam Michlap did, remember?
We told him, "Okay.
"We want sharks in the restaurant, in the Italian restaurant,"
and he did that beautiful painting.
And, I mean, actually we stayed very close to that,
you know, at the very end.
That probably will be included as some of the artwork
because just to see how similar the lighting really is,
the beautiful deep reds and the candlelight.
Or the... You know, it's funny,
we played with ideas on where all this lighting could come from.
We thought, "Well, maybe it's bioluminescence."
So, not that we ever explained...
- Phosphorescence or florescence... - Right.
It bought us a lot, at least for our own logic of what was going on
even though we never have the characters really play with money
or explain electricity.
It's just a given.
When you start to build a universe, you need, you know,
to put the floor first...
That's right.
...and then the walls and then the wallpaper.
Now this, this started as a joke, really.
We always had this shrimp, sort of,
agreeing with Lenny that he shouldn't be eaten.
But this monologue came out of a joke that our Head of Story, David Soren did.
- Who also... - He knew he had to make the scene...
- He's the voice. - By the way,
he's the voice of the shrimp, yeah.
- Sorry. Continue. - It's okay.
He'd made three versions to show everybody
which one we should go for to try and make the scene a little funnier,
and then this crazy ad-libbed monologue came up, and we were all on the floor.
We're just like, "Okay, fine, that's the one."
Remember the first time we played it, it was twice as long, was it?
Oh, God. I hope that, well, it's not animated.
- No, no, no. - It's a shame.
- He went on. - 'Cause that long version
was so great.
- Food stamps and welfare. - Remember, it got so crazy.
Maybe we have a video of David Soren...
Oh, God, that was so funny.
The sub story of those shrimps.
That's right.
You're a good person.
Another little musical cue from Hans
to help sell that little threat from the shrimp.
And then the racetrack, the next sequence coming up.
Coming up, yeah.
That was a big deal
shooting a race scene outside.
Come on, Pop.
Son, you're gonna learn how to be a shark,
whether you like it or not.
And Frankie was eating oysters and, I remember the beginning
for economic, comic... Economical results,
we thought it was complicated to have, actually,
Frankie eating the oysters and putting the shells away,
so we had to pile up shells.
And I thought, "Okay, let's have Frankie eating the whole thing."
So this is why he's chewing, we're hearing the sound.
- Crunching. - Yeah.
Chewing the whole thing, the shells.
- That's why. - Yeah.
Here's Oscar logic.
I like the way he reinvents his memory, his past of what Angie said.
What did Angie say?
Dreams can begin small.
Anything to rationalize his decision to bet all the dough on the horse race.
The introduction of Lola. This is a great song.
This was amazing.
I love that song.
It's so much fun.
When that song kicks in and you see her eyes.
You get as mesmerized as Oscar does.
Some of the funniest animation is this stuff with Oscar.
This is awesome. This is totally awesome.
Were you guys looking at Beyoncé videos?
What did you guys do?
Beyoncé and Tyra Banks' videos.
We wanted her to be a mix between, you know, a pop star and supermodel.
I always love that when he starts doing it.
And we dropped, you know, we call it "circle of confusion."
You know, the circles of confusion
where everything in the background becomes circle, like colorful circles.
Because it's just a scene between Oscar and Lola,
- everything else just disappears. - Yeah, everything disappears.
Yeah, just the two of them.
There's a funny little gag on the newspaper here,
that Mrs. Sanchez is holding.
- Little play on The Ring. - Yeah.
Shelley Morrison as...
The Hook. It says the tagline,
"Before you die, you eat the hook."
- What are you doing? - Bring us some drinks.
- Why are you touching me? - That would be great. Thanks.
Oscar's always trying to spin his boss.
- Bring back some little wiener thingies. - You mean the one with the toothpicks?
He wants to impress Lola,
and at the same time, he's got to get rid of his boss.
My box.
- Your box? - His box?
You can't afford the gum under the seats.
- Sykes. - He just laid five grand on Lucky Day.
I think he can afford anything he wants.
- And he never gets away with it. - Yeah.
We have reanimated that scene when he's showing them that she's crazy,
improvising and acting, you know...
- It was funny but inappropriate. - Yeah.
Under I don't know what product but...
And don't get me wrong, you're cute,
but you're a nobody.
Oscar, you cute, but you're a nobody.
Wait! Lola! Come back!
I'm not a nobody. I'm a wiener!
They love to make poor Oscar's life miserable.
You're in trouble up to your gills.
They love teasing him.
Go on. Get in here.
Notice the kid with the red balloon.
The balloon comes in handy later on
when we need the sound of a gunshot, in a way.
We had fun naming the seahorses here, too.
Another cameo voice, Mark Swift, our associate producer on the movie
actually is the voice of the announcer.
Really gave it a good authentic feel.
With his classy, British accent.
Just felt like a dog race, you know or something. It seemed appropriate.
Lucky Day's crashing his way through.
- A very good performance. - It really is.
Very intense.
This was fun, treating the horse race... Or the seahorse race, like a horse race.
So, you can hear their hooves hitting the ground
even though they're really not touching the ground.
But you want that sound.
- We needed that for the energy. - You need it to sell it, yeah.
And it doesn't play better than this.
And we played with putting score on top of it,
and then we pulled it back.
- Like techno music. - Yeah.
But it was energetic enough.
But it just felt better with the sound design.
- The hooves. - Yeah.
Look at Lucky Day go!
I like when the two of them start singing together.
We had so much fun teaching Marty...
- Oh, my God, that was great. - ...this song from Moving On Up.
It's Lucky Day!
And this is the best. Poor thing.
The speed ramps.
Remember, the layout team had a lot of fun playing with speed ramps on this.
That was a great thing you guys did.
We would watch movies like Snatch
and talk about doing things that you wouldn't normally do in an animation.
Yeah. Scorsese's movies, of course, you know, like Casino and Goodfellas.
Yeah.
And yes, Snatch, and some of the telefeature movies as well.
You know, when you play with slo-mo, fast-forward,
and freeze-frame and stuff like that,
and we wanted to give a little of that feel...
That same energy.
That same energy to this movie as well.
There's a little homage to Pulp Fiction in the way Oscar's handled
and thrown into, instead of the trunk of a car,
you'll see it's the mouth of some large fish but it...
Which you never see again.
- That's right. - Yeah. No, but...
Which until now, probably no one understood.
