Special Report From Rhett Wickham: Honing the Range (Part Two)
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JOHN SANFORD
We have to say a shout out to Mike Surrey. Originally Nik Ranieri was going to do the horse character and then Nik got pulled on to "Chicken Little", they wanted to get him into CG training right away, and Mike was available and we got very excited by that because we both like Mike’s work, a lot. But Mike was a little bit dodgy about it at first because he wasn’t sure if he would be interested in animating a horse, that’s what he said, and we said ‘Well why don’t you take a couple of weeks and play around with the idea and just come back to us with whatever you like.’ It’s that sort of the Baloo the bear sort of thing - Baloo doesn’t have any distinctive markings - it’s almost a generic character. Yet it’s such a specific bear that you know it when you see him and Mike did the same thing with Buck.

RHETT WICKHAM
He’s just such a great, great talent and funny guy period.

WILL FINN
Great sense of humor, great acting.

RW
Where did he go off to?

FINN
Mike?

SANFORD
He’s at DreamWorks

FINN
Yeah, he slipped through the cracks.

RW
And Shawn (Keller) did, too, didn’t he?

SANFORD
Yeah, Shawn’s another one of our favorites. Mike and Shawn.

FINN
Because you know the great struggle of this is that we’re making a 2-D movie in an age when everybody’s in love with CGI, and we gathered all the animators and said ‘We have some CG in this movie, and we love CG it’s fine, but one of the things CG still struggles with is that fluid, expressive, ever changing model. And John and I both have the same attitude about model, it should be as flexible as possible and the only rule of thumb is that if it looks like the character it’s on model and if it doesn’t then it isn’t. Not that a single model sheet becomes a rubber stamp for a character.

SANFORD
That’s like a prescription for generic acting.

FINN
Yeah.

SANFORD
And Mike took that and ran with it, and did some great, just some of the funniest facial expressions.

FINN
Insane posing on the horse’s anatomy, and things that just weren’t real, you know? It was just like..let’s not pretend we’re not in a 2-D cartoon, let’s get all over that and remind the audiences of why it is they love that to begin with. And we do that wherever we can with the cows, with the rabbit, with everybody. And they really embraced it. Mike in particular, but everybody tried to go as nuts as they possibly could whenever they could.

RW
Well is there anyone more manic than Shawn?

FINN
Shawn was more in tune with this character.