Surf's Up Directors Speak

Over at Animated Views, there's a cool interview with the directors of Surf's Up, Chris Buck and Ash Brannon. The best part of the interview is where they talk about how the other penguin movies affected their movie, namely March of the Penguins and Happy Feet. Here's an excerpt:

When we started Surf’s Up, we had no idea about the other movies. I know people find that hard to believe. But even though the animation industry is a small thing, we don’t always know what everyone is doing.

Of course, March of the Penguins is live-action and a documentary. Happy Feet – you know, I don’t even know the genesis of that. But it may have started as live-action – sort of a Babe-like thing that George Miller was doing. Of course, George Miller runs in different circles in the animation world. So we didn’t really know about Happy Feet until probably we were a couple of years into our production.

We had already built models, and our story was already set, at least the basics of it. It wasn’t like we could just say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to change the animals, because someone else is doing something with penguins!’ It was a matter of, ‘Well, we’ll just run our course, and hopefully there’ll all very different movies.’ A good thing is that people like penguins!

Go check out the entire interview at Animated-Views.com