Q&A with Producer Chris Jenkins

Bill Desowitz talks with producer Chris Jenkins about the creative challenges of pulling off Surf's Up, the second feature from Sony Pictures Animation, opening June 8.

by Bill Desowitz

For Chris Jenkins, the biggest attraction of telling an animated story about surfing penguins was doing it in a mockumentary style with the imagination and immediacy of today's real-life video. It was just the kind of fresh challenge that he needed after spending most of his professional career at Walt Disney Pictures, where he served as artistic coordinator on Atlantis: The Lost Empire, visual effects supervisor on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, supervising effects animator/designer on Pocahontas and effects animator on Hercules, The Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. A native of Wales, Jenkins has a degree in scientific illustration from Middlesex University in England.

Bill Desowitz: So you were involved with Surf's Up from the very beginning. Tell us about how this came about. Penguins!

Chris Jenkins: Penguins, penguins! Five years ago, the studio had a project and it was surfing penguins and they were developing the story along the lines of Romeo and Juliet. And when I got there I tried to gently suggest that maybe Romeo and Juliet was the best possible comedic potential. But anyway, they pursued it for a time and it was a very Saturday morning type piece.

BD: Meanwhile, you've had Gnomeo and Juliet on and off and on again at Disney and now Miramax.

CJ: You know what? For my sins, I was actually on Gnomeo and Juliet for a couple of months before I left. So, as soon as I got to Sony, I thought: "Oh, my god! Nope, I can't do this!" At that point, I was on several different projects anyway and participated in some of the development meetings. But that version of surfing penguins went away and they literally shut it down. And I thought about it some more and thought there was something cool about this -- and no one at that point thought that penguins were going to be a craze in 2005 and 2006, and so I thought they were great anthropomorphic characters and I'd like to see more. And I set out to do the story from the point of view of [mockumentary] stuff I like, which is Spinal Tap, and having some fun with it. I thought it would be a great idea if we could put a microphone in front of an animated character and see what they have to say and get into their souls.

BD: Obviously you're a fan of Aardman's mockumentaries as well.

CJ: I love it…I mean I've always loved that wry kind of humor that comes from reality. I like the unassuming quality of people when they're being introspective. I also like the idea of being able to do a full-length documentary. Different from the Aardman versions, we would capture sound bites and then bend them to our will for ultimate world domination, just to actually tell a narrative with that kind of approach. Putting characters into the same time and space and record them rather than animation has done for a long time. It just makes sense. When I started off wanting to do that, I was met with some resistance initially. I kept saying it works it live action. Of course the schedules are difficult but you wouldn't film people in different locations -- you couldn't. And so why would we? Let's go for a natural performance -- let's make this as believable as possible. And then when Chris [Buck] and Ash [Brannon] came on [to direct], it was a wonderful meeting of minds in approach and so we all huddled together and held tight as long as we could and made the movie.

BD: How did you decide on Chris and Ash as the directors?

CJ: I knew of Chris back at Disney and I knew he was great. Ash I knew through a friend and brought this idea to him. He really loved it and we made it happen. Since working with Chris, we've become really tight friends and are working on the next project together. We just wanted to look to the success of what animation has been in the past but not necessarily do the recent past, which is all frenetic movement-based animation, but really look into the core of the characters and do what animation does best.

BD: What was it like working with Sony on their second animated feature? I understand that you got to fly under the radar during production until Open Season was completed.

CJ: It was wonderful in that regard. There was definitely a sense of making our movie unhindered, which, from my point of view, having been in animation so long, you can establish something cool and different when you're just starting out as a studio. At the same time, what I did have from the very beginning in Yair Landau [vice chairman of Sony Pictures Ent. and president of Sony Pictures Digital], in particular, was somebody who embraced a challenge. We're an upstart company anyway, at least our division is, and we not only needed to be different, but also be great to actually put ourselves on the map, so when I pitched this idea of doing it as a documentary, I told them that if we didn't do this, somebody else would, not realizing the irony of penguins being all over the place. They absolutely got on board with the new, original way of doing things. And I know we could've done this at any other studio. I hit Sony at the right time.

BD: Talk about being able to apply your experience with vfx animation to Surf's Up.

CJ: The atmosphere of the movie is strongly influenced by an approach I've always had, which is effects becomes another character. Let me give you a simple analogy that I used when I was doing training with effects: a snow globe without the snow is like a pretty picture with water in it. Once you shake it, that environment comes alive and it has fascination for young and old alike. It becomes a new world. That's how Chris, Ash and I talked about this in development: we agreed upon treating the wave as a character, which didn't mean the wave would sort of get up and start slapping people around. It meant that it would be embodied with a metaphor each time it was on screen -- it would have a greater emotional weight. It would amplify the content of the theme. That would be hyperbole, except for the fact that if you don't look at it like that, you are going to be more inclined to taking on more simulations of waves: programs that run almost automatically and give you what they give and then you stick a surfer on top of it. Of course, we wanted to manipulate the waves so that they did have a stronger character and we could customize each sequence, and that influenced the way that the technology was built and building enhancements followed and we were able to get the kind of control and weight and balletic-like quality to the way in which the wave moved through the scene. Kind of like the way great character animation is when you're animating from the inside out. That's what we were able to achieve.

BD: Describe some of those emotional moments with the waves.

CJ: The waves on [aging surfer] Z's side of the island are beautiful and had a quality of wanting to dive into the water with the characters to the waves at the end of the movie, which are tsunami size. And, as you reflect from the outside looking in, they have a certain quality on screen but to construct them to do that you needed the approach of understanding them as a character.

BD: And also the relationship between the surfer and the wave.

CJ: Absolutely, totally: that was imbued in the original crafting of the story. I mean, that's one of the reasons I was so attracted to surfing penguins initially because there's so many metaphors in water -- and in waves particularly. I've always loved the ocean for effects and for environment. There's a story here about how to be one with life. If you fight the wave, if you try to govern the ocean, it's going to throw you down on your back and you're gonna drown. You have to accept the way it moves and move with it. There's a deeper Zen philosophy that I wanted to bring into the core of the movie.

BD: There's definitely a little Star Wars there.

CJ: You know, we had a Star Wars jar on the movie: one of those big Arrowhead jugs. And anytime anybody made a Star Wars reference, they had to put a dollar in the jar. There is that quality. From my point of view, from someone who deeply loves fairy tale and mythology, it was the Joseph Campbell in the storytelling. But inevitably the Star Wars analogies kept coming up. And, yeah, it's a mentor story [between Z and Cody]. But beyond that, there was an aspect of -- let's see if I can explain this properly. When I left Disney, I felt old and jaded for the business and started to lose the sense of joy for animation. And so, in a way, I could identify with Z and how he feels about surfing. So this allowed me to get inside my head and see what I had become and see what changes I could make and regain my enthusiasm. And that's basically a father and son-like quality, which I can see happening with my soon to be 16-year-old.

BD: Talk about the stylization of Surf's Up.

CJ: I've seen this on many of the movies that I've worked on, whether it's Hunchback or Hercules or Atlantis, where you overtly try stylization and it becomes an end in itself and starts to take away your efforts at storytelling. I think our stylization needed the water to be believable -- a hyper reality that goes on in animation, like in the old stuff like Pinocchio or Bambi. I personally want to have that sense of looking into a View-Master and wanting to fall into that world.