"Surprise!" "Alex." "Do not interrupt me when I'm daydreaming." "When a zebra's in the zone, leave him alone." "Come on, Marty." "Just wanted to wish you a happy birthday." "Thanks." "I got something stuck in my teeth." "It's driving me crazy." "Can you help me?" "Please?" "You came to the right place, my friend." "Dr. Marty, D.D.S., is in the house." "Please hop on top of my sterilized examination table, if you may." " I don't see anything." " It's on the left." "Sorry." "Just don't talk with your mouth full." "Right here." "What the heck is this doing in there?" "Happy birthday!" "Thanks." "You put it in behind the tooth." "You all right." "These aren't even on the shelf yet." "Here." "Check it out." " Look at that." "Look at that." " Look at that." "It's snowing." "Ten years old?" "A decade." "Double digits." "The big 1-0." "You don't like it?" " No, no, it's great." " You hate it." "I should've gotten you the Alex alarm clock." "That's the big seller." "The present's great, really." "It's just that another year's come and gone and I'm still doing the same old thing." ""Stand over here." "Trot over there." "Eat some grass." "Walk back over here. "" " I see your problem." " Maybe I should go to law school." "You just need to break out of that boring routine." " How?" " Throw out the old act." "Who knows what you'll do." "Make it up as you go along." "Ad lib." "Improvise." "On the fly." " Really?" " You know, make it fresh." "Fresh?" "Okay." "I could do fresh." "Works for me." "Here come the people, Marty." "I love the people." "It's fun people fun time!" "Let's go, Gloria!" "Up and at 'em." "We're open!" "What day is it?" "It's Friday." "Field trip day." "Yes, it's field trip day." "Let's get up and go in ten more minutes." "Come on!" "Melman!" "Wake up!" "Rise and shine!" "It's another fabulous morning in the Big Apple." "Let's go." " Not for me." "I'm calling in sick." " What?" "I found another brown spot on my shoulder." "Right here." "See?" "Right there." "You see?" "Melman, you know it's all in your head." "Let's go!" "Come on!" "Phil!" "Wake up, you filthy monkey." "I'm going to be fresh." "Straight out the ground." "Tasty fresh!" "Freshalicious." "Ziploc fresh." "Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, the Central Park Zoo proudly presents:" "Show them the cat." "Who's the cat?" "The king of New York City." "Alex the lion." "It's showtime." "Gather around, people." "Big show about to start." "Check out the zebra taking care of biz." "That's right." "Just smile and wave, boys." "Kowalski, progress report." "We're 500 feet from the main sewer line." " And the bad news?" " We've broken our last shovel." "Right." "Rico, you're on litter patrol." "We need shovels." "And find more Popsicle sticks." "We don't want to risk another cave-in." "And me, skipper?" "I want you to look cute and cuddly, private." "Today we're going to blow this dump." "Come here." "Come here." "Come on, penguin." "You don't see that on Animal Planet." "Well, show's over, folks." "Thanks for coming." "I hope you thought it was fresh." "I'll be here all week." "In fact, I'll be here for my whole life." "Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, including Christmas, Hanukkah, Halloween, Kwanzaa." "Please don't forget to never spay or neuter your pets." "And tip your cabbie, because he's broke." "You, quadruped." "Sprechen sie Englisch?" "I sprechen." " What continent is this?" " Manhattan." "Hoover Dam!" "We're still in New York." "Abort." "Dive!" "You in the tux." "Wait a minute." "What are you guys doing?" "We're digging to Antarctica." "Ant-who-tica?" "Can you keep a secret, my monochromatic friend?" "Do you ever see any penguins running free around New York City?" "Of course not." "We don't belong here." "It's just not natural." "This is all some kind of whacked-out conspiracy." "We're going to the wide-open spaces of Antarctica." "To the wild." "The wild?" "You could actually go there?" "That sounds great." "Hey, hold up." "Where is this place?" "Tell me where it is." "You didn't see anything." "Right?" "Yes, sir." "I'm sorry." "No, sir." "For his final appearance of the day, the king of New York City." "Alex the lion." "Thank you very much." "You guys are great." "You're a great crowd." "Give yourselves a hand." "That's too kind." "Too kind." "Underpants!" "Everybody get home safe." "Hey!" "Check out my Web site." "Twenty-four hour Alex Cam." "Watch me sleep." "This is the life." "That's the spot." "I'm in heaven." " It's Marty's birthday." " Just rip it open." " What is it?" " Come on." "Open it up." "What you got?" "A thermometer." "Thanks." "I love it, Melman." "I love it." "I wanted to give you something personal." "That was my first rectal thermometer." " Mother..." " I'll miss that bad boy." "Get the cake." "Melman, come on." "Happy birthday to you" "You live in a zoo" "You look like a monkey" "And you smell like one too" "I say." "You guys are just embarrassing me." "And yourselves." "What?" "We worked on that all week." "Let's go." "Let's make a wish, babycakes." " What'd you wish for?" " Nope." "Can't tell you that." "Come on." "Tell." "No siree." "I'm telling you, it's bad luck." "You want some bad luck, I'll blab it out." "But if you want to be safe, I'll keep my mouth shut." "Would you just tell us?" "What could happen?" "I wished I could go to the wild!" "The wild?" "!" "I told you it was bad luck." "The wild?" "Are you nuts?" "That is the worst idea I've ever heard." "It's unsanitary." "The penguins are going." "So why can't I?" "The penguins are psychotic." "Come on." "Just imagine going back to nature." "Back to your roots." "Clean air, wide-open spaces!" "I hear there's wide-open spaces in Connecticut." " Connecticut?" " You got to go over to Grand Central." "Then you got to take the Metro-North train... north?" "So one could take the train?" "Just hypothetically." "Come on." "What would Connecticut have to offer us?" " Lyme disease." " Thank you, Melman." "No, I just want..." "There's none of this in the wild." "This is a highly refined type of food thing that you do not find in the wild." "You ever thought there might be more to life than steak, Alex?" "He didn't mean that, baby." "Doesn't it bother you guys that you don't know anything about life outside this zoo?" "Well, I mean, come on." "That's just one subject." "You got a little schmutz right there on your..." "Thanks, guys." "Thanks for the party." "It was great." "Really." "What's eating him?" "Maybe you should talk to him." "Go over and give him a little pep talk." "I already gave him a snow globe." "I can't top that." "I can see where this is going." "It is getting late." "I guess I'm going to..." "Come on." "He's your best friend." "All right, all right." "Okay." " Night, Marty." " Night, Glo." "What a day." "I mean, I tell you, it just doesn't get any better than this, you know?" "It just did." "Even the star's out." "Not going to find a star like that in the wild." "Helicopter." "Marty." "Buddy." "Listen." "Everybody has days when they think the grass might be greener somewhere else." "Look at me." "I'm ten years old." "My life is half over." "And I don't even know if I'm black with white stripes or white with black stripes." "I'm thinking of a song." "Alex." "Please." "Not now." "Yes." "It's a wonderful song." "I think you're familiar with it." "No, you don't." "I'm not listening." "Start spreadin' the news" "I don't know you." "I'm leaving today" " We are a great big part of it" " He's funny." "Who is that?" "Come on." "You know you know the words." "Two little words." "Shut up!" "I'm sleeping here!" "We're not all nocturnal, you know!" "I'll knock your "turnal" right off, pal." "Yeah, you and what army, stripes?" "You mess with him, you mess with me, Howard." " You're a bigmouth lion." " See?" "Mr. Grumpy Stripes." "We make a great team, the two of us." "We sure do." "No doubt about it." "So, what are you going to do?" "Go running off to the wild by yourself?" " No." " Good." "You and me." "Let's go." " What?" " The wild." "Come on." "You and me together." "It's a straight shot down Fifth Avenue to Grand Central." "We'll grab a train, we'll head north." "We can be back by morning." "No one will ever know." "You're joking." "Right?" "Yeah." "I'm joking." "Of course I'm joking." "Give me a break." "Like we're going to get a train." "Don't do that." "You really had me worried there." "Oh, well." "I guess I'll hit the sack." "Yeah, me too." "I'll need to rest my voice for tomorrow." "It's Seniors' Day, you know." "Have to roar extra loud." "Give them a little jolt." "You know?" "Good night." "They forgot to turn off the ambience again." "Don't worry." "It's cool." "You know, I got it." "Much better." "Come on, now, baby." "My little filet." "My little filet mignon with a little fat around the edges." "I like that." "I like a little fat on my steak." "My sweet, juicy steak." "You are a rare delicacy." "What?" "You suck your thumb?" "What is it, Melman?" "You know how I have that bladder infection and I have to get up every two hours?" "I got up to pee and looked over at Marty's pen, which I usually don't do." "I don't know why, but I did." "And..." "What?" "What's going on?" "It's Marty." "He's gone." "Gone!" "What do you mean, "gone"?" "How long has he been working on this?" "He wouldn't fit down there." "This doesn't make any sense." "Where would he go?" " Connecticut!" " He wouldn't." "Oh, no!" "What are we going to do?" "I mean, we got to call somebody!" "Hello?" "Get me Missing Animals." "And hurry." "We've got a lost zebra probably on the way to Connecticut, and we need..." "Wait a second." "We can't call the people." "They'll be really mad." "It'll get Marty transferred for good." "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." "I know that's right." "We got to go after him." "He's not thinking straight." "Let's stop him from making the biggest mistake of his life." "He's probably out there lost and cold, confused." "Poor little guy." "Come on." "One of us should wait here in case he comes back." "Not now." "This is an intervention." "We all got to go." "What's the fastest way to Grand Central?" "You should take Lexington." " Okay. "We. " We should take Lexington." " What about Park?" "No, Park goes two ways." "You can't time the lights." "I heard Tom Wolfe is speaking at Lincoln Center." "Well, of course we're going to throw poo at him." "We should've taken Park." "You sure this is the fastest way to Grand Central Station?" "I don't know!" "That's what Melman said." "You, guys." "That room has some nifty little sinks you can wash up in, and look!" "Free mints!" "This isn't a field trip." "This is an urgent mission to save Marty from throwing his life away." "Now, where's the train?" "Here it comes." "What did Marty say to you?" "I asked you to talk to him." "I did!" "I did!" "I don't understand." "He said, "Let's go. "" "I said, "Are you crazy?" He says, "I'm ten years old. "" "And he has black-and-white stripes, and so then we sang and..." "What you got to do is go straight back down West 42nd." "It's on your left after Vanderbilt." "If you hit the Chrysler Building, you've gone too far." "Thanks a lot, officer." "Wait for the light." "Freak." " Did you say "zebra"?" " That's right." "A zebra." "Right in front of me." " Can I shoot it?" " Negative." "Then I'm going to need some backup." " Knicks lost again." " What are you going to do." "Did that say "Grand Central Station" or "my aunt's constipation"?" "This is it." "Grand Central Station." "It's grand and it's central." "Move aside." "We have an emergency here." "This is an emergency situation." "Just chill out." "It's not that big of an emergency." "Upstairs, downstairs." "How do you like that?" "Lady!" "What is wrong with you?" "Get a grip on yourselves, people." "You're a bad kitty." "Dagnabbit!" "I missed the express." "Looks like I'll have to take the Stamford local." "I got him!" "I've got him!" "He's got him!" "I got something for you!" "I'm okay." "What are you guys doing here?" " I am so glad we found you." " We were so worried about you." "Don't worry, I'm fine, I'm fine." "Look at me." "I'm fine." "You're fine?" "He's fine." "Great." "You hear that?" "Marty's fine." "That's good to know." "Because I was wondering..." "How could you do this to us?" "I thought we were your friends!" "What's the big deal?" "I was coming back." "Don't ever do this again." "Do you hear me?" " Do you hear him?" " Guys, we're running out of time." "Melman, you broke their clock?" "...do this again!" "Don't you ever, ever do this again!" "Come here." "We've been ratted out, boys." "Hold