Sorry, kid. It's nothing personal. It's just business.
We used to drive him out to the desert, the kelp desert in this large fish here,
and dump him off just like he was being taken out
- to meet his end in the desert. - Yeah, I remember.
You know, I boarded that sequence.
We did this sequence, and I remember it with the whale.
You did this, too. You storyboarded this whole sequence
where the way it's revealed that he's actually attached to a rock.
They are torturing him.
One of the earliest jokes we recorded in this movie was this one of,
"Ernie, you made a joke."
I like that effect, you can see his spine.
Yeah.
We used to have no effects like that for a very long time.
That's right.
We decided at the end to add that stuff.
I think it's more cartoon-y in a way and fits the movie.
It's much better.
This was a very long shot.
How long did the animator work on this?
Weeks.
If you watch it, you'll see there's no cut here.
Two animators working on it.
Yeah, I think they worked, I don't know, two months.
The lighting changes from deep sea to...
- And slowly gets in to the green. - Yeah, it gets in to the...
You see, I mean it was a homage to Traffic as well,
the torture scene with Ernie, Bernie and Oscar.
So, it's much more yellow and golden
mostly to give that feeling like in a desert,
like in a Mexican desert, you know, feel to it.
So, it goes from blue to more yellowish water.
Don't get no easier than this.
Nightmare for Lighting to do that all in one shot.
Yeah, it's very hard to make the water feel dry.
Right.
Dry like a desert.
Saying a desert underwater... Right there, we are in trouble.
Hit him in the tail again.
- I like the funny face he make. - Funny face.
Their hats are so amazing.
And they were the hardest to animate.
Yeah, but it was crazy with the interpretation of the dreadlocks
and it was very hard to control all that stuff, although...
Which is why we kept putting them in more and more of the film.
There's one thing that drives me still crazy on Oscar is that,
you know the thing he's got between the two eyebrows?
I drove people crazy with that thing in finalling, you know,
they had to erase that little scar he has between the eyebrows.
'Cause it pinches?
- 'Cause his skin is coming together there? - Yeah.
I'm not for that.
I'm not gonna eat ya.
It doesn't look unnatural though.
Most of the time, it looks like a good wrinkle line, like a worry line.
He spends a lot of the movie worried.
Yeah.
But when I looked at it at first, you know...
Yeah.
...for checking. In some versions, they were big scars.
You guys were pushing the expressions so hard on his face.
Yeah.
But it was not only in the forehead, there were neck issues and,
you know, jaws and,
crazy stuff going on because we are pushing so much.
Yeah, the models on this movie,
the characters, the way they were built in the computer
could handle a lot more stretching
than what we could do on Shrek
because when we'd pull those faces or tried to push expressions
on our models on Shrek,
the characters couldn't handle it. They would, sort of, break apart.
and you can see some of that on that DVD,
sort of outtakes where teeth would pop through the skin.
And that was one of our goals on this one was to, right? To find a...
If you stop frame on a, I don't know, for instance,
when he gets tortured by Ernie and Bernie and you see that close-up of his face,
in slo-mo, you see this crazy distortion of the face and stuff like that,
that we managed to do in this movie
as a, actually, more of a style of animation for us.
And on top of that, we have actually,
where I wanted multiple arms when the arms were flipping very fast,
that's an old 2D technique.
A traditional animation cartooning technique.
How am I ever gonna explain this to Pop?
So, it allowed for a different kind of energy on this movie
where the characters could really move in a way
that was more familiar to hand-drawn animation
and gave them a real energy and a kind of spark.
Remember how long we spent trying to figure out
how the news traveled back to the reef
that Oscar killed a shark.
There was a group of tourist fish at one point taking a picture.
Yeah.
And it was a crazy vet, you know, mostly soul character.
That sort of became Crazy Joe, like a hermit.
Wasn't there a guy who was like, in the desert looking for quarters
with the metal detector thing and he had a camera?
- What movie were you working on? - Yeah.
Sorry.
Maybe that was just in the script.
Well, it was like a hermit crab out there, you know, with a shopping cart
living out there in the piles of trash.
Yeah, he had a Polaroid camera.
He took a picture and nobody believed him that Oscar could take on a shark.
And we used to sort of do this telephone thing like,
everybody would... The news would travel.
- The crazy vignettes, yeah. - We watched it travel through...
And then we ended up with this.
You know, Ernie and Bernie took the news back
and it made perfect sense 'cause they dragged him out there.
- Yeah, simpler, faster, too. - It seemed like a no-brainer.
- Cheaper. - "Cheaper."
They are there. They are already there, you know.
This is fun.
The story gets out of control.
7,500-foot shark.
- And then Katie Current. - Katie Current.
She was a lot of fun.
She gave us permission to do a little bit of parody with her
which was awesome.
The big kahuna?
Katie, I'm gonna keep it real.
- I can call you Katie? - Of course.
Any shark try to mess around in Oscartown is going down!
Yeah, it's poetic. In the heat I get poetic!
Oscar.
Okay. Get outta here, you barracudas.
At one point, this movie was very complicated.
This was almost the L.A. Confidential of animated movies.
We had to start combining characters and simplify story lines
'cause it was just, it was a legacy.
Yeah, remember, actually, Lola was Sykes' girlfriend at first.
Lola was Sykes' girlfriend.
- My manager? - You're a superstar.
We're gonna make a fortune. Let me handle it.
Yeah, she was dumping Sykes
to move on to what she thought was a bigger fish with Oscar
when he became a hero.
And earning all kinds of dough.
You're the 10. I take my 90 off the top.
- I don't think so. - Talk to me.
- You get 15. - 70.
- 20. - 75.
Dude! You're going the wrong way.
50-50.
- You happy? - No. You happy?
- No! Deal! - Deal!
This is where Oscar and Sykes seal the deal,
and are set up for the name "Sharkslayer."
- You're slaying 'em. - No! He's slaying sharks!
Hey. Hey, that's good. That's good. I like that.
- Oscar the Sharkslayer. - All right.
So I just realized, and actually, Sykes is the only character that we...
Where we kept his tail in the fish position.
- He never gets feet. - No.
His tail never turns into feet.
And, I am not talking about the sharks
because the sharks, of course, they stay shark otherwise...
- They would look funny. - They would look funny.
We should also talk about the lighting which is pretty amazing
because there's this technical term, "global illumination," that was used
which is essentially, natural lighting.
