Open Season Co-Directors Jill Culton and Tony Stacchi Talk Animation Turkey

"It's us animation studios against the rest of Hollywood," laughs Tony Stacchi, co-director of Sony's debut computer graphics (CG) animated project Open Season, strangely and subconsciously echoing one of the marketing taglines for the film: One Fur All, All Fur One.

The "Fur" element in the film is represented by Boog (a domesticated grizzly bear portrayed by comedian Martin Lawrence) and Elliot (a mule deer brought to life by Ashton Kutcher). Debra Messing and Gary Sinise voice the notable human representations.

While the fact that Open Season took three years to come together may seem like a lifetime when compared with a live action feature, Culton's prior projects at Pixar took five. With additional sequences animated for the DVD, life with a CG project requires a whole lot of love.

The Journey

Jill Culton (Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc.) admits her Northern Californian habitat affected her initial involvement with film: "The people at Sony sent me [Steve Moore's] treatment that was about five pages long. And it took me a while to read it; I'm a nature lover and I didn't want to move to L.A. But the whole concept of animals fighting back against open season was too good an idea to pass up." She adds that, because of her experiences and inspired by the artwork on some Christmas cards found in her attic, she "wanted the audience to be as overwhelmed by nature as Boog is when he goes into the woods for the first time. And Boog is really the human character, because he's a domesticated grizzly bear who hasn't ever been into the woods. You really go on a journey with him discovering everything for the first time."

Former colleagues - and renowned story doctors - at animation studio ILM (at which the 2-dimensional Curious George began as a CG project) and familiar with being charged with getting the done in a very short amount of time, Culton and Stacchi came together again when Culton brought Stacchi on board for the three-year assignment. Industry veteran Roger Allers (Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid), who was responsible for pre-production concepts on 1982 flick TRON, joined the directorial threesome halfway into the three-year project.

The Premise

Basing Open Season on Steve Moore's comic works, Stacchi relates that "there's nobody who's had a pet, or who's hunted animals or who loves animals who hasn't wondered, ‘What do they do when we're not around? What do they really think about us? And, given the opportunity, would they bust into a 7/11 store and eat all the sugar in the place?'"

Duck Season Rabbit Season

Acknowledging that they watch the old Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons "all the time because we love 'em," Stacchi describes the feel of Open Season as reminiscent of the Warner Bros. classics. "Hunting has a long, humorous history with Warner Bros. animation through its cartoons, and the whole of the United States has a very nuanced view on hunting and guns and everything else," Stacchi provides, "and we're doing the movie from the animal's point of view of what it feels like to be in the woods during open season. But I don't think anybody is subject to any more ridicule than anyone else."

Culton adds, "It's a film for families, for kids, and yet there are guns in the movie. At one point there was even the threat to change the title. However, [Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group Chairman] Amy Pascal said, ‘I'm okay. The only thing is, I don't want to ever see a gun in the hands of any of the hero characters.' Which meant the animals. So we had to come up with really cool ways for them to fight without any real ammunition. That was a creative challenge that was really fun, and we'd... come up with things like, ‘How can you make a weapon out of toilet paper?' Hopefully, it won't feel as much a statement about hunting as it is about a mini army of underdogs ["Hopelessly inept underdogs!" interrupts Stacchi] who overcome obstacles to survive."

The Cast

For the buddy comedy element of Boog and Elliot, they "paired up 40 different voices with each other," Culton recalls. "We'd have random pairings that the editor would put together, and we didn't want to see the names. Some [pairings] were counter-intuitive, like when we put [Martin Lawrence's] voice inside Boog. Martin often gets cast as the comedy sidekick, [but] he does really well holding the emotional arc for this entire movie."

Pushing Oscar^TM-winner Gary Sinise (Apollo 13, Forrest Gump, The Green Mile) to go out of his comfort zone until he started having fun for the role of seven-foot-tall, shark-toothed villain Shaw, Culton relates that they "chose him partly because the animators loved animating him... He could go from being calm to being completely explosive."

As for Park Ranger Beth, "we wanted Debra Messing because we wanted [Beth] to be entertaining and to be an individual," Stacchi shares. "A lot of time in animated films, the female characters are the hardest because people are ultra sensitive and say, ‘Oh, she complains too much' or ‘She whines too much; she's unlikable,' and you're not allowed to give the female character the complexities or the problems that you are with other characters. As the mother-type character for the bear, it would have been too easy to play her very milquetoast or very loving." [Editor's note: Given that the word ‘milquetoast' entered the English language from a comic strip about the timid Casper Milquetoast, its use here by Stacchi is apt.]

The Key to Classic Characters

The key, Culton offers, is "to create characters that exist outside ourselves and separate from the film, and separate from the actors who played them. For example, when you think of Toy Story, you don't really think of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen; you think of Woody and Buzz. You think of these characters as existing on their own.

"There was a point that Tony and I both remember. We were sitting in the animation bay, and we had 60 animators working on the film, and you'd hear them talking amongst themselves: ‘I don't think Boog would ever do that' or ‘Elliot would never say that.' After a certain point, we didn't have to give them that direction. The whole crew could see whether Boog would move a certain way or make a certain expression. When the characters take on a life on their own, that's the test; that's what you wait for."

Culton continues, "Tony and I really wanted to make sure that our film had a unique style. Carter Goodrich [who does covers for the New Yorker]... created characters that really stand out as being from the same world as well as being really unique. We have a porcupine who's bright blue and looks more like a sea urchin than a porcupine but is the cutest guy in the movie. He's created incredibly lovable characters."

Technology's Traps

Told from the start that Sony would absolutely not do this film in IMAX or IMAX 3D, the directors found that perspective changed when the film started to get really good reviews from test audiences and the studio. With luck on their side, Culton boasts, "This film plays like it was made for 3D. We have so many things coming at the camera, we have a car chase on the water, we have a battle with things flying all over the place... To be honest, I think this film will play even better in 3D IMAX than in a regular theatre."

"It's also a sign of how quickly things change," says Stacchi. "Somewhere in the middle of our production, Polar Express went out on IMAX and did fantastically, and people all over Hollywood started to take IMAX seriously. There's no telling, when you start a film that takes this long to make, what huge technological change might happen in the middle of it."

Inspiration

While approximately forty babies were born to cast and crew over Open Season's production and are named in the credits, all 110 pounds of Culton's Bloodhound/Labrador-mix, Odie, should also receive credit on the film, jokes Stacchi. "There was a scene in the movie where Boog has to go to the bathroom in the woods and he's really shy and the deer is cheering him on. And Jill was describing to the animator the way Boog was looking back over his shoulder really sheepishly, and I knew she was describing her dog. It was literally a story Jill had told me about how Odie looks at her when he wants to go for a ride or when he's watching her leaving to fly to L.A. for work and knows she'll be gone for a week. She looked like she couldn't put her finger on it and I just wanted to say, ‘Jill, it's just Odie watching you leave for the airport.'"

"I think that's the whole thing," ends Culton. "If you're an animal lover, you do secretly think about what your pet's doing when you're not there... I'm sure Odie watches HBO."