your fire!" "Cute and cuddly, boys." "If you have any poo, fling it now." "It's the Man." "Good evening, officers." "No." "You don't talk now." "Okay?" "You're not good with the "putting words together and their coming out good" thing." "You keep it "shh. "" "How you doing?" "You know what?" "Everything's cool." "We just had a little situation here." "Little internal situation." "My friend went a little crazy." "Happens to everybody." "The city gets to us all." "Went a little cuckoo in the head." "Don't be calling me cuckoo in the head." "Just shush!" "I will handle this." "I got him!" "Go!" "Right here, please." "Would you give a guy a break?" "We'll take my little friend home and forget this ever happened." "All right?" "No harm, no foul, right?" "Hey, it's cool." "It's me, Alex the lion." "From the zoo." "What's the matter with them?" "I feel really, really weird." "I love you guys." "I love you so much." "Last night's dramatic incident in Grand Central is an example of what animal rights wackos have been shouting for years:" "Animals clearly don't belong in captivity." "They are to be sent back to their natural habitat, where they will live their lives in the freedom they desire." " Hey." "Little help?" " He's awake!" "He's awake!" "Do something!" "My head." "What the...?" "Wait." "Where?" "What?" "I'm in a box!" "Not the box." "They can't transfer me." "Not me!" "I can't breathe." "Darkness creeping in." "I can't breathe." "I can't breathe." "Walls closing in around me." "So alone." "So alone." "Alex, are you there?" " Talk to me, buddy." " Marty!" "You're here!" " What's going on?" "You okay?" " This doesn't look good." "Alex, Marty, is that you?" " You're here too!" " I am loving the sound of your voice." " What is going on?" " We're all in crates." "Sleeping just knocks me out." "Is that Melman?" " Are you okay?" " Yeah." "No, I'm fine." "I often doze off while I'm getting an MRI." " You're not getting an MRI." " CAT scan?" "No CAT scan." "It's a transfer." "It's a zoo transfer." "Zoo transfer?" "!" "No, I can't be transferred." "I have an appointment with Dr. Goldberg at 5:00." "There are prescriptions that have to be filled." "No other zoo could afford my medical care." "And I am not going HMO." "Take it easy, Melman." "It's going to be okay." " We are going to be okizay." " No, we're not going to be okizay." "Now, because of you, we're ruined!" "Because of me?" "I fail to see how this is my fault." " You're kidding, right, Marty?" " You." "You ticked off the people." "You bit the hand, Marty." ""I don't know who I am." "I got to go find myself in the wild. " Oh, please." "I did not ask you to come after me, did I?" "He does have a point." "I did say we should stay at the zoo, but you guys..." "Melman, just shut it." "You suggested this idea to him in the first place." " Leave Melman out of this." " Thank you, Gloria." "Besides, it's not my fault that we were transferred." "Melman, shut it." "Does anybody feel nauseous?" " I feel nauseous." " Melman, you always feel nauseous." "Progress report." "It's an older code, skipper." "I can't make it out." "You, higher mammal." "Can you read?" "No." "Phil can read, though." "Phil." "Ship to Kenya." "Wildlife preserve." "Africa?" "That ain't going to fly." "Rico." "I was the star in the greatest city on Earth." " Guys, listen." " A king." "Loved by my people." " Let's be civil." " And you've ruined everything!" ""Loved"?" "If the people loved you, it's only because they didn't know the real you!" "Don't make me come up there." "I'll whoop both of y'all." "I thought I knew the real you!" "Your black-and-white stripes, they cancel each other out." "You're nothing!" "Stop it!" "You're not helping the situation." "Status." "It's no good." "I don't know the codes." "Don't give me excuses." "Give me results!" "Navigation." "All right." "Let me think." "And shut him up!" " I did it!" " Let's get this tin can turned around." "Guys?" "No, wait." "Come back, Marty!" "Don't go." "Get me out of this thing." "Somebody." "Hello?" "Get me out of this thing right now!" "Hello?" "Somebody?" "Alex?" "Is that you?" "Melman, I got you." "Hang on!" "Wait a sec, Melman." "Wait right there." " What are you doing?" " I'm getting you out of the box." " Relax." " Alex?" "Giraffe, corner pocket!" "Here goes nothing!" " Wait." " Hold still!" " Wait, Alex." " Hold still." " No, come on." " Here I come!" "Look!" "Alrighty, boys, fun's over." "All right!" "That's right!" "Left!" "No, your left!" "Right here's good." "I don't have anything on me right now." "I'll have to get you later." "To you too." "Sugar, honey, ice tea." " Hold up!" " I'm going to kill you!" " Come here!" "Don't run away from me!" " Calm down!" "If you keep running, I'm going to just kill you more!" "Oh, look at us." "We're all here together." "Safe and sound." "Yeah, here we are." "Where exactly is "here"?" "San Diego." "White sandy beaches, cleverly simulated natural environment, wide-open enclosures." "I'm telling you, this could be the San Diego Zoo." "Complete with fake rocks." "That looks real." "San Diego?" "What could be worse than San Diego?" "I don't know." "This place is crackalacking!" "I could hang here." " I'll kill you!" " Take it easy!" " Strangle you!" " Calm down." "Then bury you, dig you up, clone you and kill your clones." " 20-second timeout." " I'll never talk to you again." "Now, look." "We're just going to find the people, get checked in and have this mess straightened out." "Oh, great." "This is just great." "San Diego." "Now I'll have to compete with Shamu and his smug little grin." "I can't top that." "Can't top it." "I'm ruined!" "I'm done." "I'm out of the business." "It's your fault, Marty!" "You've ruined me." "Come on, Alex." "Do you honestly think" "I intended all of this to happen?" "You want me to say that I'm sorry?" "Is that what you want?" "Okay, I'm..." "He just shushed me." "Marty, look, you've got to be just a little bit more und..." " Don't you shush me." " Do you hear that?" "Don't you hear that?" " I hear it now." " Where there's music, there's people." " Go to the head honcho." " A sidewalk would be nice." "Yeah, what a dump." "They should call it the San Di-lame-o Zoo." "First they tell you, "We got this great open plan thing." "Let animals run wild. "" "Next thing, flowers in your hair, everybody's hugging everybody." "This place kind of grows on you." "This way, guys!" "Come on!" "What the...?" "Oh, no!" "Okay, let's make a good impression on the people." "Smiles, everyone." "Let's get it together." " Is that the best you can do?" " I'm not smiling." "It's gas." "Well, great." "Let's make gas look good." "It's not people." "It's animals." "California animals." "Dude." "This is like a Puffy party." "I like to move it, move it" " Ya like to" " Move it" "All girls all over the world" "Original King Julien 'pon yer case, man" "I love how all the girls that love to move their body" "When ya move your body, ya do" "Move it nice and sweet and sassy, all right" "What kind of zoo is this?" "I just saw 26 blatant health code violations." "I'm loving San Diego." "This place is off the chizain." "Twenty-seven." "Woman, physically fit, physically fit" "We should've brought chips and dip." "Wait." "Where's Alex?" "What happened to him?" "He was right behind us." "Wasn't he?" "I don't know where he's at, but he's missing one heck of a party." "The fossa!" "The fossa are attacking!" "Run for your lives!" " Fossa hungry." " Fossa eat." "I hate spiderwebs." "Yeah, thanks a lot, guys." "Thanks for waiting up." "Really appreciate it." "Hey, hi." "We just got in from New York, and we're looking for a supervisor." "Because we've been sitting on that beach back there for hours, and nobody's even bothered to show up." "I don't know how things are normally run around here, but there's been some sort of major screwup, which is cool." "So if you could point us towards the administrative offices, we'll..." "Well, howdy-do." "Spider on my back!" "Maurice, did you see that?" "He scared the fossa away." "Come on, Gloria." "Get it." "Get it!" "That's it!" "Smack it!" "Whip it!" "Whip it good!" "Where'd it go?" "King Julien, what are they?" "What are they?" "!" "They are aliens." "Savage aliens from the savage future." "They've come to kill us." "And take our women." "And our precious metals." "Get up, Mort." "Do not be near the king's feet, okay?" "We're hiding." "Be quiet, everyone." "Including me." "Who's making that noise?" "It's me again." "There it is!" "Get it!" "Come on, Gloria!" " Enough!" "Enough with the stick." " I think she got it." "Is it still on me?" "I hate spiders." "It's okay." "It's gone." "They are savages." "Tonight we die." "The feet." "I told you..." "I told you to..." "I told every..." "Didn't I tell him about the feet?" "He did tell you about the feet." " Wait." "I have a plan." " Really?" "I have devised a cunning test to see whether these are savage killers." "Hi there." "You let me handle it." "Alex handles it." "Marty does nothing." "Hi there." "Sorry." " Alex, what'd you do?" " Stop." "It's okay." "I'm just a silly..." "Just a silly lion." "You poor little baby." "Did that big mean lion scare you?" "He did?" "He's a big, bad old puddy tat, isn't he?" "Come on." "Mama'll hold you." "Look at you." "They are so cute from a reasonable distance." "Aren't you the sweetest little thing." "I just want to dunk him in my coffee." "They're just a bunch of pansies." "I don't know." "There's something about that one with the crazy hairdo that I find suspicious." "Nonsense, Maurice." "Come on, everybody." "Let's go and meet the pansies!" "Presenting your royal highness, our illustrious King Julien Xlll, self-proclaimed lord of the lemurs, et cetera." "Hooray, everybody." "He's got style." "What is he, like, king of the guinea pigs?" "I think it's a squirrel." "Welcome, giant pansies." "Please feel free to bask in my glow." " Definitely a squirrel." " Yep." "Squirrel." "We thank you with enormous gratitude for chasing away the fossa." " The "whossa"?" " The fossa." "They annoy us by trespassing, interrupting our parties" " and ripping our limbs off." " Good." "We're just trying to find out where the people are, so..." "What big teeth you have." "Man!" "Shame on you, Maurice." "Can you not see that you have insulted the freak?" "You must tell me, who the heck are you?" "I'm Alex." "The Alex." "And this is Gloria, Marty and Melman." "And just where are you giants from?" "We're from New York and..." "All hail the New York giants!" "Is this some sort of inbreeding program?" "I say we just got to ask these bozos where the people are." "Excuse me." "We bozos have the people, of course." "The bozos have the people." "Well, great." "Good." "They're up there." "Don't you love the people?" "Not a very lively bunch, though." "So do you have any live people?" "No." "Only dead ones." "I mean, if we had a lot of live people here, it wouldn't be called the wild, would it?" "The wild?" "Hold up there a second, fuzzbucket." "You mean, like, the "live in a mud hut, wipe yourself with a leaf" type wild?" " Who wipes?" " Oy vey." "Oy vey, everybody!" "Could you excuse me for a moment?" "Get me out of here!" "We got to get out of here!" " Help!" " What are you doing?" "!" "I'm swimming back to New York." "I know my chances are slim, but I have to try!" " You can't swim!" " I said my chances are slim!" "Nature!" "It's all over me!" "Get it off!" "I can't see!" "I can't see!" "I can see!" "Look." "There's obviously just been a little mistake." "The people didn't dump us here on purpose." "As soon as they realize what happened, they'll come looking for us, right?" "Yeah, right." "I don't know the words But we're born free" "You know something?" "I bet they're already on their way." "Well, boys, it's going to be ice-cold sushi for breakfast." "Rico." "Well, since I'm doomed to die on this forsaken island," "I, Melman Mankiewicz, being of sound mind and unsound body, have divided my estate equally among the three of you." "Sorry, Alex." "A latrine." "Nice work, Melman." "Outdoor plumbing." "No, it's not a latrine." "It's a grave." "You sent Melman to his grave." "Are you happy?" "Come on." "This isn't the end." "This is a whole new beginning." "This could be the best that's happened." "This is not the best thing that's happened to us." "You abused the power of the birthday wish and brought bad luck on all of us." "Why'd you tell your wish?" "You're not supposed to." "I didn't want to tell you." "Remember?" "You guys made me tell you." "Besides, this isn't bad luck." "This is good luck." "Look around." "There's no fences, no