Whereas in the past, in computer animation,
you kind of had to fake it.
In this technique,
it recreates what natural light would normally do.
So, we could do bounce lighting,
light it almost the way you'd light a live-action set.
Yeah, the light would bounce off characters, you know...
And onto other characters or the walls.
We couldn't do that on Shrek.
Light would die when it hit the next surface.
And we would have to try and imitate it by lighting,
putting another light in there
to make it look like light was bouncing up.
We got to do that on this film,
so it gives this very natural sort of feeling to the lighting.
I said some things to him. We gotta find him.
That gag with Luca pouring coffee,
trying to pour coffee in his cup,
was added when I launched the animator
and I was trying to find a sight gag with Luca.
I love that kind of stuff, you know,
something that happens in the background.
You can still hear the story, you can still hear the dialogue.
But there's a little something there, too.
We should go back to that issue of how human
or how anthropomorphized these characters are
because we had a little mathematical ratio for a while,
right, with the fish?
Yeah, first, there was 70% human and 30% fish,
and we were like, "Well, that..."
We started to do some tests, and we were like, "That's weird."
Not visually. He means, Bibo was talking about kind of like acting,
- like how much... Behavior. - Behavior, yeah.
So, we thought that it's weird
that the fish had to walk from, you know, a chair to the door
since it can swim.
So, we changed that ratio and we went to 50-50.
And this is why I was talking about the tail, you know, twisting.
It's when, actually, when Oscar needs to dance or, you know,
make a few steps or sit down,
you have to twist the tail, so it would look like legs and hips.
Same for Lola, you know, when you want her to look sexy,
you can have actually hips, you know.
This proved to be a real challenge for our character riggers,
the people that build the characters,
'cause obviously everything needs to be built with a skeletal structure, muscles,
things that can handle the kind of squash-and-stretch
the animators were doing
going back and forth between human and fish, where legs could become a tail,
and then spread and divide and become feet
and same thing with the fingers.
Like whenever we want to, our fish can have fingers,
and other times they can go back to being fins.
We couldn't do the same thing with the sharks.
- Didn't look right. - No.
Started to look like, I don't know, a weird person with shark suit.
Puppets. Yeah.
A person in a shark suit.
And if they walked on their fins, it just looked too comical.
It looked too silly.
But you can see how wild the movement is and how extreme the poses are,
and that was really hard to do for the riggers
to find a way that the characters could handle that
without their textures stretching or distorting.
- That was the big breakthrough, right? - Yeah.
Being able to rig something where you could,
it wasn't a rigid skeleton underneath the model
but something that would stretch out
and the skin around the skeleton would go with it.
Yeah. That's what we did very early on,
actually at the very beginning of the production,
we did 2D pencil line tests,
trying out animations, the style of animation
for the characters, especially on Oscar.
And I would say 80% of the animators were like,
they come from traditional animation,
so we wanted that feel, you know, the traditional animation, cartoon-y,
you know, style for this movie.
So, we showed those tests to the riggers and they were like...
The technical directors.
- "You sure you want to do that?" - They started running.
Our animators loved it.
Our animators saw the possibilities.
All of our animators had to retrain themselves
to work on computer.
They brought with them all the skills from their careers in the past.
Yeah, actually, some of the animators created the programs, you know,
that helped us to do that, to achieve that.
And it was great. They worked very close together with the riggers.
And that was perfect.
So, the acting on this, that these characters are capable of is really,
it's extraordinary for the same reasons.
With all the different controls in the face,
the ability to stretch and squash the textures,
the models without them breaking up
just gave all the animators a tremendous amount of room to play.
And they did an amazing job to capture the actors', you know...
Expressions?
Mannerisms, you know, and expressions.
And I never forget who my friends are.
They studied,
our animators and all of us studied the films of everybody's.
They looked at past films of Renée's so you can see that in her eyes,
the way the lower lids lift up...
Pouty mouth. Yeah.
It's very unique to Renée.
It's not that these fish actually look so much like the actors,
it's that they act like the actors.
It's an important point 'cause everyone says,
you know, they were modeled after the actors,
but it's not so much the modeling.
It's like what you said, it's the acting,
the way they perform is what resembles the actors.
It was capturing the essence of every actor's, you know, acting,
so the animators didn't copy anything, just interpreted.
Well, you know...
Sharks! On the edge of the reef!
They're... They're Great Whites!
Someone came up to me... Just to switch subjects from technical
to something I found fascinating, someone came up to me and said,
"Why do the fish have elevators?
"Why were they using elevators when they can just swim?"
Which was a very good point, and then I thought, "Well,
"why do we use elevators? We can just walk up stairs."
- We're all limited by our perceptions. - I guess the answer is...
- Because we're lazy. - We are lazy.
- Even the fish are lazy? - Yeah.
That's a good answer.
Biceps, triceps!
Couple times they jump off the balcony.
We thought it might be fun when Oscar was swimming around
thinking how he made a mess of his life,
that at one point he might jump from a bridge.
But obviously he can swim, so it was no big deal.
It would just give the illusion of jumping.
We tried to do that gag of just jumping off a bridge
and then not falling, but it never quite... Couldn't figure it out.
- It goes dark. - It really does.
It's just too dark.
Suicide is not a great subject.
Lenny!
The kelp.
Kelp fields were always really fun.
Super close.
There were a lot of different techniques used for creating kelp.
Some of it was sort of a...
Some of it is hand-animated, some of it is a program.
Yeah, yeah, the Effects department developed programs for...
The kelp in the background is actually automatic.
It's a behavior.
- It's a behavior. - Yeah.
Not animated.
Which is similar... It's a similar technology for
in the background you see, you know, hundreds of fish...
- Yeah. - ...in groups,
schools offish, those are actually behaviors.
They put in a patch offish that have, you know...
It's more difficult for the schools offish
because don't want them to collide, you know,
and you have to find their pass, you know,
and you have to compose them.
This sequence was hard to light.
For some reason, the blue was getting very electric.
And it was very hard to time as well. To color time.
Things will work out.
- You think? - Yeah!
Yeah, nighttime scene, dark characters, you can imagine.
This is the sweetest scene on Lenny. This is where you really fall for him.
They are just beginning their bonding here.
They're getting to know each other versus adversaries.
And then later on in the warehouse, they connect a little bit more.
