Bernie Mac. I love Bernie.
We were able to use Ben Stiller's son for some of these vocalizations
of the Baby Alex lion.
Remember the rattle used to be a zebra rattle. We actually...
And Baby Alex bit the butt of the zebra rattle and the dad said,
"That's a bad habit."
But it seemed more appropriate for the story that it was a lion rattle.
Yeah. We wanted to stay away from food issues.
Setting up this idea that, just like lions in the real world,
in this world you have to sort of be tough and fight your way to the top.
It's not a Manifest Destiny situation here.
There's Alec Baldwin's character.
Very much a coincidence that they have the same hairstyle.
Actually, a lot of Baby Alex,
it is Ben's son, Quinn, but also Mark's son, Declan.
- Yeah. - Baby Declan.
We went about 50 times to record the six lines that he did.
No, he does a great job.
He's got a real future.
I hear he's turned into quite the diva.
He was asking about his credit.
He's three years old, asking about his credit.
We thought this was a great opportunity to just set up the story from the start.
That's the benefit of a sequel, 'cause, you know,
a lot of people are familiar with the characters,
so we could jump right into story, which is great.
I think this beginning really helps the story, just seeing
what happened to Baby Alex and how it impacted his father
sets it up for the rest of the movie. It really makes it powerful at the end.
We also spent a lot of time on the music in that opening part,
how to make it feel different from Lion King, that other movie
that shall never be mentioned, in Africa.
I like that hunter's voice. It's really good.
- Eric. - Such a mean man.
This grass was a huge challenge for the film. Millions of blades
blowing in the wind and moving when characters walk through it.
The beginning of the film, we didn't think we could do it.
But the guys figured out some technology, and between our effects
and lighting department, we were able to create massive fields
of savannah grass.
This is the intense moment of the film. We sometimes screen this to kids,
and it can be really a little bit disturbing for them.
- Again... - Right there.
Half-dozen versions of that ear, tried to get it to be clear,
- but not too gross. - Right.
The blood had been fluorescent at one time. Just really bright.
This is where some kids cry in the theater.
We debated whether or not to reveal that Zuba was okay or not here.
We thought that might have been too sad.
Yeah. In retrospect, it seemed like the right thing to do.
Here's the magic of the movies. He comes from Kenya,
floats in the ocean and will make his way to New York.
- It could happen. - It could.
It's fun. When we were figuring out the timeline of when this was happening,
it was in the '70s.
We just thought it would be appropriate to have the Twin Towers in there.
But some people thought it was disturbing to have the Twin Towers,
even though, historically, they'd be there.
There was a debate about that.
I felt it was disturbing if we hadn't had it.
It's like rewriting history.
Just to prove it was in the '70s, earlier, in the last sequence,
the characters actually had sideburns. Just to make it feel legit.
A natural performer, Alex.
Gets to the zoo and he's right at home.
This is the first song that will.I.am worked on with Hans Zimmer
using some themes from the first film.
That's Willow as Gloria. Jada's daughter.
The butterfly maneuver, which comes back later.
It was nice to revisit the zoo,
and have an opportunity, in this movie, to set up where they came from.
Good thing we still had the set lying around.
So to speak.
We reused some footage from the first film.
- Give it a TV look. - That's Meredith Vieira
from The Today Show, which I love.
- Yeah. - Watch every day.
Setting up Nana here.
"Previously, on 24."
This is a good opportunity, even if you didn't see the movie,
we kind of just replayed a bit... The first movie, if you didn't see,
it would just keep people up to speed.
- Al Roker. - Lesley Stahl was the other one.
60 Minutes.
The song that drove parents crazy is coming up soon.
We thought it'd be fun to have this NASA moment
with them going up in the elevator.
Guillermo Navarro came in. We should talk about him.
He helped us with our cinematography.
This is a shot he devised. He thought it was important to set up
the world and where we left off and...
An excruciating shot for the people who had to light it. Mark, I don't know...
For a year. I think this is the most expensive shot in the movie.
And it's a great shot, though.
When we play this with the kids, they start getting up and dancing.
It's great. This song is like
- candy to these kids. - There's the duty-free shop
in the background, if you see it. Buy coconuts and masks there.
We thought it'd be fun to use that plane that we set up in the first movie.
Originally, it was Amelia Earhart's lost plane.
It turned into a Madagascar tour plane, right? In French.
Sacha Baron Cohen is King Julien.
A lot of improvisation for us, like this little song there...
We can use about 10% of his improv. We want to get a PG rating.
I was just thinking in watching this, going back to the beginning,
we'd be watching it in boards, a long time ago.
But thinking about Rob Koo, our head of story,
especially the opening and all that, but through all of this
and how it developed. Talking about Guillermo,
but how it all starts with those boards.
Yeah. For those of you who don't know, we start with drawings.
We draw thousands and thousands of drawings to put the film up,
and watch it like a movie before we do any animation.
We really count on these artists
to kind of help with our cinematography, our story.
They come up with a lot of gags and lines as well.
Andy Richter as Mort. He's so funny.
Doesn't seem like airport security will change in the next 20 years,
so that gag might hold up.
We always joked about the world's biggest slingshot,
since this is the second... "Madagascar Space Program."
- That line got cut. - It did get cut.
Great effects work on this plane from Scott Peterson and his team.
All through this scene and coming up with the plane crash,
just an incredible amount of work to get all this smoke
and props and pieces of metal falling off the plane, that sort of thing.
Vines right there. Huge effort.
- Great sound, as that plane falls. - Skywalker guys.
That's a great joke. Always gets a huge laugh.
- I love the one guy that falls off. - Yeah.
We could have ended the movie there.
That was the end of the movie for Mort for a while.
- Yeah. - We just loved Andy so much.
Loved Mort.
We used to have this dream Alex would have about being back in New York
and being a nightmare, and he would be waking up from it here.
It ended up being cut and it seemed to work okay with the lightning.