schedules." "This place is beautiful." "Baby, we were born..." "I've had enough of this." "This is your side of the island, and this is our side of the island." "That is the bad side, where you can prance and skip like a magical pixie horse and do whatever the heck you want." "This is the good side for those who love New York and care about going home." " Come on." " No, no." "Back!" "Back!" "You know what?" "This isn't good." "Okay!" "You all have your side, and I'll have mine." "And if you need me, I'll be over here, on the fun side of the island, having a good old time." "This is the fun side, where we'll have a great time surviving until we go home." " A yabbadabbado old time!" " This side's the best." "That side stinks!" "You're on the Jersey side of this cesspool!" " Wilma!" " Now what do we do?" "Don't worry." "I have a plan to get us rescued." "Can't wait to see the look on Marty's face when he sees this." "Just look at him." "He's helpless without us." "Shut up, Spalding." "I've been standing here for hours, man." "How long do I have to pose like this?" "She is finito." "I defy any rescue boat within a million miles to miss this baby." "When the moment is right, we will ignite the beacon of liberty and be rescued from this awful nightmare!" "What do you think?" "Pretty cool." " How's the liberty fire going, Melman?" " Great." "Idiot." "I heard that." "Why can't we just borrow some of Marty's fire?" "That's wild fire." "We're not using wild fire on Lady Liberty." " Now, rub, Melman." " I've been doing..." "I can't." "I can't." "I can't do it." "Fire." "Not yet!" "No!" "Melman, hold still!" "Jump!" "Alex, jump!" "Don't worry, cats always land on their..." "Face?" "Man, what kind of cat are you?" "You maniac!" "You burned it up!" "Darn you!" "Darn you all to heck!" "Can we go to the fun side now?" "Everybody, calm down." "Come on." "Into your chairs." "Everybody, calm down." "Let go of his tail." "Separate those two, would you, please?" "You here, you there." "Everyone..." "Calm down, people, okay?" "Now, presenting your royal highness, the illustrious blah, blah, blah." "You know, et cetera, et cetera." "Hooray." "Let's go." "Now, everybody, we all have great curiosity about our guests, the New York giants." " Yes, Willie?" " I like them." "I like them." "I liked them first." "Before I even met them I liked them." "I liked them right away." "You hate them compared to how much I like them." "Oh, shut up." "You're so annoying!" "Now, for as long as we can remember, we have been attacked and eaten by the dreaded fossa." "The fossa!" "The fossa are attacking!" "It's a cookbook!" "Please." "Maurice." "Quiet!" "Come on, y'all." "They're not attacking us this very instant." "So my genius plan is this:" "We will make the New York giants our friends and keep them close." "Then, with Mr. Alex protecting us, we will be safe and never have to worry about the dreaded fossa ever again." "I thought of that." "I thought of that." "Yes." "Me." "I did." "Hold on, everybody." "Hold on." "I'm just thinking now." "I mean, does anyone wonder why the fossa were so scared of Mr. Alex?" "I mean, maybe we should be scared too." "What if Mr. Alex is even worse than the fossa?" "I tell you, that dude just gives me the heebiedabajeebies." "Maurice, you did not raise your hand." "Therefore, your heinous comment will be stricken from the record." "Does anyone else have the heebie-jeebies?" "No?" "Good." "So shut up." "When the New York giants wake up, we will make sure that they wake up in paradise." "Now, who would like a cookie?" "Yo, Al." "Melman and Gloria are over there having a good time." "There's room on the fun side for one more." "No, thanks." "Look, I've been thinking." "Maybe if you gave this place a chance," "I don't know, you might even enjoy yourself." "Marty, I'm tired." "I'm hungry." "I just want to go home." "Could you just give it a chance?" "Think about it." "It really isn't the fun side without you." "I know." "And then..." " It's him." " Who is it?" "It's the pizza man." "Who the heck do you think it is?" "Yes?" "Can I help you?" "Can I come to the fun side?" "Beg your pardon?" "You know, I've been kind of a jerk." "But I've been thinking about what you said, and I'm sorry." "Welcome to Casa del Wild." "Take a load off." "Wipe your feet." " Alex!" " Mi casa is su casa." "Very impressive." "Have a drink." "It's on the house." "This is seawater." "You don't swallow it." "It's just temporary till the plumbing's done." "Y'all look hungry." "How would you like some of nature's goodness?" "You have food?" "The Fun Side Special, coming up." "Seaweed on a stick." "On a stick." "Don't love it till you try it." "That's unbelievable." " So good." " Well, thanks." "It does kind of hit the spot, doesn't it?" "Well, maybe it could use a little lemon." "No, it's great." "It's really great." "Doesn't get any better than this." "But it does." "Check this out." "Would you look at that." "It's like billions and billions of helicopters." "It's a shooting star." "Make a wish." "Quick!" "How about a thick, juicy steak?" "You know what, Alex?" "I promise you I'm going to find you a steak tomorrow if it kills me." "It is getting late." "I guess I'm going to..." "I think I'm going to hit the sack too." "Sweet dreams, everyone." "What are you doing?" "Twenty-seven, 28, 29." "Thirty black and only 29 white." "Looks like you're black with white stripes after all." "Dilemma solved." "Good night." "You see, Maurice, Mr. Alex was grooming his friend." "He is clearly a tender, loving thing." "How can you have the heebie-jeebies for Mr. Alex?" "Look at him." "He's so cute and plushy." "I don't think he was grooming him." "Look more like he was tasting him to me." "Suit yourself, no matter." "I don't care." "Soon we will put my excellent plan to action." "All we have to do is wait until they are deep in their sleep." "How long is this going to take?" "!" "Well, this sucks!" "Wake up, Mr. Alex." "Rise and shining." "Wakey-waking, Mr. Alex!" "You suck your thumb?" "Where are we?" "What the heck is going on?" "Where's the beach?" "Take it easy." " Who built a forest?" " Don't be alarmed, giant freaks." "While you were asleep, we simply took you to our little corner of heaven." "Welcome to Madagascar." " Mada-who-ah?" " What?" "No, not whooha." "Ascar." "Marty." "It's..." "Just like my mural back at the zoo." "Oh, no, fella, that is the real deal right there." "Look at that, that's not a bad view." "That's the thing that you were always looking at, but it's actually there." " That's the real version of..." " How about once around the park?" "Let's get our blood pumping, lungs breathing this fresh air." "Who's with me?" "!" "Naw." "I don't think I could..." "You're it!" "Want to play around?" "Got you there!" "Come here!" "You're it." "Stop that!" "You're crazy!" "Okay, Marty, I'm it." "I'm it." "I'm it." "You win." "Come on, Alex, get in the groove." "I haven't eaten in two days." "My blood sugar's real low." "I just don't have the energy." "I don't think that's your problem." "First of all, that's not how you run in the wild." "Let's go." "Put the rubber to the road!" "You just have to let out that inner lion." " Now, who's the cat?" " Marty, I really don't..." "You are, that's who." "Come on!" "Here we go!" "That's it." "Let's build up some steam!" "You the cat." " Who's the cat?" " You the cat." "I'm the cat!" "Surprise!" "You're it." "You're it!" "Can't juke the cat." "Cat's too quick." "I feel like a mile-high pastrami on rye on the fly from the deli in the sky!" " Let's go wild!" " Now you're talking!" "Man!" "I feel different." "Kind of charged up or something." " Like you said, baby, it's..." " Crackalacking." "Ain't that right, Melman?" "I'm in heaven." "You see, Maurice, Alex is now our friend and the fossas are nowhere to be seen." "It could be said that my plan is working in a very good working kind of way." "Alex." "You got to try some of this." "I feel good." "Feel like a king again." "King?" "You should see his act." "Come on, Alex, why don't you show him some of your act." "No, I really don't think I could..." "Ladies and gentlemen." "Primates of all ages." "The wild proudly presents:" "The king." "Alex the lion!" "E flat, fellas." "The king is in the house!" "See, if he is the king, then where is his crown?" "I've got a crown." "Got a very nice one." "And it's here on my head." "Look at it." "Have I got it on?" "Do the roar, man." "I've never heard that one before." "Go wild, man!" "Come on!" "Break out the wave!" "Excuse me." "You're biting my butt." " No, I'm not." " Yes, you are." " What did you do?" " You just bit me!" "No." "I didn't." "Did I?" "You kind of did." "What the heck is wrong with you?" "Why'd you bite me?" " It's because you are his dinner." " What?" " Excuse me?" " That's dumb." "Come, come, Maurice." "What is a simple bite on the buttocks among friends?" "Here, give me a nibble." "The party is over, Julien." "Your brilliant plan has failed." "What are you talking about?" "Your friend here is what we call a deluxe-model hunting and eating machine." "And he eats steak which is you." " Get out of here." " Okey-dokey, Maurice, I admit it." "The plan failed." "All is lost!" "We're all doomed." "The fossas will come back and gobble us with their mouths because we are all steak." "I'm steak!" "Me, me, me!" "Mr. Alex cannot stay here." "He belongs with his own kind on the fossa side of the island." "By the power vested in me, by the law of the jungle..." "Be gone!" "What?" "Come on, do I look like a steak to you?" "See, I told you I don't look like a..." "Wait." "What you say?" " He's going savage." " Run for your lives." "Marty, run!" "A bull's eye." "Excellent shot, Maurice." "I'm so sorry, Marty." "What is wrong with me?" "What have I done?" "It's true." "I'm a monster." "I got to get out of here." "What have I done?" "This is a nightmare." "And it's all my fault." "Now, because of me, we've lost Alex." "Well, what are we going to do?" "We'll find a way to help him." "That's what we'll do." "Come on, we are New Yorkers, right?" "We're tough." "We're gritty." "We're adaptable!" "And we are not going to lay down like a bunch of Melmans." "No, we're not." "That was not me, okay?" "That was the boat." "The boat!" "The boat's come back for us!" "Come on, guys, we got to flag it down." "There it is!" "Hey, over here!" "Melman, give me a lift." "Hurry up!" "Lift me up!" "My neck." "You guys." " Melman!" "Steady." "This way!" " You have no idea how much this hurts." "Hey, boat!" "We're over here!" "Look!" "It's turning!" "It's coming back!" "It's coming back!" "Come on!" "Come on, baby!" "Yes!" "You guys." "You flag down that boat." "I'll get Alex." "Hold on there." "You cannot go back there by yourself." "Come on." "I know Alex." "He hears we're rescued, he'll snap right out of it." "The people are coming." "They can help us." "Melman's right." "The people will know what to do." "Now, we got to flag down that boat." "Now, this is more like it." "You?" "!" "Where are the people?" "We killed them and ate their livers." "Got you, didn't I?" "Just kidding, doll, the people are fine." "They're on a slow lifeboat to China." "Hey, I know you two." "Where's that psychotic lion and our monochromatic friend?" "Marty?" "He's righ..." "Where did he go?" "He was right behind us." "He went back for Alex." "He's going to get himself killed!" "Well, boys, our monochromatic friend's in danger." "Looks like we have a job to do." "Captain's log:" "Embarking into hostile environment." "Kowalski." "We'll need to win the hearts and the minds of the natives." "Rico." "We'll need special tactical equipment." "We're going to face extreme peril." "Private probably won't survive." "Alex!" "Come out, Alex!" "The boat's here!" "We can go home!" "Snap out of it, Alex." "The boat came back." "We can get out of here." "We can go back to civilization, and everything will be like it used to be." "Stay back." "Please." "I'm a monster." "Alex, you're no monster." "You're my friend." "We're a team." "You and me, remember?" "I don't want to hurt you." "I ain't leaving without you." "Alex?" "I'm thinking of a song." "It's a wonderful song." "I'm sure you're familiar with it." "Start spreadin' the news" "I'm leaving today" "We are a great big part of it" "Come on, you know the words." "Two little words." "Please don't make me sing this by myself." "You really don't want to hear me sing this by myself." "Uh, Alex?" "Could you come out here for a minute?" "Hey, Alex, a little help." "Help me!" "Anybody, help me!" "Somebody!" " Melman?" " That's right, baby." "Run!" " What's the