I love that, where his little feet are kicking. It's great.
It's very classic.
Then how to discover...
How for Lenny to discover that Oscar is a Sharkslayer?
That's right.
There was a lot of different things we played with here,
but bringing the shorties back was a fun one for Lenny to overhear
that Oscar is the Sharkslayer.
And we get to work with Bobb'e again.
- All the kids were great. - They were.
Hey! Yo, the shorties!
- Oscar! - What y'all doing here?
The word "shorties," you know, Will taught us that one
because he used it in an ad-lib and then that became the characters' names.
We just always referred to them as shorties.
What did I tell you?
I remember that tag was added at the very end.
Yeah, it's "Oscar the Sharkslayer" on top of the shark.
On top, yeah.
For years, it was only that shark, not the name "Sharkslayer"
and then we added graffiti.
This is why you see only once and never see it ever again.
Right.
- Come on, Oscar. - Get your butts home.
I know your moms. I'm gonna tell 'em y'all doing bad stuff.
- Let's go make Mr. Sykes puff up. - Yeah!
- Bye, Oscar! - See ya later, dude!
And then these guys have to strike their deal.
Did you see what just happened there?
I know.
This is where we get the glimpse of Lenny actually being, maybe he's smart.
Maybe he's bright.
- Maybe he can be a Don. - That's right.
This sequence was supervised in animation by Fabrice Joubert,
and it's funny because
he was grateful and he's a little bit of a Lenny as well.
He's very quiet, but still has a peculiar sense of humor.
And a very sweet guy, and I think, I mean,
he did that scene when Lenny says just before this, when he says,
- "Please don't cry," and he's like... - And he wipes, fans his eyes.
Just that little hand gesture for me was, like,
priceless.
I'm not explaining myself to you. You know what? You're on your own!
Lot of people don't realize that the animators are also,
I mean, they really are the actors, part of the actors in the film.
They perform all this stuff.
They were the stars for me.
That's so sweet.
This was another scene we got to record with
two of the actors together. Will and Jack did a lot of ad-libbing
in the little deal that they made together.
- It was really fun. - That was a funny session.
You wanna talk about that other sequence that got cut out?
Yeah. It's interesting enough...
Story-wise, we always,
in between these two sequences here, we would actually cut away
to Sykes going to see Don Lino.
Flipping the tables on him from the first scene we see them in.
Exactly. And telling Don Lino, now Don Lino's out.
But it really broke the flow, and...
It's also one of those things where
it can be dangerous to break point of view.
And up through the first act we'd always
switch back and forth between Oscar's story
and Lenny and the sharks' story,
but once they come together in the kelp fields...
- The stories merge. - Yeah, the stories merge,
so you really wanna stay with Oscar's point of view.
So, we had this weird scene, all of a sudden, where we broke away,
and it didn't fit.
So we decided to pull it out and use...
Cannibalize it, actually.
Yeah. We used story elements of it in
the scene following this one, where Oscar goes to see Sykes.
Which was great, because it gave Oscar bigger stakes.
He actually gets to hear Don Lino's voice,
and hear the threat against him instead of hearing about it.
- Right. - Here's another classic
Crazy Joe scene.
Still one of the biggest laughs in the movie there. He just...
He's just watching The Benny Hill Show in his shell.
Benny Hill is funny.
It is. It's true.
It's like the word "chicken" is always funny.
And it got a huge laugh in Venice, remember?
Yeah. That's like...
- Internationally, that was a big laugh. - Benny Hill is big in Europe.
- Yeah. - Especially in Europe.
Look at the giant sponge that Lenny's made into a bed.
I love you, man.
He's so cute.
- You're my new best friend. - Stop it.
Okay.
It's some of the best animation.
It's like Lenny's behavior, the way he sits down or lays down on the bed,
and puts himself comfortable on the bed, it's so great.
And it's very inspired.
They're both actually kind of like big kids.
- Both characters. - That's right.
We've always described Oscar's character as a big kid who...
You know, he keeps...
He has these big dreams about what he wants to be,
and he thinks if he has the coolest stuff, he'll be happy.
And it's, kind of... He has a little growing-up to do.
And then he bumps into Lenny,
who's also kind of trapped, a little bit, being a kid,
in that he wants his dad's approval and needs it,
and doesn't think he can ever match up to what his dad's expectations are.
So the two of them kind of connect on this
- funny little... Yeah. - On that level, yeah.
Hold up.
With Lenny, especially,
it's very easy to drift into him just being dumb.
But actually he's just...
He's smart, he's just really innocent.
And that was sort of the one nuance we needed to find,
and once we got on that,
I think his character kind of...
- Jack really helped in that. - ...came out.
Keeping him...
Keeping him sharp.
It shows in animation because when I talked with the animators,
actually, Oscar is a little fish with big dreams.
So when he acts, when he makes gestures, hand gestures,
it's bigger than himself.
So he makes big gestures.
And Lenny is a big fish,
but he's a kid.
So when he acts, actually, he moves like a kid.
Like I said, he sits down like a kid.
He doesn't make huge gestures.
Here's one of our transitions that...
Where we had a lot of fun trying to experiment with things like
Snatch, the movie Snatch type of transitions, where
you're in one scene, and then suddenly you find yourself in another,
rather than just a hard cut.
I've got news for you. The Sharkslayer made me his manager,
One big help was the Head of Layout, Gil Zimmerman.
Actually, he went through every movie like that.
And he was great to work with.
And he's got so many ideas.
He also did something that I thought was just so smart,
when the camera, the computer camera
would crane down... We'd have these big shots,
and it'd crane down. He'd actually
- put in noise to make it bump. - Yeah.
- So it wasn't... Yeah. - Like give weight to the camera.
Visual noise.
The problem with the computer animation stuff is it's perfect.
And movies, traditional movies, live-action movies,
there's nothing that perfect,
so there's certain things in there that might bump or jitter.
Just very subtle things that you don't notice, but...
- Human error. - Human error, yeah.
You want to feel the human error.
And it doesn't feel right unless you have that stuff in there, so...
That was added, that gag was added.
- This was... Yeah. - Last month of the production.
We ended up putting all this stuff.
My guys are coming for you, Sharkslayer.
Oh, boy. Yeah, Robert was amazing.
He was so into this movie, he really...
I mean, all the characters,
all the actors, rather, to their credit,
really treated their characters with the same respect that they would
if they were doing a live-action film.