This was a tough scene 'cause we'd had fun action,
and we needed to get out some information.
We used to have dozens of different versions of this conversation.
I always liked the tourist skeletons.
They didn't really do much to clean out the plane.
All these old tourists from the Madagascar tour.
That was a great example of what the animators do
to capture the essence of David Schwimmer,
especially when he's looking awkward and gets up and leaves.
It helps to videotape him while they're recording,
but the animators are great at caricaturing these expressions.
I felt that was one place where Rex Grignon, head of animation,
pushed more on this. It's not quite as...
We don't have as much of that, like, stretchy, kind of goofy,
but we put more into acting. It's much more subtle.
- Don't you think? - Yeah. It was great to push the nuance.
It's one of the things we were able to do with this film,
since we knew the characters
after working with them for five years on the first film.
We knew we could go to deeper, richer, more emotional places with them.
It put demands on the animators
to, at times, really get that subtlety
and really show what's going on deep inside our characters.
Some of those emotional moments.
We're coming into the plane crash, which is the first sequence
we put into production. Tom, you originally boarded this,
and it's close to what you did three years ago.
It was one of the hardest sequences, and our first sequence, which was good,
but a challenge getting it through.
Bold move.
The effects work in this is just fantastic.
That's what makes it.
The Skipper is your alter ego. Do you have a little doll at home?
Yes. The doll is great. That was the first scene with the doll.
And I think Mireille wanted to...
Eventually, we named it Lola, after the Copacabana song
at the end of the movie.
Amazing shot here. All these objects floating around.
Big challenge for the effects guys.
This is one of the scenes where we actually got Ben and Chris together
and recorded them performing this scene.
So it was really funny to just sit back and watch them play off each other.
They did more iPod humor with Marty saying,
"I had 10,015 songs on that thing."
Alex would say, "Neil Diamond didn't write 10,000 songs."
"So now you're dissing Neil Diamond?"
I think it was also an area where Guillermo Navarro, who came in,
really helped us do some cinema on that.
It's really fun, we had layout people. We just shot it live-action.
We had some layout artists sitting on top of chairs.
He'd move the camera around.
I think he helped us push to make it more dynamic.
Dumped the couch on its back so the animators were in the couch
looking up into the ceiling, shaking the couch.
It was very low-rent, low-tech stuff.
But it really helped us in a very quick and inexpensive way
to find ways to shoot the sequence, keep it dynamic
and not get locked into standard, cliché setups.
I miss a line there. It says, "Kiss it like you kiss your sister."
- Tom, you also used to say... - "Like you're kissing the pope's ring."
"Kissing the pope's ring." I love that. We had to cut it out for timing.
It was a great line.
Being a good Catholic boy, I like that one.
Just to mention the clouds here. We took a trip to Africa.
We realised clouds would be two-thirds of our set.
So we had to come in and talk to the smart people
about how to build the clouds,
make them three-dimensional so we could light them in particular ways.
Remember Kendal Cronkhite, our production designer's,
early vis-Dev on this, the visual development on this?
Remember how graphic... Beautiful paintings
of very, very graphic trees. We wanted this to look not...
We didn't want it to tip off that we were in Africa.
- More ambiguous. - We wanted to be ambiguous in this.
We hid the horizon line. Kendal kept it moody.
There's Ben ad-libbing, which brought about that
"69 months" gag throughout the film.
When the switchblade came up, too, we wondered if we could get away with it.
We were prepared to do a switchblade comb in case we couldn't.
But a switchblade's fine.
There's so many little details that are great.
You can look at this endlessly, controls in the cockpit
or the air mask that Melman's breathing through. It's in French.
- On the air bag... - The little guy with a beret.
Yeah.
There's even an artist creating Marty's drink. Making sure it looks...
Bumps around and the cubes are floating correctly.
You get nothing for free in these movies. Always an artist behind it.
Bill Winter Safaris. There's our tribute to Bill Winter.
He was our guide in Africa, when we went to Africa.
We took all the creative leads from the film.
Jeffrey Katzenberg said,
"If you're gonna make a movie that takes place in Africa,
"you've got to go and see it." And he happened to have a plane.
He took us there. We had a great trip. Ten days...
- It was amazing. Unbelievable. - and nine reserves.
When Alex was chasing the jeep, the shot seemed a little bit soft focus.
Could we fix that, you guys?
I'm keeping a file of notes we've gotten since the movie's come out.
This is another scene we talked about. Was it too violent?
Was it over the top? What really helps here is the music.
The music makes it so silly and ridiculous
that I don't think anyone's questioned that since it came out.
- Yeah, go ahead. - We did that polka theme for Nana.
We could do covers in polka. That was her music.
We originally had the Star Trek fight music in there.
If you didn't get the joke, seemed really dark.
The thing is, you can beat Nana up, as long as she never gets hurt
and she always wins.
We're just about to reveal the beautiful...
We called it the Jurassic Park shot. Our first reveal of the watering hole.
The is where the art team did an amazing job.
You can really see that they went to Africa and took it all in.
I think this is such a beautiful shot.
Mireille, you always wanted to make sure we did this right.
To make sure we landed the moment here.
- Well, it's like landing in Oz. - Yeah.
We always...
Here's the first sighting of our crowds, which is an incredible task for us.
We didn't know if we could do this.
Our crowd scene did four times the amount of crowds
we've ever done in a movie before.
They did an amazing job, Justin and his team.
On top of the fact that you've got thousands of animals,
you've got animals of all different sizes, some are on two legs,
some are on four. Managing those extras
and making sure they're not crashing into each other is a monumental task.
- Putting them in grass. - Yeah.
Here's a piece where a lot of the animators used to film themselves
doing the line and show it to the director
so they'd have a quick feedback on the acting.
One of the animators, Carlos, did a few of these shots.
Every time I see these shots, I see Carlos acting them out.
It's also a testament to Ben Stiller and just his creativeness,
- ad-libbing all this stuff. - Yeah.