plan?" " This is the plan." " Fossa hungry." " Fossa eat." "This is the plan?" "Come and get it." "Take that." "There's too many of them, skipper." "It's been a real pleasure serving with you boys." "That's my kill." "Mine." "Alex hungry." "Alex eat." "It's showtime." "Thanks for not giving up on me." "Man, you almost gave me a heart attack." "You can't just come sneak up on me." "Just because you're a lion..." "Let go of me." "Let go of me." "We're getting out of here." "Guys, just go with me on this." "Like I said, it's showtime." "Mine." "My kill." "They're all mine." "It's the king of the beasts!" " Don't eat me!" " He's big and scary!" "Fear me!" "Savagery beyond comprehension." " I am far too young to die!" " You're a monster!" "A monster, I say!" " And, you!" " Me?" "You want some of this?" "You better run for your lives." " Somebody call a cop!" " He's psychotic!" "This is my territory." "Understand?" "I never, ever want to see you on my turf again." "You the cat!" "Got my boy back!" "I did it!" "Give me some love!" "The plan worked!" "The plan worked!" "I'm very clever!" "I'm the one, baby!" "Come on." "Time to robot." "I am very clever king." "I am super genius." "I am robot king of the monkey things." " Compute, compute." " So, what's for lunch?" " Close those eyes." " Why do I have to?" " Do it." " They're closed." " Tighter." " Yes, sir." " No peeking." " They're closed." "Open that hatch." "Fire in the hole." "Now chew." "Chew like you mean it." "Savor it." " And?" " Well?" "Pretty good, right?" "There's always Plan B." "This is better than steak." "I love it." "The kitty loves the fishy." "Well, I propose a toast." "Now, he may be a pain in the butt at times..." "And trust me, I know." "But this cat proved to me without a doubt that his heart is bigger than his stomach." "To Alex." "Enough!" "Stop it!" "What do you think?" "Should we head back to New York?" "I don't know." "I mean, this is your dream." "You sure you want to leave?" "I don't care where we are." "As long as we're together, it doesn't matter to me." "Well, in that case..." "Yo." "Rico." "I'll take 300 orders to go." "But before you leave, I have an announcement to make." "So shut up, everyone, please." "Thank you." "After much deep and profound brain things inside my head," "I have decided to thank you for bringing peace to our home." "And to make you feel good," "I'm going to give you this lovely parting gift." "No, I couldn't." "Really, I can't take your crown." "That's okay, I've got a bigger crown." "It's got a gecko on it." "Look at him shake." "Go, Stevie, go!" " Bye, little fuzzbuckets!" " Thanks for everything!" "So long!" "Arrivederci." "See you later, crocodile." "Maurice, my arm is tired." "Wave it for me." "Faster, you naughty little monkey." "By the time we get back to New York, it'll be the middle of winter." "So I was just thinking, why rush?" "Maybe we could make a few side stops along the way." " Maybe Paris." " You just read my mind." " I was thinking Spain." " Run with the bulls." " What about Fiji?" " Canada." "Can we?" "Cheap meds." "I wouldn't even mind coming back here sometime." " I could do that." " You could say that again." " Skipper?" " I always wanted to go to Australia." "Don't you think we should tell them that the boat's out of gas?" "Just smile and wave, boys." "Smile and wave." "Here come the balloons." "We chose balloons because we were thinking of an airy and lighthearted movie." "I'm Eric Darnell." "And I'm Tom McGrath." "We're the co-directors of this movie." "They say talking about film is like dancing about architecture, but we'll do our best." "Comes Marty, the voice of Chris Rock, doing a Tarzan yell." "We actually found some original Tarzan yells and played them for Chris." "Even the original Tarzan yells were manufactured." " Nobody could actually do that." " Not even Johnny Weissmuller." "I think he might have, but it was all edited." "Chris did his best and it came out pretty funny." "Very funny." "Ben also does it a little later on, which is quite a challenge to do." "It's always fun doing slow motion in computer animation because it has to be animated in slow motion." "It's not like we animated at normal speed and then slow it down." "Here comes the lion." "Ben Stiller, of course, is the voice of Alex." "And we wake up right in the heart of New York City." "Kendal Cronkhite and Shannon did a greatjob of kind of simplifying and idealizing the Central Park Zoo, which is a great location for us, because it's smack dab in the middle of Manhattan and surrounded by these wonderful skyscrapers." "If you look closely at the environment, it does look like New York City in many ways." "It is stylized and modified somewhat, but on a more detailed level midpoint of not having any parallel lines in New York City, something we called the whack factor, which gave everything just a bit of a style." "A little askew." "Sort of matched the style of the design of our characters." "Plus we wanted to have this opening in the fall." "And the art department used this great muted palette, kind of showing the city and romanticizing it at the same time." "So when we went to Madagascar, it'd just explode with color." "So it's sort of... we start the film with this talky sequence as we introduce these two characters." "And Ben and Chris just both did a greatjob, energizing this dialogue and giving the animators material to work with so we could keep it interesting." "Here goes Alex up on the wall." "It is great." "The animators had a great time just pushing the movement like this and finding these strong poses, hitting them and sticking them and staying on these poses to kind of really push the attitudes." "Here comes the people." "There's the lion chasing the zebra, a little joke on the clock." "So we go around the horn here." "We meet everybody, just trying to set up their routine and how Alex loves the routine of performing for the crowds and he's the most energetic about the whole idea of being a star." "You see something very normal and simple, at least it looks simple, when you look at that water that Gloria's in." "Every time we have some organic thing like that, water, wind, particles of dirt or sand or whatever, it's a big task for the effects department to put that in." "Nothing's for free." "Crowds were very much a huge challenge and having all the variations of people." "Here's our monkeys." "Conrad Vernon actually the voice of the gingerbread man in the Shrek film is the voice of our monkey." "Mason, we call him." "Sounds like James Mason..." "After James Mason, yeah." "A spit, just that water coming out." "Big task for some effects animators to pull that off." "And they have to do spits a lot in this movie." "We have about 50 spit takes, I believe." "So here's where Hans comes in." "Hans Zimmer, our composer, gave us some great music." "He found a theme for our characters that he, you know, was playing here." "And he found a large number of variations on that theme that we could use later, emotionally, to really kind of hit the friendship between Alex and Marty." "Masses of people, huge challenge for our crowd guys." "So this is really... we tried to take a point of view from the people looking at the animals, to set up the lives our characters go through every day." "This is their normal routine." "We wanted to show that." "One of our best actors." "The highly trained Tom McGrath as the voice of the Skipper." "Just kind of fell into it." "I'd voice it in pitches and we actually wanted someone like Robert Stack, this tough guy in a little penguin body." "We'll often do the voices just to fill in until we can get the actor in and record them." "And Tom did the voice of the Skipper." "When it came time to cast, we just figured Tom sounds good." "Let's keep him in there." "So Marty tried his best to get into the routine, find something different, but it didn't quite do it for him." "Beautiful afternoon lighting, almost magic-hour lighting here." "Nice warm glow in the afternoon, fall feeling." "Originally, Marty was inspired to go to the wild by just his mural alone, and then we found out we could use these little guys, these penguins escaping, to plant the seed in his head that there was something else out there besides the zoo." "And it's just one of the cases we found we could use the penguins throughout the film to kind of be a little mirror of wanting to find your roots, the same thing Marty's going through." "They go through their own version of it." "He's explained it, very clearly now, laid it out." "Chris Rock, very excited." "I always liked thatjoke." "Marty's got some new ideas to think about." "So you know, it's interesting." "To think that every time you see anything on-screen, somebody had to go in and figure out how to make it, get it up onto the screen, what it should look like, how it should move, how it should feel." "With animation of, you know, in any medium, nothing is for free." "In any medium, nothing is for free." "Everything that you see is on-screen." "It's like those fireworks, those cheering crowds, are all positioned and designed, even these little elements you see on-screen." "Obviously, forjust seconds, whether it's Gloria's fruit bowl or Melman's medications, are all designed from scratch by artists and technicians and put in place by animators and given surfaces, so that they reflect the light properly." "And then lights are applied to them." "It's a huge undertaking forjust, you know, every moment, every second of film, in a process like this." "It's one of the reasons that we do have two directors for a movie like this, or at least why we like to do it that way, is because there are just so many decisions to be made every day," "notjust about what the characters say and do, but what those bars look like on that cage or what the surface of that tree should be." "Originally, with that monkey, the teacup build, originally we had a martini glass." "We decided we needed to take that out." " Make it more universal." " More universal." " Tea is much more universal." " It works with his character too, having a tea and a teacup and saucer." "But, everything on, including that whipped cream is a big ordeal because it has to move with Marty's mouth and feel like it's connected." "Marty just dropped the bomb on his friends." "So this is a point in the film, you know, this scene, rewritten many times, and how to best show Marty's love for the wild and what his dream is, and we wanted to have it" "in an intimate conversation from all the noise in the zoo." "The art department put this light right in the center and made this little table so that it felt like they're just sitting around a dining room table as friends would, just to try and get that feeling." "And Marty's kind of pushed aside as his friends downplay his ideas." "One of the goals of this is how we portray the city and we try to tell the movie through their point of view, to have them know only the things that they would see or perhaps hear about." "And so we try to always see the film unfold from their eyes." "We wanted to keep them very naive and have, you know, their knowledge kind of play into what is believable" " with animals in a zoo." " Right." "And yet, from their perspective, they consider themselves New Yorkers, which is what this premise is all about." "Take four New York City zoo animals, New Yorkers to the core, and dump them into the wild." "How would they survive?" "For a lot of that New York sensibility, we worked with Peter Mehlman, who was a producer/writer for Seinfeld for many years." "He helped to sort of find that New York sensibility and rhythm." "And language too." "Came up with some great dialogue." " That helicopterjoke." " The helicopterjoke was Peter's." "And of course, Mark Burton and Billy Frolick, writing partners on this, did a wonderful job laying this story out for us when we first began." "Really focusing on the story between a zebra and a lion that you wouldn't expect to be friends and they really kind of honed in on that idea as kind of the centerpiece for the story, this kind of fable about these animals," "this predator/prey that should never be friends." "So that's the heart, and this scene here is purely to show how close and what kind of history these guys share." "You know, originally, this was a big song and dance number and it went into a huge fantasy musical kind of Busby Berkeley thing," "you know, to show Alex's viewpoint against Marty's viewpoint." "But we felt at this point in the story, we've already said that in many other ways, so it seemed kind of a redundant kind of idea." "So itjust