They believed these characters,
they understood the motivations,
and every time we returned to record with everybody,
they knew their characters, and they kept them alive
over the course of a couple of years.
And everybody was able to tap right back into their character,
and understand where to find it. It was great.
We spent so much time with that lava lamp.
To make sure that... I mean,
for me, it was crazy because I thought, "Okay,
"it's a lava lamp."
With CG, and I thought it would be so easy,
but we have to find the right speed,
and the right shapes, and make sure that it doesn't upstage the...
- The action. - The action and all that. It was crazy.
I'll have to mention...
The person who, for me, is the grand architect of this movie,
Pierre O. V.
- Pierre Vincent. - Pierre-Olivier Vincent.
I mean, he created all those...
This couch, this everything, and the whole city, actually.
He made, remember the drawings?
- Yeah. - He made, he's like...
There was not enough room for the paper only...
- He drew huge. Yeah. - It was so huge.
We invite you to look at other features on this DVD.
You'll see a huge library
of some of the visual development that was done on this movie.
You can understand what we're talking about.
Because we spent a good, I don't know, a year and a half
developing all of the locations, just visually in two dimensions,
before we built anything.
So, that means we did paintings and drawings,
and you'll see a lot of the artwork everybody created,
including character color, and character designs.
A lot of time, talent and effort went into finding the look for this film.
- Hi. - Shark!
Swim, Angie. I'll cover you.
Lighting, little things like this.
The light switches on when she says, "Oh, stop it."
Look. You think it's easy.
Hit a switch, turn a light on?
And it's such an important thing
'cause you gotta get that warm light into the scene.
You can't have it be washed over with the cool blue light for the whole thing.
You lied. Everybody thinks you slayed the shark.
Renée is so great.
She's such a great actress, and so funny.
Will Smith, we recorded constantly with him,
and he really helped develop the character of Oscar.
He's such a great ad-lib actor,
and a good sport. Everybody had to be a good sport
to work like this.
To work over and over again on the same scenes.
But we'd also...
Which actually worked out really well.
...play into the headphones for Will, Renée's performance,
then he would sort of bounce off of that to get the feel,
as if they were in the same room together.
I don't want any part of this.
Too late now, veggie boy. They'll be looking for you, too.
Point taken. What's the plan?
- This is what we gonna do. - Oscar, here's the plan.
I love how...
One of the main animators, actually, the supervising animators
on this movie, Ken Duncan,
took care of mainly Angie's character.
I know Ken for probably 20 years now,
and he's one of the greatest animators on the planet, animation, so...
It was not only a pleasure to work with him, but he brought so much.
Every time I came to see an animation
he was doing, it was like... Just the little details
he put in her acting
was perfect, was just adding so much...
Very sophisticated acting.
This is Katie Current reporting live.
Yeah, the acting in this movie is pretty consistent, the animation.
I'm just amazed at how quickly
everybody who was used to using a pencil
made the transition, and did so well,
and understanding there were other ways to do what they knew how to do.
How to stretch a character, how to play with the timing
in such a different medium.
I can barely work email.
And... Yeah, I think... I mean...
When you have the skills
to learn the technique, and to...
And to master a technique is just work.
Those... All those animators are pure talent.
So, just learning a technique is not hard when you have the talent.
This was a fun sequence to finally see.
It took so long because that whole city,
that's a huge model,
that was built on a computer, it's so complicated.
And to finally see that thing. I remember when we finally saw it lit,
and it was in color, it was amazing.
It's kind of like late-in-the-day lighting.
- Sunset light in Times Square. - Yeah, the magic hour. Yeah.
Thanks to Kevin Rafferty,
he was...
He took care of all the exterior daylight big city scenes,
which were actually the most difficult
things to do.
That scene is...
That, I mean...
That shot right there is huge.
This is such a simple gag, but I've always loved it.
You don't even see Oscar.
Don't swallow.
But just hearing him inside of Lenny's mouth,
and being mad at a shark while he's inside his mouth.
I've always really enjoyed this.
This silly little monologue right here.
And the whole time poor Lenny is just, he can't bear it
'cause he's a vegetarian, and he just can't bear the taste of anything
other than kelp in his mouth.
But, Oscar, I think I'm gonna puke.
No, no, no. No, no, no.
And it was fun.
Later on, you'll see a sequence where Lenny
saves Angie by pretending to eat her,
and it wasn't really part of the original story.
But once we saw Lenny gagging,
it was just funny how it became such a key story point,
that that was a great way to...
- To rescue her. - Yeah.
Should say, Michael Wilson,
who's also a writer on Shark Tale,
I remember we were just...
It was some late-night session, trying to figure out that scene,
in what would be the craziest rescue mission ever.
Which would be to actually eat the person you're rescuing.
There were versions of that sequence, actually.
Lola killed Luca,
and brought the head in newspaper, wrapped in newspaper.
- It was darker. - The movie was a bit darker,
- in the early days. - Darker movie.
- We felt we were making... - She dropped...
She dropped the entire grand piano on the table with Luca dead in it,
or something like that. It was crazy.
- Yeah, it was... - What were we thinking?
That was the rated-R version of Shark Tale.
- We were breaking ground. - Shark Tale unrated.
Sorry.
But this has always been fun, watching the two of them team up.
With the whole reef watching.
There's lots of changes of medium here.
You can see... Sometimes, it's as if you're watching a film
shot through the media, through... Like a news broadcast.
And it's part of that whole, you know,
the shorter attention span kind of feel to the movie,
where we were gesturing at kind of a media-savvy feel.
Where sometimes you're watching a broadcast of the story,
and sometimes you're in the story,
other times you're looking at the giant screen there in Times Square.
I love, especially, that scene when he gets in slo-mo there,
when Lenny is falling from the screen.
Because I know...
I like the symbol of Oscar actually is bigger
than Lenny in that scene.
And it's a symbol of that Oscar becomes
larger than a shark.
- Larger than life, - Yeah, and larger than life.
And they're both happy.
Lenny is happy to become a small fish,
and Oscar is happy to become the biggest fish.
For me, it was a key scene.
...but maybe a few hearts.
It's a great gag in here
that we gave to Katie.
One of the best lines in the movie.
"Watching the Sharkslayer making out."
We did a couple power sessions.
We brought in some really funny people.
Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer, Lona Williams,
Scott Aukerman and BJ Porter, and we did this little round table,
and that joke came out of that.