- That's Fergie. - Yeah. Fergie is the hippo.
Little cameo.
So, now, we're not in the '70s any more. So no more sideburns.
Then the coughing that Bernie had done there, he did cough
when he tried to roar. It just seemed fitting for the character.
- So we actually put it in. - We searched and searched
for the right voice for Zuba, Alex's father here.
And it was really tough, because we needed this conflict
between father and son. But we're not making The Great Santini.
We wanted him to still be warm and for audiences to know
that he still loved his son.
Ultimately, you hope that they come together again.
Then when we found Bernie, he was just perfect.
- And Sherri Shepherd, too. - Yeah.
- Yes. - One person that can hold her own.
- She's a great actor. - Yeah. Up against Bernie Mac.
We wanted somebody tough.
We went through so many birthmark signs.
Some were African symbology for "fighting lion,"
and it ended up being Africa and Madagascar.
- Not too subtle. - Kids understand it, I suppose.
- Yeah, not too subtle. - This is one of the areas
the animators really landed. This was John Hill's team.
This sequence, I think, was just seen as the starting
to recognize as Alex, is really powerful and the animators, with very little,
really landed this. It's so emotional.
Even little eye twitches and eye darts really helps out the subtlety.
We end up having a lot of these 360 shots,
which... 360 shots in the movie that are hard to light.
You have to light it from every angle.
But we had a lot of these, and the lighters really
made a great effort to give us what we wanted.
We have Zuba, 20 years later. He's got a little gray streak in his hair.
- You mean Makunga? - Makunga, sorry.
I think this was partly... Didn't Kendal see someone at an airport
who had a gray streak and thought it'd be great for the character?
I saw that guy, too, at the airport the same day.
Rob Koo put the dik-dik in Makunga's hands that he's playing with.
Like in Africa, we just saw dik-diks everywhere.
- What do you call them, Tom? - Africa's Cheetos.
Every animal snacks on them.
Kendal was great. We did this Lawrence of Arabia bit here
and she made sure that it was... Their hats were made
out of the parachute they landed in.
To try and keep the details real, to make the world a little real.
We said, "Chris, we want you to voice every zebra in Africa."
- He just said, "Okay." - It was amazing.
He was so wonderful about it.
Then we had him say the same line over and over again.
He would have to say "It's crack-a-lackin'" 50 times.
"It's crack-a-lackin'. It's crack-a-lackin'."
It was very difficult in the production design of this
to differentiate our characters from the other African animals.
Kendal Cronkhite and Shannon Jeffries did a great job of, like,
de-saturating the other animals, having them different designs.
And to pull our main characters out, which is really hard.
Then the problem of getting the animals to stand out from the background
because they're made to blend in so they don't get eaten.
We learned that Mother Nature knows what she's doing.
We put our lions out in the field of grass, and we couldn't see them.
So we had to bring up their color, knock back the color of the grass
and other tricks to make sure our characters popped.
I think, with the lions, we designed them once,
and Kendal felt strongly that they looked too similar to Alex and Zuba,
that we had to go back in and redo our lions to make them stand out more.
With the zebras, it's the other way.
They all look just like Marty, with little variations.
Originally, these were individual scenes, and then...
It's great that we kind of did the intercutting here.
We really tightened them up so we could make it a party scene.
We had Will on the film
to work with Hans Zimmer to do music. But he also did voices.
He did what he called his "deep, dark, chocolate" voice
for... Moto Moto.
We just knew we had to use him. It was so much fun.
We were even in the studio doing that voice then,
and he said, "I've got an idea for a song." It just hit him.
He pulled a piano bench over
and started banging on it in front of the mike.
Boom, boom, boom.
- Then he started to do that... - Amazing. So wonderful.
He ran back behind the end of the booth and pushed the engineer aside
and started using his software to cut it together.
In 20 minutes, he had the song. Pretty much as it appears in the film.
Also, with Moto Moto it's great that the guys who rigged our virtual puppets,
we wanted to have him to be able to flex his pecs and also flex his butt cheeks.
So they gave the animators the tools to do that.
It's surreal when you're doing your job and saying things like,
"We need more butt cheek flex."
Always, the little hairs on Moto Moto's chest kind of creeped me out.
They used to go a lot lower. We had to...
What is it called, manscaping?
Sacha did this...
It wasn't even in the film, this song.
He said, "It'd be great if Julien sang Private Dancer."
He went off for 10 minutes doing this song and dancing and...
Didn't he do an hour of all different songs?
Yeah, he did many songs.
My favourite was when he was singing Word Up! by Cameo. That was great.
This little sequence, we just thought a nice comedic introduction
to get us in, and then we remembered Sacha's singing
and found a place to put it in.
We could make a film on each of these characters.
That's the hard part of the job.
Losing a lot of stuff to fit the story into the movie.
It was a big challenge on this story 'cause we carry 12 characters,
13 characters from Mad 1, and then all the characters they meet.
So it was a big challenge just to service everybody.
This is the first sequence we did the 3D clouds in.
It took them a long time to get it worked out,
but I think it looks beautiful.
This is fun, with the penguins. They never support the story,
so they can always be comic relief, in a way.
That's why they're so fun to work with.
We just all love Boston so much. We wanted to get them into the film.
What about Nana getting tossed out through the windshield?
Is that a Rob Koo special, or was that...
We had a whole fight sequence here at one point.
This joke was Jeffrey's joke. We showed it to Jeffrey, and he said,
"They gotta stop and say, 'Is she dead? No?' And go back for her."
The sound effect was really important on that.
- When they hit, the beach-ball sound. - Right.
When it was too harsh, you went...
No one likes their grandmas being hit by jeeps.
This is the extension sequence.
We completed the sequence and added this beat
as Nana became a bigger character throughout the movie.
Originally, we had many types of villains.
We had evil hunter-poachers, we had... Who was it?