came down to a few bars of New York, New York." "I always liked this scene where, classic apartments, buildings, New Yorkers yelling at each other to be quiet." "The process for writing and developing a film like this is perhaps a little bit different than a live action film." "We do try to start with a script." "It's flexible." "We can modify and change it and do by design, by a process, continue to develop ideas as we take them into other parts of our production process, which include storyboarding, where we basically draw out a comic book version" "of every scene of the film." "And the story artists can put a lot of new ideas into the process that way, both on how they stage things." "They may come up with new gags and lines of dialogue that help inform the scene." "And it's a very iterative process." "We just do it over and over again, refining and redoing sequences, looking at them together and seeing how they play out, rewriting scenes, and that goes on throughout the production process, which in this case was about four years." "Not enough credit can be given to storyboard artists." "Like this light that he claps on and off came out of a storyboard artist." "They're writers themselves and actors and they really come up with a lot of the great things you see." "Plus the animators really add little nuances and little things that kind of make the characters even more believable." "It's a great example here." "As Marty looks at his wall," "I think it was Manu who animated this, put this little scratch on his ankle in there and itjust makes you feel like he's a living thing, you know." "Originally in the first version of the script, all the animals were darted by activists and shipped away from the zoo, unbeknownst to our characters, they had no idea what was happening." "Then as the story evolved, we found it stronger that Marty would be so obsessed with seeing the wild that he would actually escape, and cause the others to be worried and follow after him." "It's a little bit more active on Marty's part." "Plus we got to bring the characters out into the city and see how they interacted and how much of a fish out of water they are in their own city." "And they're completely oblivious to it." "We have these three neurotic sort of New York males in the film and with our one female lead, the hippo, voiced by Jada Pinkett Smith, we wanted a tough, strong character, and you wouldn't think of Jada necessarily off the bat," "because she's so petite and nowhere near a hippo." "But when you hear her voice, it's so commanding and strong and it's just the thing we needed to sort of help keep these three neurotic males in line and Jada just did a wonderful job as the voice of the hippo." "We did something different with the camera here, give it a handheld feel, which adds to the frenetic nature of the sequence." "Something you and Johnson threw in there just to add that hectic kind of nature to it." "Great expressions." "Another gag here added by a story artist, just break it off and throw it." "I think that's the only food joke from Gloria in the whole film." "Which we kind of tried to avoid." "We wanted Gloria to be big and robust, but to be a beautiful hippo and not have to worry about... make her a character where she's worried about eating or has a weight problem because hippos are 800 pounds and they're proud of it." "A great pose when Gloria busts out of that brick wall." "So we wanted to get the monkeys to be transferred as well, so they became part of this little escape, with their own agenda, to go see Tom Wolfe." "Rockefeller Center." "Getting some of these icons in here." "We thought, what better way to put... push these characters through New York better than on a subway?" "That's one of the things, being in the city, that every New Yorker is well familiar with is the subway." "So we just tried to capture that as best we could, that experience." "When Marty is traveling through the city he's in wide open space and these guys are cramped and claustrophobic and in smaller spaces, just to kind of contrast" "Marty and his friends." "Melman has these Kleenex boxes on his feet, the little tip of the hat to Howard Hughes." "Classic shot of New York City landmark, Times Square." "There's a lot of animation in those signs." "That "What are you going to do," is another Peter Mehlman thing." "It always makes me smile." "It's such a little thing but such a nice touch." "Now, that is actually a model of Grand Central Station, a beautiful set that they built inside the computer, so you can shoot it from any angle." "And it's one of those things as before, a little bit whacked out, a little whack factor." "It's identical but things have been simplified and kind of caricatured." "But all to make you feel like you're actually there." "A little bit over the top with the..." "And had some fun with the audio, sound effects, of some of this stuff." "It was a fine line, you know." "Where do you go, way over the top and have those kind of cartoon-y sound effects." "We tried to find the best balance we could." "But that old lady is great, and that's, for even little kids, they just love seeing a lion get hit with a purse." "And that was fun to be able to do slapstick." "That was part of our conceit, to have a lot of the action and motion be entertaining as well." "And just like, you know, years of traditional animation has done." "So we've sort of reached a place now with computer animation technology where if you've got the talented people, and the time and resources you can really do just about anything you can dream up." "There was a reason why the first computer animated films were toys and insects, things with exoskeletons, because it's really hard to get that sort of furry fleshy feeling with computer animation." "Well, it's still hard, but it's certainly possible today." "So we could really push that and make these characters organic and squash them and stretch them in ways that we've seen in traditional hand-drawn animation, but perhaps not as much in computer animation." "That's a greatjoke." "At least I think so." "This is so tremendously difficult to..." "A huge number of crowds." "Even they have to keep breathing and moving even subtly so they don'tjust freeze up and..." "Here she comes again." "That was Elisa, her name was." "She was one of the loop group voice people who just threw a great voice on that side character." "One of the rare times here where we go for the human's point of view." "One of the things we discovered when they transfer animals, they use very heavy drugs." "It kind of inspired a way to do our version of Pink Elephants On Parade, to have this little fantasy thing that only animation can do, that brings outjust a little something special and we thought it was very funny that he would have" "this kind of a hallucination." "And twice, by the way." "So this is our "guilty of exposition" scene, where we really needed to find a way to explain what the people's motives were and why they were transferring these animals, because they didn't think they were happy and 'cause they escaped." "We thought it'd be funny to show it through Alex's point of view." "And then get darted again." "One thing people ask about the characters, are they designed after the actors?" "'Cause they look like them in some cases, but they're not." "They're designed well in advance of casting in some cases... in most cases, in our case here." "But the thing is, when they're performing behind the mike, we do videotape them." "And it's something we don't copy, but we give it to the animators to inspire them." "They're also inspired by other performances." "And they add these little nuances in the faces, these little facial expressions the actors give." "So it really makes these characters look sometimes like the actors." "But that's how that kind of gets in there." "They find an essence somehow." "So this was one of the first shots that we animated on the film, because they're just essentially on stage." "It gave the animators a chance to really find a style and a tone for the way we want to move these characters around." "Six animators had worked on this shot, and the time on the shot is incredible." "It's close to 30 seconds, I believe, and so it's a very long shot." "Different animators would work on different characters." "This is one of the..." "just a flat graphic moment we could take, cinematically." "And we thought it'd be interesting to shoot it all as a single shot with all these characters coming on-screen, and a few times in the movie where we have this kind of proscenium staging, to take a break from the cinematics of it." "Always enjoy watching this and watching the characters that aren't speaking, see how the animators have chosen to keep them alive and thinking." "You always feel like there's something going on in their heads, even when they're not speaking." "Pretty amazing for a first shot and it really set the tone for some of the nuances in how these characters move and react." "Here's Tommy." "Originally we didn't have a lot of the sets built too, so this was a great choice to flex the muscles of the characters and they can build these crates relatively easy, so that's why it was one of the first scenes to be animated." "I've always enjoyed this reveal." "We kept trying to think of a name for the boat." "We had Lollipop for "It's A Good Ship Lollipop. "" "We had SS Act Two." "We put names on the boat and itjust drew your eye right to the name instead of the scene." "Those are cans of root beer, just in case, if anybody was wondering." "Root beer, not beer." "This was one of the first scenes that was boarded in the film, and originally it was a storm at sea that washed the crates overboard." "But so many films had been done, castaways, at the time, you know, and there was so many storms, that we decided... and Gilligan's Island had been out for quite some time." "So we decided it'd be fun to use some of these characters, when the entire zoo was being transferred, and have them do a little jailbreak." "So this was really the scene for these penguins and for a while this was their only moment in the film." "And we kept it in our screenings and people just liked them, so we just decided to put them elsewhere in the film, and found really good storytelling places for them." "It's a great addition, the sound of that breaking coffee cup, which was designed by the sound effects folks." "Yeah, those guys, you know, even with the little foley they did, moving hay and everything, add so much to the storytelling, and a lot to the comedy." "A lot of the sound effects really made some of these jokes play really well." "It's just like the picture, the sound, everything you hear has to be invented." "'Cause there is no real place where you can record penguins slapping each other like this, so every sound, every step on a keyboard, every handshake or wave or slide across a deck." "That was a little something Rex Grignon added there, that penguin sliding." "Also on that map on the wall behind the penguin when he shrugs, it said "Madagascar,"" "and that was one of the only times we ever wanted to see Madagascar originally in the film." "We never even wanted to mention it." "We didn't want anyone to say it, but we caved in." " We caved in." " We did, we caved in, and, I think, Julien the lemur introduces it later." "You want to talk about the genesis of this?" "This sequence, my brother's wife, her father was in the Navy and they were doing war games, and he was repainting a deck and got washed overboard." "And he always described the story about being caught in these swells as when he dipped down 50 feet and came up the boat was just a little further away." "It was so graphic and visual, we thought maybe from Alex's point of view he would go through the same experience." "And we had Marty in his box and water was spraying out of different holes and he was using all his hooves to cover it, but it was very funny." "But then it looks like Marty was dead after it for a long time, so we decided to keep it with just Alex." "Well, even this here is a dramatic moment." "Alex arrives on the beach all alone and he's scared and worried about himself and the others." "And yet we still try to find ways to keep it fun and visual, as he holds onto his tongue or as he rolls up onto the beach and the sand is coming out of his mouth." "Or this joke here, that he's heading down towards the horizon." " Cats hate water." " Dan Wagner, he animated this, and was finding ways to push Alex even farther." "During the making of the film it was always a challenge." "How far