There's a lot of really funny jokes that came out of that session.
Angie, you ain't know I had it in me, did you?
It was like an Oscar-splosion.
We had a lot of fun...
Everybody gets to contribute ideas throughout,
when you're working on an animated feature.
'Cause if everybody sees the movie many times before it's finished,
our animators are always adding new ideas to help make a scene even funnier.
Earlier, when we're introduced to Angie,
and she hears Oscar call her his best friend,
and she grabs a pen and pretends to commit hari-kari on herself.
These are the kind of things that are not in the script.
They weren't in the original storyboarded sequence,
and it's an idea that is just so much fun, we have to find a way
to make it happen. So we're always encouraging everybody
to help us out, come up with ideas.
That's kind of what's fun about animation.
Really, it's great. It's...
There's a lot of tough things about it,
but that is definitely one of the great things.
It's such a huge collaboration of ideas,
it's pretty amazing.
That example when she stabs herself, no,
pretends to stab herself with a pen through her heart,
she used to say a line, "Oh, yeah. Best friend.
"Thank you very much. That's all that you think of me."
But this visual that replaces a line,
it's always good in animation to do.
To express something, express thoughts
from a character through an action
instead of words.
To me you were a somebody, Oscar.
Now you're nothing but a fake.
I have to say, I think this is my favorite...
This is the most touching scene in the entire movie.
It's touching, and it works on a couple levels because
it's touching, and then right when Lenny comes out in his crazy outfit,
it's also a huge laugh.
It's just one of those...
- Tension breakers. - Yeah. When Lenny cuts in.
Remember when they recorded that line we were all
- weepy. - Weepy.
- Yeah. - She broke our heart.
She's so powerful, she's actually
really an amazing actress.
And Will, too, in this scene,
when he finally lets out against her,
"Nobody loved me when I was nobody!"
Even though he's yelling, it's really a vulnerable moment.
And his character just snaps into place, for me, at that point.
I totally understand what's driving him,
and why these two can't reach any kind of understanding at this point yet.
And then, that's sweet.
There's Lenny, you know.
He just wants to patch things up between them.
One shot to your heart Without breaking your skin
I love this song.
The details in animation as well. Oscar,
holding that door handle,
is like again symbolic of her.
That's Angie, he's letting go by letting go of the door.
And he just leaves one finger a little longer
because he can't really do it.
But he has to.
You wanna heal your body
So Oscar comes to his crossroads.
And this was a delicate scene,
we wanted Oscar to understand
that maybe he hadn't made all the right choices in his life,
and that maybe...
Maybe Angie was right. But it hasn't hit home yet,
how he feels about her.
That comes later. But this is kind of understanding that
the truth of what she's saying,
that maybe there's something more important out there,
than what he thinks is important.
You can live or you can die
So when he looks at the penthouse, it doesn't look...
The way we tried to do any lighting in the corners of it...
It doesn't look glamorous anymore.
- It just looked kind of gray and... - Cold.
Cold and dead.
You can fly, fly, fly, fly
Angelina did such a great job with the Lola character.
I mean, sure, she's a traditional femme fatale,
but there's a real sense of humor about her...
That Angie found for the character.
Angie was right.
It was fun recording those scenes.
What's that story? You gotta tell the story.
Well, it's just that the first time we recorded
with Angie, with Angelina,
you guys were there, and Jeffrey was there,
and everyone just falls under the spell of the siren except me.
I mean, you gotta trust the female at the helm for a moment
because you guys were always so hypnotized by Angelina.
I had to read with her, which was like, "Oh, my God."
And weren't you getting married a week later or something? Or two weeks later?
Yes, and thanks for mentioning that on DVD.
And you're just gonna drift off into this
- dreamland. - I went home immediately and confessed.
But it was funny... There was one moment where,
you know, she was putting on a voice,
and I can't remember what it was you were saying,
"That kind of voice could scare men." And she was like,
"What? I don't scare men."
- "Scare men"? - Something like,
"I scare men? No."
I guess, yeah, "Okay, no, that's good that you're purring.
"It's nice, but you don't wanna scare 'em."
"I purr? I purr?
"I didn't know I scared men, and I didn't know I purr."
All of a sudden, we were at an intervention.
She was such a good sport, it was great.
I can't help myself
I'd just like to come back to that scene
that cut on Lola when she becomes evil.
That was an, actually...
An idea, again, from the animator,
the supervising animator of that sequence, William Salazar.
And he just brought that, he just showed it to me, he's like,
"I was thinking about, like, an evil
"anime female character, you know,
"where nothing moves, but the hair is, like, flipping."
And I was like, "What?"
And, well, then I showed it to you guys,
and everybody was laughing in the room.
That was great.
Should talk about Ernie and Bernie's heads.
That gelatinous
appearance to their hats
is another one of those really cool...
I think they were the coolest characters to create,
and on so many different levels,
and the surfacing, as well, was very fun to do.
- It's called "subsurface scattering." - Yeah.
And at the time that we were working on it,
that was something that was pretty new.
I mean, technology moves very fast,
and it's something that's a bit more accessible to people now,
but it's a process that allows light to pass through one surface
and get bent, as if through something like jelly,
and refract in a way that looks very natural.
It's like light passing through jade or through glass
or through anything translucent.
It was really just one of those impossible things to do before now.
They got Angie.
But if you look closely to the hat, you'd see...
Actually, there's layers of jelly,
and the first layer, it looks like...
Like wool, like knitted wool,
to make it look even more like, you know, Rastafarian hat.
Plus that was fun to create.
And we got to save her.
Whoa, whoa. I wanna save Angie, too,
but I can't waltz in there and say, "Hi, Pop. I'm a dolphin."
Lenny as a dolphin, painted blue, covering his shark gills with
caution tape from inside the warehouse,
and rubber band around his nose.
We actually had to figure out, technically, how to
- transform him into a dolphin. - Yeah.
It was interesting.
I remember that first drawing, you gave me the sketch,
like, "Well, we have to wrap his nose."
Yeah with rubber band, and...
- This is one of the favorite scenes. - Where the five families sit down.
Yeah, David Soren, our Head of Story, really shepherded
this sequence and did a great job.
It's one of the funniest sequences in the movie.
Just the whole setup of Oscar facing all these sharks,
and they're as scared of him as he is of them.
It's just great.
The whale's always fainting.