- German princess. - Goethe Von Ishkabibble.
We needed a blue-eyed lion. So it was all these diabolical plans
to dam the river that feeds the reserve.
- She was a princess from... - Löwenbräuenstein.
- Sounds like a bottle of lager. - It does.
This was great. It was suggested in a story meeting that we just use Nana.
It fell into place because it became more of a cause-and-effect situation
with her and the tourists losing their jeeps.
She's not the villain, either.
It's really more Makunga who's pulling the strings
- and doing the evil stuff. - Let's talk about lighting, here...
It's so beautiful.
I love Bernie in this sequence. He does such a great job.
So much of it was ad-libbed. It makes him so sweet.
This is a great sequence for the family dynamic.
Bernie went into this whole ad-lib about Alex hiding in a box.
He wouldn't come to dinner. We didn't have boxes in Africa,
so we couldn't use it, but it was really cute.
The music here is really beautiful underneath this scene.
It helps with the emotions. Again, Hans Zimmer.
We knew we wanted this nice, warm light in here.
And weren't sure exactly how to achieve it. You never...
Throughout the scene, you never see the source of that light,
until the very end.
Which is another idea that came from the story department.
Kids always like the foofie joke.
They can identify.
That was a great line that Sherri ad-libbed.
As opposed to the first one, you were talking about this before, Mireille,
we wanted the opportunity to flex muscles in animation,
both with broad and the subtle stuff.
This is where the animators came through with bringing that.
We didn't have too much of that in the first movie.
The story alone created opportunities to do this kind of acting.
She had this moment coming up where she kisses him. I love that moment.
- We used to have dialog. - Wasn't this you insisting here,
when you had little children, you used to just stare at...
My kids are older. They still get mad.
I go in when they're sleeping and stare at them.
They're trying to go to sleep, saying, "Go away, Mom. Go away!"
- We should have just kept her there. - Peeking.
We did have her there. Zuba would come get her.
"Come on, let the boy sleep."
We're back to our polka.
That's Philly Joe, who's Stephen.
Stephen is the reader who'd work with the actors every time we're recording.
He's an actor himself and does voices. He was great.
He's Philly Joe, with the video camera,
as well as one of the giraffes, Stephen.
- Named after him. - You're in my light, Stephen.
This is great work that Philippe Gluckman and Scott Peterson
did with lighting and effects to make this gag play.
There's the corporate-ladder people.
There used to be 25 of them.
"What's up with the corporate-ladder people?"
So we had to find more variety with T-shirts.
Mort's so fun. Andy Richter is just like,
he created the "tra-la-la" song.
He's the only one that could get to that falsetto voice
and not have it be really super-annoying.
He's just funny, you know?
But that was a challenge. We had to make sure
we didn't see him in the water.
- Oh, yeah. - We added that scene.
We couldn't show the shark in the water.
It's sort of the "infinite number of monkeys" concept,
which allows you to accomplish anything.
We had jokes about writing works of Shakespeare, eventually,
- but those kind of went away. - Mason, played by Conrad Vernon,
one of the directors of Monsters vs. Aliens and Shrek 2.
I love the fact that most of the animals in the movie talk,
apart from the monkeys. They're actual monkeys. They don't talk.
- And the flamingos. - And the flamingos.
And the dik-diks. The dik-diks talk a little bit.
We call that monkey Mason.
Conrad does his best James Mason impersonation.
- He's the only talking monkey. - Whenever Phil does sign language,
as well, we do our research and bring in people that know sign language
so the animators can actually get it right.
We used to have Alex here with mime makeup. He looked like a mime.
We're just... Since we wanted this emotional scene after he gets banished,
it didn't really... He was hard to take seriously
- with the mime-face makeup. - He looked like a clown.
Yeah, it was a clown.
This was one of the first ideas in the film,
that Alex would go through this rite of passage. We tried many things,
you know, even alluding to circumcision at one point.
Different gags. But it kept coming back to this idea
that Etan Cohen, our writer, came up with,
that Alex would do this dance performance
and actually do West Side Story.
We went away from it a few times, but it kept coming back.
It just seemed so Alex.
His dad was explaining it, he used to say,
"There's not gonna be any snipping, is there?"
Zuba would laugh and say, "Not if you're quick."
We used to have this to make it clear cubs would pick out partners to fight.
One of them fought Grampy, the elderly lion.
- Picked lions they could beat. - The other one, his little brother.
I think Grampy said, "Get off my lawn!"
- Wheezy, I think, was there. - Yeah.
Teetsi was fun. This is great.
We wanted to do these muscles popping out of him.
They went to great lengths to have two models of Teetsi.
One was the lethargic one, and one was fully ripped.
They could make muscles pop out of it, which is really fun.
I like how, despite all his fierceness, he gets kind of,
"Not 'dance' dance." He gets bummed out.
This was great. And, as earlier before,
the animators would act this out and videotape themselves dancing.
We had a choreographer, Yeko, who also broke down
the West Side Story choreography
and was an aid to the animators, as well.
Also, the cubs coming out, a lot of African movement.
African dance, choreographed a whole dance for them.
Even for things like Alex's black eye,
we had to track it through the movie and, you know, different stages.
I'm sure it's the same continuity you'd have in live-action.
But there's three stages for Alex's black eye
that thread throughout the movie.
As well, the fruit hat has three stages of wilting.
Just for the choreography here, with these grandstands, again,
Guillermo Navarro encouraging us to shoot these scenes low-tech
with video cameras and just people around the studio being the actors.
It really helped in our low-tech version of shooting these shots
to choreograph the staging and blocking.
In this one, I remember we went outside and shot it on the stands,
where they had baseball, so we could have steps
and Nol and the team, out there in the cold, shooting it.
Yeah. There's probably 60% of the movie we shot that way.
I just wanted to have H., our editor, cut that together
so we had a version of video of us acting it out.
Yeah.
These Hats of Shame, they have this in some tribes in Africa.