can we push these characters, and see how far we can take our animation?" "It's easy to be reserved and... it was great that Jeffrey Katzenberg was so supportive of the animation style we all wanted to do that he was even a big advocate of pushing it as far as we can, see what we could get away with." "Another place here where the story artist was given this idea of Alex coming across Melman and was asked to figure out a way to make it fun and physical and visual." "And so all of this action here, pulling on Melman's neck and grabbing this log, was all invented by the story artist who drew it up and presented it to us on a big bulletin board, like a comic book." "And you figure if you're laughing at that when it's a black and white drawing on a bulletin board, then chances are you've got something." "And a car screech sound there when Alex comes to a stop." "Coconut." "There are great little added sounds that, you know..." "There's only certain moments in these where we really went over the top." "Like that clown horn." "That's always cracked me up." "We wanted to just keep the action going and get all our characters reunited quickly, and try to hide the fact that it's so convenient they're all showing up at the same time." "But, you know, each little beat, each little character gets his moment." "We have our pair, back to back musical jokes here, with Hawaii Five-O and now Chariots Of Fire, and we thought about, can we really get away with those just running up against each other?" "We decided yes." "We can." "This is our little twist on the little love affair, which goes sour." "Again with the slow motion, even all of those little lips flapping around, all hand-animated to appear like slow motion." "So that line "sugar honey, ice tea"" "that Marty says when he turns and runs the other way, is something that Chris Rock came up with." "We have a lot of opportunity to play around and be inventive when we get into the studio to record these actors." "There's a great shot of ourjungle for the first time." "A lot of times we just had exclamations." ""Wow, this is great"" "or, you know, something really ordinary, and Chris and all the cast were really great at finding the language for their character." "And Chris would come up with funny exclamations." "Dagnabbit." "He'd say sugar honey ice tea." "And right here." "That's Chris Rock all the way." "But that's part of the process that's so great, is we... these actors just aren't names on the marquee for us." "I mean, there's a reason why they're famous, it's because they're so good at what they do." "And so when we get into the studio with them, we let them fly." "If they've got ideas, you know, we go." "We get it." "And often itjust is... it's just gold." "Like Ben running after Marty." "Ben standing behind a microphone." "He's jumping up and down, acting out of breath." "We say, you're chasing Marty telling him how many ways you can kill him," "Ben would just put his heart into it, and it looked..." "The performance is great." "It really is convincing that they're running or moving or getting hit." "This is the first shot of the jungle interior, absolutely beautiful images." "The art department created these environments for us." "The lighters who gave it this wonderful glow, not too bright, 'cause the sun is going down, but it's just absolutely beautiful." "And again, it's always fun to have Alex get beat up." "But we needed to detain him for later." "He had to be out of the loop later on." "Most of the plants are derived from real plants you would find in Madagascar, although they are stylized." "But, at least as important to that is how they're placed in the jungle." "The art department looked at a lot of reference, especially like Balinese gardens." "These are gardens in very tropical climates, and they use the plants that they have in that sort of climate, and yet create these very manicured, groomed spaces." "And we use that idea to give this jungle a sort of structure." "It wasn't supposed to be a literal version of Madagascar but kind of stylized, using plant designs." "But to make it kind of an innocent, naive version of a jungle, a kind of childlike view." "To place 900 dancing lemurs in a jungle is quite an undertaking for a computer." "This is one of the scenes where we really wanted to show the wildlife and one of our editors, Clare De Chenu, found this piece of music called Move It, that would..." "And to kind of give these characters a personality we thought, like, ravers at a party." "That's how they like to live." "And this Move It song is from the '80s." "And Sacha, who is playing Julien, heard this music that was just in the background and decided he'd like to sing it." "So he went home and practiced it." "Came back in and he just blew the doors off it." "Plus he danced on videotape, which the animators referenced." "And really gave the introduction to the locals a great flavor." "And we introduced the fossa." "Yeah, it was a stroke of genius to cast Sacha Baron Cohen as our lemur king." "Leslee Feldman and her crew suggested him to us." "And we'd actually never heard of him before, but then saw the work he'd done on HBO with Ali G." " And he could create characters." " Yeah." "He came in and played around with some voices, kind of this Indian, came up with a French, kind of Indian accent." "And then after a few sessions really gave it it's own kind of flavor." "We don't know what it is, what that accent is." "So this was hard to set up, a challenge for us to set up." "You know, the locals and what they're like, and their enemy, the fossa, and kind of their situation." "And to introduce the New Yorkers to the locals as well." "Mort, he's one of my favorite characters." "We've been told he's very popular in Japan." " Andy Richter." " Andy Richter as the voice of Mort." "He's so funny." "Cedric The Entertainer is the voice of Maurice, sort of the second in command." "He's a kind of lemur called an aye-aye, this very bizarre exotic creature that lives in Madagascar and nowhere else." "Cedric just has this wonderful warmth to his voice." "You know, when we began, we thought we might try to get Malagasy accents for our characters that live in Madagascar." "But we soon realized that the best thing is to use these beautiful voices that our actors can bring to the table." "Cedric just has all of this warmth and this mellow tone to his voice." "It's a great contrast to King Julien, which is what we wanted, these two to kind of be a contrast." "And, yeah, we needed that, someone who had brains in the organization who could play against this child king." "The locals, because of these guys, were very small characters in the original version, and their parts just grew tremendously because of Cedric and Sacha adding so much to them." "In some of these scenes we had a lot of dialogue between Maurice and Julien in the bushes that was really funny." "A lot of it was improv." "Some of those things, for time, you have to lose." "The animators having fun with how..." "Sacha used to hold his hands in all these crimped shapes when he'd perform, and the animators tried to add that to his character." "There was a waterfall actually behind them that we didn't have the water quite ready for yet." "And so we didn't turn on the water for the shot." "So all the things weren't quite built yet, but enough to have the scene come across." "So we had to plan out what scenes were best to animate first with what sets are finished." "So cute." "This is great." "Jada turns on her motherly charms here." "Originally the joke for Mort was that he was the most annoyingly cute of all the lemurs." "Remember, you always thought it was great that he was 37 years old in reality, and that's why it was so annoying." "Act your age." "We had a joke, where they called him on his age, and he just giggled." "And we lost that." "Had to cut it for time, I think." "You know, when we started this film, putting five furry lemurs on-screen was the most they could do." "And there you see, there's a few more than five." "And so that was the challenge to, you know, how to get all these characters on screen at once with all their fur." "Every one of these characters has millions of hairs on him." "And every one of those hairs, and its associated data, has to be pumped through the computers to create these images." "So itjust becomes monumental, the amount of information that has to get calculated, to create these furry guys." " This is a..." " Ad-lib." " It's always challenging in these..." " Yeah "ripping our limbs off. "" "This is a little bit that Sacha had done where to punish Maurice he calls everyone to prepare the spanking machine." "They all cheer and..." "But before the spanking machine, he asks them their names and it's a little funny bit that we ended up losing, again, to keep it moving." "So it's always a challenge with these, like a nine-foot-tall lion or a 15-foot giraffe to be in the same scene with an 18-inch lemur, you know." "Cinematically it's very challenging sometimes." "It was hard enough just keeping Melman in the shots with his friends, much less adding these little guys to the mix." "That's why it was fun to have Melman's head kind of drop into the frame from time to time." "It sometimes came off pretty funny." "That's another adlib, "fuzz bucket," very funny." "Beautiful sunset lighting here." "When we started the film, a lot of it was going to take place on a beach." "We didn't think about things like kicking sand and footprints and the history of footprints and all these little things that add so much to the realism of it." "I mean, these guys, a lot of the artists just really invented ways to do this that it really adds so much." "And make you feel like you're on a beach." "That was an ad-lib from Chris Rock." "He just started singing that song and he really didn't know the words, so he starts going and inspired that little acrobatic gymnastics that Marty does." "This scene actually came after the crates went overboard, and, in the film, with the penguins celebrating." "The characters are overboard, it's dramatic, and you cut back and the penguins are having champagne." "We found a better place for that little penguin celebration." "It was a great image, I think, with Melman in his grave, sort of giving up." "His giraffe crate is a headstone." "A little thing about the will in the sand is that the art department had researched a New York State will and all the legalize and how it's written and actually wrote it, modeled it in the sand." "Yeah, that's a legal, binding document there." "It's legit." "This little Melman ad-lib here." "David Schwimmerjust came up with that." "It's very funny." "Itjust gives the animators so much material to work with, these great performances." "David made Melman just such a wonderful character." "He's so appealing, you know, even with his phobias and weaknesses." "We didn't want him to be a downer," " we wanted him to be a lot of fun." " A loveable hypochondriac, which he did so well." "When we tested it, they asked kids who their favorite character was, and this little boy raised his hand and said," ""I like Melman, because he's too tall. "" "He's too tall!" "Which is great, 'cause he is too tall, poor guy." "So the kid was really empathizing with him." "And this is where we start to go into the survival montage." "We tried so many different types of music, songs that would underlie it." "We were really stuck on it, and then Hans decided he wanted to take a shot atjust composing something and it really hits every beat of this and the attitudes of the characters." "He really did a greatjob, building it to this climactic, monumental moment with the Statue Of Liberty." "It was a great idea Tom came up with, that they construct their own version of the Statue of Liberty, that they could use the Liberty's torch as a beacon." "Which led into another storyboard artist's" "Planet Of The Apes reference, which kind ofjust seemed to work right into this." "We do have a lot of shameless film references in Madagascar and we just think they're funny." "And usually, though, what we'll try to do is give it a test that, if it works even if you don't get the reference, if it makes sense to some degree, within the context, then it's OK." "Yeah, we had him doing the Tom Hanks bit here, but we just thought it was too much Cast Away." "So we kind of took out the "I make fire" bit." " Fire is very difficult." " In computer animation." "This was a monumental task to do the effects here of this right here." "And breaking apart like this." "We had a lot of extra material in this sequence." "Some