Just come back to the scene when Oscar gets the news
on the phone that, actually, Angie got kidnapped.
And you see in that scene that all the colors,
very slowly from the place
vanish, you know, they...
It goes from very NG...
- Bright and colorful. - Yeah.
Bright, colorful and magical,
and suddenly no more magic is in the room, and it gets gray.
Okay, so go back and look at that.
- And then come back to this sequence. - Rewind,
bookmark, come back.
That would be me.
The big Lino speech.
I've been looking forward to meeting you.
That sequence, we looked at
every scene with De Niro in it.
Yeah.
In his bio.
And you took 'em out.
You know who I am?
We love pulling the rug out from under Don Lino,
and Luca, his sidekick, is the best character for that.
Vinnie Pastore really had a lot of fun with him.
I've been running this reef since before you was born.
If you thought a guy like me can't get to a guy like you...
Guess what?
You thought wrong.
Man, you the one who's wrong.
Oscar's gotta do his big bluff.
He's good at it. He's good at bluffing all the time, he's a liar.
Well, I say he's bluffing.
Marone, if I wasn't married.
How ya doing?
- Peter Falk. - Peter Falk.
How did you meet him? That was a great story.
When you were writing his character?
Yeah, it was funny. I...
There was so much writing to do, I'd go to a coffee shop
at midnight, I'd be writing some of these scenes.
I was in Beverly Hills, at this coffee shop, it was midnight.
We'd just cast Peter Falk.
I hadn't had a chance to meet him yet.
And I was writing
one of these scenes, I don't remember which one.
And I looked up, and he walked into the coffee shop,
and sat down, so I went over to him, I said,
"This is crazy, but we haven't met yet,
"but I'm one of the directors on Shark Tale,
"and I'm literally writing your scene,
"and it's nice to meet you." And he was laughing, and it was great.
It was actually one of the great ways to...
"Am I doing Shark Tale? What?"
- Exactly. - "It's news to me."
That scene.
It's such an old reference, but it's funny.
It's funny.
Nobody, I repeat, nobody makes a move without my okay.
- It's a classic. - It is. Yeah.
- Classic dance moves. - Parachute pants.
What'd he do? I can't see it.
We have a little homage to, which movie is it with the belt?
Where he's walking around the table,
- kind of threatening... - The Untouchables.
- Untouchables. - Untouchables, right.
We tried to do an homage to...
- Marty's film, Goodfellas. - Goodfellas.
Where we had the long tracking shot into the kitchen,
when Oscar was gonna get into this really amazing club
we called The Viper Fish Room.
And now that he was a big shot, he was being ushered into the club
by Mr. Sykes, but ultimately we let it go.
We still have one.
We have, "You think I'm funny?"
Yeah.
"You think I'm a clown? Am I a clown to you?"
- Right, yeah. - That's from Goodfellas.
The horror!
It's such a throwaway gag, but it's just...
The shark eating a license plate.
And if you look closely, isn't that the license plate from the movie Jaws?
It's the exact license plate from Jaws.
All right, that's for you geeks out there.
And us.
- Us geeks. - You're the biggest geek here.
Is that you?
You're alive?
I thought I lost you.
This is actually an important beat.
His first reaction should be, you know...
- How great it is... - From the heart.
Yeah, from the heart, that his son is alive 'cause...
You know, ultimately, he's...
He's a father in denial, not so much an evil villain.
Then he quickly sweeps...
- Sweeps that across. - But then he switches. Yeah.
- And it's all about... - Yeah, he's actually...
He's not the villain of the story.
Lola is more of a villain than he is.
Yeah. I mean, he's the antagonist, but he's not...
- He's caught up in... - ...Dr. Evil.
...responsibilities, and the old-school way of thinking about...
Appearances. What does it look like for a son not to match up to his father.
And he has to let go of that stuff to really accept Lenny.
You never take sides against the family. Ever!
And Little Oscar tries to jump in and help and protect Lenny.
This is between you and me.
What did I ever do to you?
You took Frankie away and you turned Lenny into a dolphin!
"...into a dolphin."
I'm gonna get you.
Really, sharks do hate dolphins.
Dolphins are the only...
I think this is true.
We don't have a lot of scientific stuff in this movie,
but dolphins are the one threat in the ocean to...
- The main enemy, yeah. - Right.
They gang up on sharks and take 'em down.
And the return of the shrimp.
You still hungry, big guy?
Shrimp aren't much of a threat.
If you notice carefully,
the very last shrimp to come out of the portal is Stumpy.
- There he is. - Stumpy, yeah.
- The one above the... - You see...
Actually, you don't see here because it's full-screen,
but in the second scene you see him turning back because he's too scared.
Really.
That's the little shrimp that
the other shrimp was talking about in the restaurant scene.
So that was a true story.
It was a true story, that his sister had a baby,
and it lost its arms...
That was an idea brought by the Effects department actually.
They surprised me with that.
See, gags come from everywhere.
The big climax in the Whale Wash.
How do you stop a shark?
It was a tricky sequence to do because it was about confusion.
So, how do you do a sequence about confusion
without confusing the audience?
And yourself.
And, from a distance, the sharks look pretty similar.
Lenny?
Well, you say their names, that's how you do it.
Yeah, that's right.
That's why we had Rob here, "Yeah, just say the name."
Lino?
Lot of effects-heavy scenes here,
- a lot of slow motion. - Yeah.
The lighting was going from normal to red light...
A tricky one.
You kept the caution light flashing the whole time.
A little Michael Bay reference there.
This is Hans' score again,
taking the theme for Oscar, which was, kind of, this cool...
Ocean's Eleven kind of a feel to it, and then turning it into
a dramatic action piece here for when he defeats Lino.
Okay, somebody needs to get me out of the bubble, today.
- Angie... - The Sharkslayer has done it again.
And, of course, the media steps in to keep our lovers apart.
I always loved that you guys stuck the microphone right in his face.
It took me a couple of viewings to catch that one.
- Tell our cameras how it feels to be you. - Angie!
Oscar, get me out here. Quick. I need to get a head start
so I can get as far away as possible.
Look what you did to him.
Madness, our crowds cheering,
and this was another homage,
a little bit, to Day of the Locust here.
Where the crowd just becomes evil for a moment,
and Oscar has to give it all up.
And Crazy Joe is always the perfect comedic...
Thank God for Crazy Joe.