Eric had researched.
When we were unsure of whether we should have Alex wearing a fruit hat
for a third of the movie, it was justified by reality.
They make kids, if they fail the rite of passage,
wear this big, flowery, feathery hat of embarrassment.
We used to try and justify where they had gone, far away from watering hole
in the dik-dik area with dik-diks surrounding them.
But we decided we didn't need to explain it
as much as just get into the scene.
We used to have a lot of dik-dik jokes.
We were afraid people wouldn't know that it was a real animal.
This was one of the sequences
we reworked more than any other sequence.
Right. It was tough. It's the big split between father and son.
- Finding the right tone. - Hans, with this bit,
wanted to be subtle with the music. And had that nice piano beat.
When we were in London scoring,
Eric's son had the opportunity to sit at the piano
- and play those chords. - He was thrilled.
Eric's tearing up now as we're talking about it.
In this sequence, we used to have the ostrich giving birth.
- Melman was delivering an egg. - Twelve-pound omelet.
Schwimmer had a great line. He said,
"Don't worry about the shell. He'll grow out of it."
He also had an assistant, Sandy, who is on the cutting-room floor.
The gum-chewing, clipboard-toting Sandy.
I'd love to know what the elephant did to get his trunk in such a knot.
Melman says he's been naughty. I want to know what that means.
Don't ask.
That was the old magic trick. The knot was not part of his trunk.
It was a model put on there. We had to find a way to get rid of the knot.
The animator pulled it off screen and did the old switcheroo.
This is Cassidy Curtis' sequence. Did a great job with his crew
- to bring out the comedy in Melman. - This is from the first film,
when Marty did his show in the zoo in New York City.
They helped him, too, because I believe they used...
They started with the effects of water that we used in the first movie.
So it gave the effects artists a helping hand there.
Water is extremely difficult for Effects to get it to look right.
This, actually, you wouldn't think of as being a difficult effects sequence.
But between the water and grass... It's not like it's explosions.
It was a really tricky sequence for our effects team.
We had many debates over this shot here
about the water hitting Marty,
'cause that's a really hard contact, when water contacts another character.
And wet characters are very difficult.
Something that's probably easy in live action, but hard in computer animation.
A lot of help from Skywalker Sound.
Mixing a million zebras and trying to make it feel like a huge group.
This is Eric's joke that was always funny. "Folding it here."
Another huge scene.
This took a long time, to choreograph all these monkeys.
If you notice here, that's meant to be toilets that get knocked over.
We move by it so fast, it's hard to catch it.
But a lot of thought went into that joke.
Another great thing, when we come in on the plane,
you see Lunch Monkey underneath the plane, eating his banana.
I love seeing that little guy.
The crowds people would put monkeys everywhere.
They have their own little jokes...
Find Waldo. Where's Waldo?
This was another scene we shot with Guillermo.
A lot of the ideas with these monkeys tearing apart the plane
is sort of their relationships all get torn apart,
- came out of that live-action shoot. - When we started,
it played like talking heads.
It's like, what do we have around the plane?
Monkeys came up, and people pretended to be monkeys,
pulling chairs out from under them. It gave it a little bit of life.
One of the tools that the art department team used...
Before the movie starts, they ask us about emotional highs and lows
going on in the film. This is a moment where things
are going wrong for the characters. Skies are Grey.
Maybe people don't connect that. But it really helps with the film
that when things are down,
you'll see skies are Grey, the color's pulled out.
When things are happy for characters, they're the most colorful scenes.
Kendal and her team will track this and plan sequences around
the emotional beats of the sequence.
It's fun to hear the ripple go through the crowd as they realise,
"Wait a minute. That's Mart... He's not Marty... Oh!"
As Alex is discovering it, the audience is, too.
This is another great scene. Ben and Chris, again in the same room,
played off each other and brought this scene to life.
This is another one where you see
the live-action reference coming from the animator,
- it's Jason Spencer Galsworthy. - It looks like Jason.
It does.
A lot of times, animators will look in a mirror when doing performances,
and as much as you can get Ben Stiller, you can also get the animator in there.
Way in the distance, behind Marty, there's a thousand zebras.
If you watch close, you'll see them, they're grazing, moving around.
It's that little touch, just helps keep it real.
Great scope in this.
This film could have benefited from 3D, in a way.
But we're fortunate not to have to jump through all those hoops.
It is the last 2D movie for DreamWorks.
If you kids run up and touch the screen and feel how smooth it is,
enjoy, because it will soon have 3D effect.
Stereoscopic.
In all these environments, you know,
a lot of the tone and the feel of these spaces
come from our trip to Africa. We really
shared these sunsets, what have you, together.
When we came to the studio,
it was shorthand for us with the creative leads.
"Remember that day, sun was going down on the Masai Mara,
- "trees were silhouette?" - We'd get up to watch the sunrise.
And so it was kind of a real shorthand for us.
King Julien's moved up in the world.
He's riding ostriches instead of flamingos.
Throughout the movie, we track King Julien's apparent rise as king.
You'll notice he's riding a higher class of animal each time.
Sacha ad-libbing this scene. We had something else in here,
and he decided, "Julien would want to whistle."
He probably whistled a dozen songs, too.
"This is Maneater, by Hall & Oates."
He did the entire song, too. So we have that recorded.
"Invade a neighboring country, impose your own ideology," that was all Sacha.
I love this little bit here with Julien embracing Melman's head.
And ignoring him at the same time.
We had so much flamingo trouble.
We used to have many flamingos. They were hot pink.
- It was very distracting. - Your eye kept going to it.
So we had to make Julien and Maurice forefront.
- This is a really beautiful shot. - Yeah.
And this one looks exactly like the color key that was painted.
One of those scenes where you see the original color key,
and it turned out exactly how the art team envisioned it.
That's what's great about the art department, is we...
All these key scenes and shots, they do paintings of...