of it was animated, I believe, between Marty and Alex." "Mireille was great." "We had... this sequence was probably, you know, felt like 15 minutes." "You know, felt like 15 minutes." "And Mireille was really good about saying, this bit's good, this bit's good, you could really tighten it up." "It was like pulling teeth, but we're so glad we did tighten that sequence." " Thank you, Mireille." " Mireille Soria, our producer." "We always wanted to have this scene in the plane, which is good, and the comments like maybe the skeleton hand would be too dark." "But we just thought it was funny, and hopefully it ended up funny." "So we put smiles on the skeleton's faces so it wouldn't be..." "There's one right there." "So it wouldn't be too gruesome." "We wanted it to be like a little tree house kind of scene." "It's great that the skeleton hand sort of does the right poses." "There's Teemo that goes into the ball." "I wish we had used Teemo more." " It's a tenrec." " It's an actual animal, all these animals are, but Teemo was funny." "He used to have this French accent and had a bigger role early on, but it was reduced to popping into a little ball now." "We had a bigger role for Masacoro, which is that chameleon that you see occasionally." "She was a psychic and she would stick her tongue out onto people's forehead and change colors like a mood ring." "And she read their fortunes to them." "Again, Sacha, just going off." "He would go off for minutes." "There'd be one line of dialogue and he'd go off for ten minutes, having imaginary conversations with other lemurs, and we'd just be in tears, just laughing." "Sacha, there's certain words he would say that Julien wouldn't know, he's not smart enough to know, so he came up with a language tailored to someone who wasn't so bright, and it added a lot to his character." "That was the second place we say Madagascar." "And that's about all we wanted to mention originally." "So wouldn't you know, this is one of those moments," "Alex and Marty connect, you know, kind of intimately." "It felt like it was a good point in the film." "Hans Zimmer brings this friendship theme back in here." "Yeah, which really helps out moments like this." "This is a long shot." "The animator took a lot of time." "Some subtle performances." "Another story artist idea thatjust kind of adds to the shot, that help sign falling." "So even though they're in the wild and Marty, you know..." "We wanted to have them live like, you know, like New Yorkers even though they're in the wild." "So we thought it was funny to have this apartment door scene, with the chains and everything." "This kind of reuniting moment, and then just have a free-standing door it was funny." "Again the sound effects guys adding extra locks and so Marty has like 20 locks he undoes, and that adds a bit to it." "He's using sort of a Tiki lounge concept as a reference here." "Marty has this sort of '60s bachelor pad, I guess." "And then Hans goes, "I must do that music. "" "And he really nailed that genre of bachelor pad." "Here come our spit takes." "So this is one where we had a few and thought they were funny." "The problem was we didn't have enough, so we added more." "In the issue of food, they're so pampered in a zoo, we're like, well how can we...?" "They wouldn't know what to look for to find food, you know." "They didn't even know food grows on trees." "So they're kind of helpless in this environment being naive about the wild." "And this is a good way to show the herbivores are OK with this stuff, but Alex needs his steak." "So it was a moment we could put in where Alex really starts to get hungry here." "And Alex is hungry for steak." "It was always thought..." "It was always a moment for him to have this dream." "We tried different versions of these different dreams." "One was based off Jurassic Park where there are steaks running around in flocks and herds on a big savannah." "And then..." "We had a big dance number, with all the steaks sort of..." "Another Busby Berkeley musical, and again, the story artists had come up with this idea, based off the movie." "But it was just a real simple quick way we could convey and have a little joke about it, that Alex loves steak." "Rob Koo, one of our board artists, added him doing a steak angel, which he then added to that." "We actually added these cutbacks so that we could extend this moment, make it very uncomfortable." "It sort of cracks me up that Marty kind of buys it." "Yeah." "Hey, what do you know?" "Just the cadence of Sacha's voice makes me laugh." "Yeah, it's the Greek chorus up there commenting on Alex." "The locals are desperate." "They need some kind of help." "Just blabbing on." "This was quite challenging to do this." "It's really funny on paper when it's a drawing, all these lemurs pulling into this tree, but to actually do it is very difficult." "In traditional animation all you need to do is draw it and paint it." "In the computer world though you have to build it." "And on that gag and this one coming up here, we adjusted the timings on those over and over again trying to find the perfect rhythm." "The one time we could say suck." "The gag really is credited, that little bit, to Bob Saget, who was actually in the studio at the time." "We showed him the penguin stuff and he goes, "At the end you have them on an icy shelf just looking at each other and says, 'Well this sucks. "'" "That was going to be after the credit roll." "And we found a better place." "Well, yeah." "As the penguins became more a part of the story, we couldn't end with them in Antarctica so we could just move that gag up." "One of the underlying themes here is that these guys are all..." "Everybody's looking for a place that will tell them who they are." "Ultimately they all have to look inside themselves to find who they are, and it doesn't matter where they are." "They don't have to be where Mother Nature tells them to be or New York or anything else." "So the penguins again are a parallel to that idea." "Here Marty finds the real version of his mural and thinks that that's all he needs to be happy." "But Alex is a good enough sport to go along after their reconciliation on the beach." "This was a challenge too." "Alex is hungry now." "How do we get..." "We wanted Marty to bring this kind of wild side out." "We thought if we could get him into that chase kind of situation, a game of tag, that Alex's instincts would somehow kick in, between the hunger and just the act of chasing his friend." "We didn't necessarily have that dream sequence at the beginning of the film until we were sort of working on ideas for this sequence." "We found that there's this opportunity to set up that idea at the beginning, and then allow this to sort of resonate with what we saw when the film started." "There's a similar shot to Marty's fantasy." "So now Alex's pupils have changed." "He's transitioned into something closer to a wild cat, something's flowing inside of him that he's never felt before." "We wanted to have something for Alex that would show like when he's a little bit crazed and more wild, so his pupils shrank as his irises grow." "And then there's three wigs also to kind of show how he would progress and get a little wilder." "Here's the next version of his hair, which isn't quite as blow-dried as normal." "And his whiskers start to get little kinks in them as well." "Look how he just throws this lemur." "Animators having fun." "This is a great example of Sacha coming up with alternate wording." ""In a very good working... "" "It was something like, "My plan is working excellently,"" "in the script, and he turned it into words that Julien would say." "We used to have this long scene where Alex was sniffing Marty, with that wild look on his face and didn't know what smelled so good." "Thought he smelled steak and he..." "His nose kept leading him to Marty." "Sort of a variation on the song that we heard when Alex was at the zoo, with kind of a crazy, marching band feel to it." "And once Julien's character was, you know, challenged by another king, he became kind of bitter about Alex." "And there was a lot more of that, but then we kind of pulled back on that, because..." "A beautiful waterfall back there through these scenes that we had turned off earlier." "So it was how to show Alex going nuts, and his point of view." "And, you know, gotta give credit to older cartoons that would turn someone into a sucker, you know, and cross-dissolve." "Although it would've been great to see little steaks dissolve." "Kind of visually could show it." "Originally the steaks were realistic, and looked kind of creepy, so we had to stylize those a little bit." "So a moment of lucidity there as his eyes go back to normal briefly." "Yeah, as Tom was saying, these steaks allow us to do this, to present this idea comedically." "It could be very dark, this idea that Alex wants to eat his friends." "Which isn't something that we all can necessarily relate to in a way, so we had to play it kind of light, that part of it, but hopefully play that it's a real emotional heartbreak for these guys," "'cause they don't think they can be friends." "Everything's coming out in the open." "There was a scene that we actually took out." "It was Maurice like a car salesman, showing all the attributes of a lion." "The teeth, the claws, built for speed, four-wheel drive." "It was a very funny scene, but at this point in the film, you kind of knew what a lion was about, and so itjust kind of slowed down the sequence." "It was great working with this layout team to find really inventive ways to do the storytelling and to emphasize certain emotions, where you put the camera." "And you try and think of it like a live action film." "You have these miniature sets built and these performers within that, and it's all a virtual world, but you do have cameras and lenses and lights and there are creative people working those elements like you would in a live action film." "So it's a really neat and challenging process and there's a lot more to it creatively than most people imagine, in animation." "There's an entire department that just constructs all the models for us." "What makes these films interesting is every film can have its own style, and we wanted to definitely have our own style." "Kendall pushed a lot of the design, you know, so it's very unique." "So in a way we couldn't borrow a coffee table from the Shrek universe because it's a different style of how it's made and graphically." "So, every little thing you see, every prop, every blade of grass, everything has been made from scratch for this movie alone." "We have this Wonderful World song you've seen in many films, to contrast what the characters are going through." "We'd used it for such a long time we couldn't find anything better to play with this montage, which is virtually created from Rob Koo, I think." "He storyboarded all these characters kind of walking through and each one getting picked off by a different predator later on." "So it was pretty funny." "Itjust kind of grew from there and then we added Alex building his cage, because he was so afraid about hurting his friends." "With the fossas it's very difficult, you know, 'cause we went back and forth." "Do they talk?" "What do they say when they talk?" "And for a while they did." "We found that we didn't need them to communicate so much, butjust to be savage, and to reflect where Alex would actually go to, this non-speaking, guttural, savage creature." "Little ducky." "We were going to have him say, "Are you my mommy?" to Marty before he gets eaten, but thatjust went a little too far." "We reveal what Alex was constructing." "The Tsingy, it's actually in Madagascar." "It's a really unique place of limestone spires we thought it would be great to play out the scene there." "Jada again being the strong female and she's just great." "I mean, she has this kind of..." "When she walks into a room, her presence is there." "Jada is very petite in reality but she has this great presence about her." "Animator had fun again here." "We always try to give them a lot of freedom to go crazy with this stuff." "It's one of those things that worked out with our friends coming back from Antarctica." "We wanted to have the boat come back, so they see their opportunity to leave, but it was nice to be able to bring the penguins back at this time." "Every shotjust has ocean in the background." "One of these shots coming up right here has 15,000 trees, right here, with four million blowing leaves that they created just for that one shot." "And the effects team