Crazy Joe and Luca.
We desperately needed to undercut this.
And I'm not a real financial adviser.
Not just once.
- But twice. - Three times.
Three times, that's right.
I didn't have anything to do with it, and neither did Lenny.
Then if that was true, why did you run away?
It's a sweet father-son story.
I'll never be the shark you want me to be.
But those devices were built originally to
hold a whale in place.
I'm sure that was a nightmare trying to
- design it to come under a shark. - Well, we used the one that...
- The whale's tail? - ...held the whale's tail, yeah.
Whales are huge by comparison.
It's easy to cheat. When you're doing
traditional hand-drawn animation,
you can redesign your characters all throughout, right?
Using the eraser, and then redraw it.
- But this stuff was built. - Once you build it...
Yup.
It'd be cool if they put the blueprint of the Whale Wash on the DVD.
It might be...
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah, it's there. - You got a thumbs up.
You guys can go and check out again...
- The architectural drawing... - Yeah, it's amazing.
They even figured out how the mechanics work.
Yeah, actually, if it were built,
for real, it would work.
It's a working schematic of the Whale Wash.
Everybody has a job in the Whale Wash. Those little guys,
those little crabs, we'd call 'em "the Bungee Crabs,"
they're kind of extreme athletes, right?
They jump down from the gantry,
like bungee-cord divers,
and they snap the barnacles off the back of a whale.
You'll see it in the video coming up.
'Cause we're in, like, right near the end of the movie now.
I remember, actually, it was all designed by Armand Baltazar.
And he was pitching these drawings to Jeffrey
and us, and he was like,
"Look, here it's like in a real Whale Wash.
"So I did this like in a real Whale Wash."
And he was talking like,
actually, this thing was real.
Actually, became real.
Since he built it.
Oh, come here, you big dumb dummy-head.
Okay, this kiss was actually way longer than what you're seeing here, but...
Still no tongue.
- No. - No.
It's a PG movie.
It's a sweet kiss.
That's fun. I always love that.
Come, Sykes, try again, mon. Go for it.
Forget it. The moment's gone.
So, Lino.
It makes such sense to have the song at the end of the movie, doesn't it?
Who knew?
The Car Wash song, yeah.
- You know. - Yeah.
With a little reference to the media, everybody cheers.
Oscar, excuse me. Oscar.
And Katie bookends the movie.
I like that line.
What's next for you?
Come on. Everyone's waiting.
And then we have our celebrity fish.
He's finally happy with
what he had all along.
- Yo, dog! - Sykes!
Sykes all pimped out.
He has a gold tooth, if you look carefully.
He's got gold teeth.
...is now open for business!
Yeah, I remember when they presented all that,
like a fashion
pitch for the hat.
- For what Mr. Sykes would be wearing? - That's funny.
Yeah. There was like 25 different hats.
There she is, Missy E and Christina.
You might not ever get rich
Warm it up. I be warming it up.
Let me tell you, it's better Than digging a ditch
So, this scene was one of the first scenes we animated in the movie,
back when it was at the beginning of the movie.
That too.
So we were able to reuse a lot of stuff
that was originally planned for the beginning of the movie.
But it's great here, it's good fun.
Turtle dancers.
When I had to caricature the Christina fish,
it was pretty tough to find a fish
that would look... The type offish that would look like her.
'Cause I started with Missy Elliott and it was easier somehow.
But I found a picture of her with blond dreadlocks.
I know, she laughed about it later, too.
"Oh, yeah, they found that old picture of me with the dreads."
Yeah, so last year.
But it's hard. Everybody changes their hairstyle so much, it's hard to keep up.
Especially, people like her.
Yeah. Inventing new looks.
I love this little exchange.
So silly.
Can you believe it, I mean, Rob,
we'd present pages like that in front of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro?
Worst feeling ever to see Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese walking out with
pages that say, "Yo, yo, yo, yo... Yo."
The two legends of cinema.
Here you go.
The choreography.
Yeah, you should talk about Hi-Hat.
Yeah, that was good...
Let me talk about that clown...
You know, makeup that the killer whale has, first because
it creeped me out when I...
As a drawing, it was great because it was designed
as a very quickly done clown makeup.
And it was like, kind of, gripping.
And then on the moving, killer whale suddenly looked creepy.
Looked like the clown from
Stephen King, you know, It.
Yeah.
It was nightmarish work. At the very last minute,
we had to change it and make it more neat.
Yeah, Hi-Hat, it was a great collaboration with her.
And she brought so much.
She does choreography for a lot of the...
- Lot of music videos. - Missy Elliott.
And a lot of people. Who else?
- Tons of people. Yeah. - Everybody, I think.
And...
So, we had like three days with her,
and the animators came just to, you know, to capture
the moves and all that.
Well, they didn't dance, but...
But she was amazing. She had a team that actually figured out
the dance moves for each character.
What Bungee Crabs would do,
- what each... Style, for each character. - Yeah.
She's a professional, so she actually
did her homework, and then
when I gave her all the species offish and all that,
and she came up with the crab dance,
and the eel dance,
and it was really good, and we...
We used... You know, she...
She brought us so many moves for Oscar,
and we used that when he walks,
or when he gets from A to B.
And what I was talking at the beginning,
the music he has in him, the beat he has in him,
was actually the work of Hi-Hat as well.
And you can watch some of that footage, too,
if you look through the features, you'll see Hi-Hat and her team
demonstrating some of those steps,
and hopefully with their character right beside them.
- Well, thanks for listening... - Thank you very much.
...and hearing some of the stories. Hope you enjoyed it,
and check out the rest of the DVD.
Don't go yet. There's still a surprise at the end of the credit.
That's right, yeah. Don't leave. You have to watch all the way through...
But we can go.
But you've heard enough of us.
- I'm sure you've heard enough of us. - Yeah.
I'm tired of myself.
All right. Thanks again.
Thank you.
You'd have to be crazy not to take me back.
Did someone say "crazy"?
Taxi! Hey, taxi! Hello!
Hey, you gonna eat the rest of your popcorn?
Too much butter!
Hey! A nacho!
You're not even halfway done yet.
What? You see this guy?
He hardly worked on the movie at all!
Always on the phone, yakking, yakking, yakking.
Man, have you guys seen what's playing next door?
Stinky!
What you doing? Go on! Get out of here! Go home!
It's past your bedtime!