Very elaborate paintings that set the mood and lighting
that the CG artists then try and emulate.
These scenes, like before, talking about each character
could have their own movie. I always feel like Cedric...
He's a great partner for Julien.
He's clearly the smarter one,
but he loves to get into whatever Julien's into at the moment.
Cedric's great. You go, "Want to sing?" He's like, "Yeah! I'll sing."
Did some great stuff in here.
Again, will.I.am, creating a song for the scene.
This choreography is also derived from African dances
Yeko pulled together for us.
We started this without the choreography, originally, in animation,
and it just wasn't feeling right. So we brought a choreographer in,
and it made it feel more African.
Right. They had a very traditional waltz there.
Through no fault of their own, that's how we were directing them.
It didn't feel right as we were seeing the scenes animated.
We stopped, brought the choreographer in, and she did a great job.
Denis and his team did a great job in this sequence.
More moving camera. This is something we weren't able to do on the first,
because we couldn't render these elaborate camera shots.
This is just another example
of how technology has improved so much
and enabled us to let the camera
be choreographed as well as the characters.
The layout team, lead by Nol Meyer, they're really excited to be able
to move that camera around a lot more than they could on previous films.
This is... Also, in this sequence, at different times
we have Moto Moto animated.
And I think he came across slightly more aggressive than what we wanted.
- Seedy? - Yeah. We started testing him.
People weren't responding well to the character.
We went back and looked at every scene Moto Moto was in and said,
"Are we pushing him in a slightly seedier way?"
We went back in. I guess we adjusted five or six shots...
- We dumbed him up. - We dumbed him up.
He played so much better the next time. It was amazing.
In those few moments where we changed him,
the difference it could make to his overall character.
He comes across like Joey from Friends now.
At the time, he was coming across more macho,
and not quite as dumb, and certainly not as sweet.
- Making Gloria seem more victimized. - Fine-tuning.
We had a love story with Melman and Gloria in the first movie
that we tried to play so many different ways,
but ultimately we could never fit it into the film.
So when we had the chance to do the sequel here,
we found a way to put it in. It's such a great component of the film.
And works with the theme of just being who you are,
whatever the rest of the world might expect you to be.
In the first movie we had boarded...
They did a dance to... It was like the Dirty Dancing?
Yeah. And then Gloria had a baby.
She had been at the breeding program. She had a baby.
Water broke, penguins were washed away.
- My favourite. - It got around and round,
and we had forgotten to tell Jada
that her character was no longer pregnant.
When we were doing the EPK at the end of the movie, she mentioned it.
And Mireille had to update her.
That is a sweet speech you wrote for Melman there.
I really believe he loves her, it's so sweet.
If you look closely, you'll see Makunga's face drawn on that nest.
It's moving around so much, it's hard to catch.
But, again, one of those things we put in,
and sometimes it's hard to read in the movie.
Another huge challenge, to get all these birds to do the right thing here.
And go back into their nest.
This is a plot point that we started with, about the watering hole,
a crisis at the watering hole.
When we went to Africa, there was a big drought.
It confirmed in our minds that this is a legitimate crisis
that could happen to these animals.
The importance of it. We see herds of animals searching for the water.
There was one tiny watering hole near one place that we visited.
Elephants just stood there 24 hours a day and guarded it
so they could have it to themselves.
- Little squeak toy. - Yeah.
It's amazing, with these crowds, they're cycles of animation
that are cleverly designed so that the characters can actually
transition from mood to mood.
When we'd speak with the crowd animators of what we needed here,
it'd be like "confused chatter" to "confused, worried looking"
to "confused silence" to...
They do a great job of keeping animals alive,
making them feel independent of each other,
but still being able to emote.
We were talking, before, about the different villains we had for the film.
At one point, we had Alec Baldwin, early on,
playing a completely different character.
He was playing himself in Africa, hiding out from the PETA folks.
He was tired of PETA...
I think he got a PETA plaque in the mail for his hard work,
and he used it for skeet shooting.
He recruited help to build his hunting lodge with actors.
- It was an acting school. - He tricked actors to build this...
Saying it was an acting school. What was the line about the carpenter?
Yeah, they're building his lodge, complaining about having to build.
"When do we start acting?"
He goes, "Suppose you had to play the part of a carpenter or a painter.
"You'll be well prepared."
That character went away, and, fortunately, we were able
to re-pitch the Makunga character to Alec. He was perfect for that.
Just in case anyone wants to know, there's 4,231 zebras in that shot.
- But we asked for 8,000. - I know.
Also, sound-wise, with all these zebras chattering,
the Skywalker folks had actually taken the dialog
from Chris behind the mic, when just talking to him,
and they used anything they could to fill out the sounds
of thousands of zebras.
So if you listen closely, there might be Chris talking
about his Kill the Messenger tour, or
if he could have a water.
We had a version where Alex doesn't recognise Marty in the crowd,
and just gives such an emotional heartfelt speech
that Marty comes out.
One of the executives, Bill Damaschke,
thought it'd be more powerful if Alex actually recognised Marty.
We tried it and we all agreed.
Marty's turned the other way, so Alex, technically,
is able to pick him out with the butt-bite mark on his butt.
At one point, we even did that gag at the end of the film here,
where as they're walking off to the jungle, we see Alex take a peek
at Marty's butt to make sure he's got the right zebra.
In a way, it undermined the moment here.
We wanted to just make it up and positive and heartfelt,
as these two guys go upriver.
Later, we get the gag in at the end of the film, where we realise,
"He saw the butt mark."
So if you have a big-screen TV or Blu-ray,
you'll see, as Marty's walking off, he doesn't have his bite mark.
It would be confusing here, but later they magically appear.
This is another example of where the computer world will generate
so much of the set and light it.
But it can't do everything. There's too much data.
So these really talented matte painters really kind of
extend the set off into the horizon, or the clouds, if they have to.
They add to where the set ends up.