was just like, "We want to do this shot,"" "and we're so grateful to them for pulling it off." "That was a line that Tom just invented on the fly as a joke." "We never thought we'd use it at the time, and then we were listening to takes and we said, wait a minute," " we should try and blend this in." " Can we say that?" "Kill them and eat their liver?" "We decided we could say it as long as we were sure he was joking." "The skipper is barking off these orders, and the scene was animated." "They get the locals to help them." "That's why that skipper line was still in there." "The hearts and minds of the natives." "But we changed the sequence and they're no longer part of it." "These signs really helped us." "We know, it's maybe cheap to do that, but we knew which side of the island was which, in a way." "It's in our tone still." "Here it kind of borders on creepy with all these smiling steaks." "I remember the sound guys put in the sound of goats and little children, and we were going, wait a second, this isn't Silence Of The Lambs." "They were really fun to work with, these guys." "Really creative." "Chris and Ben did a greatjob with the performances here." "This is a scene though where we went, we changed the dialogue in subtle ways, and Chris at the time was doing the Oscars, and he was really cramped for time." "And I remember we actually..." "He let us come to his hotel and we set up a suite and recorded this stuff." "And he did a really brilliant performance." "But there was a technical problem with the audio, and we had to animate this scene, we had to go back in with him after the Oscars." "The day after, I think." "He said everybody else was calling to congratulate him." "DreamWorks called to say, hey, can we get you back in the studio?" "How he was great, you know, and it's hard for the..." "They have to recreate their performances, you know, and, luckily, our actors were really patient to the process, which can be very difficult and sometimes that happens where you have to redo stuff." "We see all these beautiful images on screen that the art department helps us realize." "But the other side of that equation is the work that Philippe Gluckman and his team do, to bring these artistic ideas to the screen in three-dimension." "Managing how all the effects look, how the surfaces look, how the light reacts with these objects." "It's a huge task." "Philippe and his team have just done an incredible job, sometimes recreating almost exactly what was conceived in the artistic development process." "And then taking things to new levels too, often in ways that surprised us sometimes." "We didn't think that maybe some things were possible." "We'd ask Philippe and he'd scratch his head and say, "Let me think about it,"" "and come back the next day and say, "Yeah, we can do that. "" "Beautiful backgrounds here, dark moody lighting and the plants blowing gently, all help contribute to the tone." "And the animation here, it isn't as broad and whacky as it is in some other scenes and has a little more subtleties." "I think the animators did a greatjob ofjust pulling off these subtle moments." "And we launch into action." "This is another little bit we had to shorten for time, but Marty was pleading to the fossas not to eat him because he had mad cow disease and other Chris Rock kind of standup routine as these fossa were encircling him." "But it ended up slowing down the action a little bit." "Again one of the things we discovered which was very difficult, whipped cream." "Let that be a lesson to everyone." "Massive undertaking again here." "All these individual fossa have to be animated by hand." "You can't tell the computer to move them around." "It doesn't look natural." "The Whac-a-Mole gag." "An amazing roar designed by the sound effects folks." "It was very hard to get a real lion's roar, we've discovered, because they don't really roar for very long." "They do really short little blasts." "So the sound guys had to create one for us." "You know, one of the things that made Alex savage visually, his teeth used to turn sharp." "We had this second set of teeth for him." "But it really, really looked like Alien." "So we decided not to use those kind of teeth and keep him with his normal ones." "Usually teeth don't change anyway." "You know, in the end, just the sound editing, what H and those guys did, it's really amazing technically how this all works." "With all these guys screaming on top of each other, and, you know, they're all recorded separately and it takes a large amount of patience in editing to string all these vocal performances together and make it sound like everyone's working with each other." "A little funny nunchucks bit that the animator put in." "Really shows off what we can do with the characters and how we can move them in a sequence." "Our character TD's or technical directors are the ones that set these up so that they can be sort of pushed and pulled to such extremes." "Robyn, Alain, and the others did a greatjob, giving the animators the handles they needed to do this kind of over the top animation." "And Rex Grignon was fantastic as an animation supervisor who really pushed the animators and helped set the tone of the style of animation we were after." "You can't thank those guys enough." "You never can, because there's so many." "There's probably 50 animators that contributed to this film, whose work is seamless." "Every animator has his own shot, and they'd run right next to each other." "So it's amazing how continuous it all feels afterwards." "We decided Alex could eat fish, since fish don't talk in our movie." " They're not." " You can eat all the fish you want." "Because a lion really can't... it's impossible for them to really live off vegetables and fruit." "Have to have protein some way, so fish was our serendipitous solution for that." "Marty actually had teeth marks on his butt from where he was bitten." "In the computer it never looked right." "It always looked really gruesome, with little blood specks or a little pink thing." "It didn't look right." "The ultimate solution they came up with was a Band-Aid, which works out great." "The story artists bring a huge amount of creativity to the table." "They don'tjust get the script and draw what's on the page necessarily." "They use that as a guide." "Catherine Rader and Rob Koo are our two lead story artists and contributed so much original material." "Much of what you see on-screen was actually never in the original script sometimes." "And Rob and Catherine are very much filmmakers in their own right as they take these script pages, just the written word, and turn it into cinema, along with their team of story artists." "And the first performance is in the drawings as well." "So that's how you visualize this, and from there everyone else is inspired by the storyboard drawings." "The crown is so small in Alex's hand." ""Go, Stevie, go!"" "He went to town on that so we put that in, the gecko on his crown." "Yeah, to fit that crown on Alex's head was and do some funky things with it, little tricks, to make him be able to wear it." "You can barely see it, it's so tiny." "But you know how big Julien is compared to Alex's head." "We got to this point and realized we needed to let everybody know the monkeys were still out there." "They're still OK." "They're back there toasting with tea and root beer, until Phil smells his armpit and is down for the count." "We've heard that we may be telegraphing a sequel here, by saying it's out of gas." "We thought it was a really funny joke." "We had the boat sail off into the sunset at one time, but it seemed very typical." "So this is something at the end of production, there's some re-used animation, but a lot of it was just..." "A lot of animators had some time and said," ""What's your favorite character?" "You want to make him dance?"" "You have seven seconds of dance time, so these guys really worked extra hard and did these little great dance numbers with the characters, which kind of helps you through the titles." "The titles on an animated film can be exhausting because there's so many people deserving of credit and so many people working on it that's it's an amazing process." "As Eric said, that's why we have two directors." "We could each work on separate teams." "But Eric and I could always get together, and with Mireille and kind of know the film we wanted to make." "So it was easy for us to split up and divide and conquer in that way." "And it sort of worked that way with producers as well." "Mireille would often be in one location and the co-producer Teresa Cheng would be up at the production facility in Northern California," "managing the production and all the folks and the schedules that were necessary." "We did it in two locations." "We have a DreamWorks campus in Glendale, California, and then one in Redwood City, California, about an hour plane ride apart," "and a lot of high end technology and video conferencing systems that allowed us to bridge that gap a little bit." "Often Tom and I would find ourselves in different locations, or Mireille and Teresa would be." "Which was probably in a total of, like, a four-year process, four-and-a-half-year process of working on this film, the last third of it is actually in production with all the animators." "All these people come aboard and help create this thing." "So it takes a long time to do one of these things." "But when you see it all done, and the work everyone else has done, it's really fantastic to see." "Every one of these names that you're seeing is actually someone who contributed a great deal of time and creative energy on the film, so that's a lot of them, yeah." "And any one of them is a tremendous artist in their own right who could go out and do beautiful work without Tom and myself telling them what to do." "Ourjob really is what the name says, direct people all in the same direction, so that everybody's telling the same story." "We're caretakers of the story in that sense, to make sure all this great creative work is servicing that main idea." "Ultimately it doesn't matter how many polygons you have or how many people are in the crowd or how beautiful the images are, if you don't have a story behind it all that people care about and the characters that people love" "and care about what's going to happen to them next." "We get to feature some of the great score work that Hans Zimmer and his team did here in these credits too." "It was great to bring some of that music back in." "This is a great piece." "A lot of it underscores the film, but it's nice to hear it just clean like this." "This is when they were escaping from the zoo." "Hans was trying to do New York-sounding material." "Looking at Gershwin, trying to do his own version, and then finally he said, "What am I doing?" "Anything I do will just be a cheap imitation of Gershwin." "I'm going to come up with my own sound for New York City. "" "When he played this for us, itjust gave us chills." "We thought it was a great piece, a great way to underscore, quite literally, what they're doing when they're escaping in the streets of Manhattan." "I think there's a montage of penguins music coming up soon." "That was fun to work with too, to find that tone that sort of..." "These guys have this black and white mentality, this sort of '50s sensibility." "And to find music that kind of helped sell that..." "Originally we had crime jazz, which had a lot of bongos in it, and so they latched onto that kind of retro, detective music and added their own bit to it." "A lot of people." "A lot of people, doing a lot of things." "Here's some more." "You do these things on computers, but there's so much support for that, and these guys don't get, you know..." "They invent ways to do new things and make it so the art of computer animation can just keep expanding." "Much of the software we use is all written in-house and maintained by computer artists and programmers in-house, which makes it possible for us to do things that frankly would be impossible if we had to depend upon off-the-shelf software." "So a lot of those names you see here are helping us achieve those sorts of things." "Helping the departments communicate with one another." "It's all about the pipeline in something like this." "The last thing you want is to have teams of people sitting, waiting for inventory to work on." "So it's a monumental task to keep that flowing and a lot of these people help with that as well." "Here we come with our final little goodbye from Gloria." "Well, it's been a lot of fun." "Hope you guys enjoyed it."