Sometimes Michael Collery and his team
would take a matte painting and break it into levels
so we could do a camera move on it
and get a little bit of parallax, even though there's not 3D elements.
And make the leaves move within the paintings or clouds.
Chris Rock... We showed him the scene and he thought
it'd be funny if all the zebras were into Alex's hat.
We jumped in the booth and recorded all these hat lines.
Probably the last few weeks of animation.
Notice he's on top of an elephant now.
Because he's getting more powerful in Africa.
This was an animator's idea, that he'd lose his staff here.
Which, in our minds, some dik-dik retrieved and gave to him.
This is a great beat that Sacha came up with.
He should have an argument with himself. He came up with it on the fly.
It lasted about 10 minutes.
Unfortunately, we did have to cut it down to keep the story moving.
Again, with production design, they took a lot of leaves off the trees
to make it feel drier.
They added dust and atmospherics to make it feel drier.
There's hardly any clouds in the sky.
Everything is desaturated to sell the dryness of it.
We went through this with King Julien, same thing we did with Moto Moto.
Walking that line of not wanting to feel like a jerk
because he's gonna sacrifice an animal.
So just going through and making him sweet.
He used to call everyone "twit" and "nincompoop" and seemed a little...
This was a huge challenge for the crowds. All running, chasing and...
I was thinking of the music, how themes are done different ways.
In the... With King Julien,
I remember being so surprised when Hans did Move it, Move it
in an orchestral version.
But it sounds beautiful. The song that's like...
I've got kids. I'm sick of that song.
But when I hear Hans' version of it, it's so beautiful.
All the animals here used to be chanting, "Sacrifice, sacrifice!"
It just felt kind of dark.
Then we changed it to celebrating Melman.
But the lip sync is still "sacrifice," if you look closely.
These are one of the scenes you write and you overwrite them,
and they're two pages long.
When you boil it down, there's only a couple of key lines that sell the point.
We always loved this scene, too, with Makunga coming here.
So we kept having to change the ending of the watering-hole scene,
when it dries up, to make sure we could motivate him coming.
But it was like how to keep that connected.
Sean Mahoney did this shot here.
Great tribute to Alec and his expressions.
This was a Baldwin ad-lib. Funny.
Now, we come to the jungle. Very different than jungles in Madagascar,
which were very colorful, filled with beautiful foliage.
This is the scary jungle.
It's difficult, within the story, to try and find variety
within the landscapes to... This is all set in Africa, and...
The art department did a fantastic job of making you feel
like you come to a new, dynamic area with its own feel and mood
and not get environment fatigue.
I love that Alex still has his hat.
He's left, and he still insists on wearing the Hat of Shame.
- The wilted, stage three hat. - Stage three.
Here, we used to have this scene
where Nana showed them how to hunt with her purse,
and she was beating up a straw zebra.
She was just thrashing it and thrashing it.
She's funnier when she's more benign. It made this reaction even funnier.
This is a reaction to her bashing the zebra.
Only when she's provoked is she violent.
They're doing all these maneuvers to escape spears,
and Ben and Chris were just making up their own maneuvers,
- the Squiggly Squid and... - Etch A Sketch is my favourite.
- Is it in The In-Laws? - The Serpentine.
Serpentine. It started with an homage to The In-Laws.
They took it to a new level.
This was a tricky scene as well. They used to be chanting "jump."
It's a very dark-looking scene.
And Melman's about to kill himself.
So, again, musically, with Hans,
they made it more a celebration of Melman, which kind of made it more...
Less dark.
For a long time, we were gonna use songs here. Didn't we have...
- Jump. - By The Pointer Sisters.
- We had The Ohio Players doing Fire. - Fire.
- Hans shot down Van Halen. - Hans just refused.
"We're not even gonna do that."
This witch-doctor scene, which is Eric, used to be at the end of the movie.
It just felt like such an add-on that we decided to put it in here,
- which meant more. - Now, we realise he's not dying.
The last thing we want him to do, obviously, is throw himself in.
There's that pull-out shot, and the crowds were Justin's group.
He just really went to town.
This was a big challenge for all the departments.
The way this rock breaks away here...
All that's done by hand.
Every crack is pre-scored into the rock so they can pull it apart.
- That was a Schwimmer add. - Really helps.
We thought it'd be funny if Melman was dressed as the bride,
and Gloria's more the groom.
So he has this little bridal veil and orchids and...
It's kind of a reversal.
His lashes seem to go with it.
It's amazing what these actors do.
We go into a studio with just a microphone and nothing else.
We describe the sequence to them
and they imagine all this stuff going on around them.
For Schwimmer, he picked up on the fact
that Gloria's holding him by the horn.
Thinking about that, how would Melman respond?
It comes out of his imagination.
This scene we had with the monkeys striking...
It was before the big Hollywood strikes,
the Writers Guild or the Actors Guild.
Probably a year before those happened.
We worried if we could keep those in, in good taste.
- Hopefully, the actors won't... - Yeah.
But yeah, discussions of all the strikes.
This last photo used to have Skipper's tongue on the hula doll's cheek.
- But it looked a little bit too much. - We had to tone it down.
I love this first reveal of the new plane as it's coming together.
We did so much work on the different stages of the plane. Alex did them all.
In the movie, you get glimpses of it, but a lot of work went into it.
We didn't want to reveal the plane completely, which was the trick of it.
To save it for the third act. For the big moment, the climax.
This sequence looks beautiful, and it's one of the sequences...
Often, what happens on these movies is towards the end, you run out of time
to get them finished and give less time to some departments.
The lighting department had, probably, half the time they're used to.
They somehow pull out beautiful images, and you can't tell at all.
They always pull it together at the end.
These are the Stage 3 tourists that are created.
- All dirty and torn up. - Lord of the Flies tourists.
The Alex performance used to be more of a pastiche act,
where it had a little bit of everything, not just dancing. It had mime,
as Eric called it, the "mimax." And other bits.
But the dance worked so well. Then the music just
pulled it all together, that Hans and Will created.
You think about what the animators added to this, 'cause it was...
It would be funny and it got laughs, but when it got animated,
- it just completely got big laughs. - Yeah.
It really was one of those scenes where it was never gonna work
- until it was completely done. - It became,
- "Who knows how to do The Worm?" - We actually had people who knew.
- "Are there any poppers in the house?" - All the poppers came.
Funny. A talented group.
But, early on, this was always... In the early versions of the story,
in different forms, Alex would save he and his father with some performance.
We're back to the butterfly that we saw little Alex doing at the start.
I love how the father's just off-kilter here.
As he gets in the air, he's doing a great job,
but no, no, no! Panic.
Faceplant.
We never explain why all these African tourists happen to be from New York.
A happy accident.
Some effects artists, instead of ricocheting off the barrel,
had Alex getting shot and blood pouring out of him.
And put it up for us to review at one point.
- It kind of worked, in a way. - It was pretty funny.
We were happy to get a barrel of monkeys into this movie.
We started with that idea and constructed the movie around it.
We went around and around with these telephone lines.
What would happen. The lines change.
So we had to keep finding twisted versions of lines going up the chain.
You can't hear everything
that Skywalker did with the sound with this plane.
They did amazing stuff where they took old engines and opened them up
and dropped microphones into them
and hand-cranked them to get the sound of gears meshing.
It's really cool stuff they came up with.
Of course, there's music and dialog that covers a lot of it.
We used to have Walking on Sunshine be the music in here as a joke.
No one seemed to get the joke.
Hans and his guys were trying all these different songs.
- They hit on Copacabana, which is... - Perfect.
- And Lola got her name. - Lola got her name.
That's what I love about Lola, it makes it so absurd.
It was absurd before,
and when we added Lola, it became even more absurd.
She's so determined.
Throws a gun, got her magic bag. She's gonna take that plane out with her bag.
That was Mireille's joke, the medic and the tape.
This is probably the biggest effects shot, one they were excited to get.
- The breaking water. - Cost hundreds of dollars.
Hundreds. We had to have a collection for that.
We had a different version of this.
Sacha saw it, and thought he could do better.
This brought the whistling back around.
- And... - Reanimated it.
Reanimate it, yeah. John Hill and his team.
We had explored having lots of cutaways to Mort and this shark
traveling through the African landscape.
It just became too much film for us.
A bus? Didn't he hijack a bus at some point?
There it was, the only death in the movie. The shark.
The gods needed a sacrifice.
Usually, animated films kill off parents. We just killed off a shark.
Another beat. We had lots of, "You did it. I did.
"I did it 50%. You did it 60%."
Great Sacha beat that went on for about five minutes.
"The eagle has landed."
We used about one second of it in the end.
Now the fish. It's gonna be okay.
We went around and around on how to take care of Makunga here.
We had a version where Zuba took him out,
where Alex took him out with a dance kick.
We thought it would kind of make closure to Nana's story
- if she was the one who took him out. - Less expected.
Yeah.
We were gonna have a beat, later on at the end of the credits,
where Nana would be back in New York, and she'd see tourists come in
to JFK, and there's Makunga in a cat carrier.
I like their expressions in that shot.
This is a great bit. Just pitching the scene to Alec,
saying, "Alex hands you a purse."
He thought he should really admire it, and ad-libbed this hiking line.
We had to make the bag with an adjustable strap because he said that.
- We liked it so much. - We had to change it.
This scene actually went on about three times as long as it ended up.
It felt a little brutal. She did a lot more to him than just that.
We had fun thinking of all the Catholic-schoolboy things
the nuns used to do to you at school.
We had a list of all those things.
Our board artists love those challenges.
Again, we were... The animals, we wanted them to get in the water.
Water's really expensive, so you can't touch it.
Because it's a great deal of effects work there.
At the end, they said... They made an effort to make that happen,
that the animals could go in the water.
- Our little misdirect here. - Yeah.
I always liked, "For better, please." Like there's a choice.
Tom's always wanted to marry a hula doll, so this was his dream.
- Closest thing he could achieve to it. - Yep.
I also like that we have eight-track tape players in this movie.
Kids'll see that, "What's that new music technology? I gotta get one of those."
I love the idea of the penguins being in Monte Carlo.
This is one of the last scenes we recorded with Bernie, too.
There was a couple of lines we didn't get with him
before he passed, unfortunately.
We reviewed a lot of the material he'd done, sequences that were cut,
and it was great listening to all that again.
Just brought back many great memories of him.
He did this little bit.
Eric found this bit with him doing a little song and dance.
"I got you, son!" This bit here, which was great.
It worked better than any line we would've written.
These are the last shots that were done in the film.
It's rare in a film, where that would ever happen.
You jump around so much.
There's our little butt bite.
Off they go.
We always joked about... Eric wanted to have the butterfly
come in here at the end, at the beginning.
Thought it'd be funny to see it, then go to another
lion father playing with his cub. It was all the butterfly's fault.
Just to try and do something interesting.
Producers brought on Jamie Caliri at Duck Studios
to create something unique for the credits.
So they're not just a scroll.
It was fun to have something completely different,
as far away from 3D as we could. He did a great job.
These are actually practical paper sculptures that they did.
Just absolutely beautiful.
And we opted to put the credits here, which the cast was great about.
So we could just get right into our story, right away,
and not have a big intro.
When you watch these credits,
it's a huge long list, they may be boring,
but these are the people we work with,
who we represent when we make movies.
There's 400-plus people at the studio, and artists that pitch in
to make these movies.
So really enjoy the credits and know that everyone had a great deal
to do with this movie.
Thanks, everybody. Three and a half years to make this movie.
An incredible timeline. It was made with a lot of grit,
- spit and a whole lot of duct tape. - Lot of laughs and love.
- And tears. - And tears. And blood.
- And blood. - We hope you enjoy it.