‘Madagascar’ characters show a lot of bounce

“Madagascar,” which opens in theaters today, may seem thoroughly modern at first glance.

It’s focused on New York City zoo animals forced to adapt to life in the wild and features the voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer and Jada Pinkett Smith.

But while filmmakers embraced the benefits of computer animation, they wanted “Madagascar” to have a classic feel.

“We really looked at the cartoons of our youth, the ‘60s and in some cases the ‘50s,” says production designer Kendal Cronkhite. “(We) pulled from Tex Avery and Chuck Jones and Hanna-Barbera.”

That meant abandoning the realistic animation style PDI/DreamWorks used for “Shrek” and “Shrek 2” and embracing a broader, cartoonier feel.

“We wanted stuff to be big,” says Rex Grignon, head of character animation. “We didn’t want it to feel stiff.

“We wanted the animation to feel very loose and the characters to feel very mobile and active.”

To create that feel, animators used an animation technique known as squash-and-stretch. In short, they would occasionally take characters or objects and drastically changed their structures, giving them a bouncy, pliable feel.

“If you have a playground ball and it hits the ground, it squashes out,” says director Tom McGrath. “You don’t really see it when you’re bouncing a ball, but if you took a photo, you would see that it squashes out, and when it bounces up, it actually stretches out.”

To some degree, squash-and-stretch animation is already used in computer-generated features, but co-director Eric Darnell and McGrath wanted to push the limit. And that required heavy duty programming.

Because computer-animated characters are modeled digitally, they are forced to follow certain rules, and PDI/DreamWorks’ previous characters were based on actual human and animal anatomy. Because of that, a long stretch could break a model in two.

As a remedy, “Madagascar” programmers developed models that could move like rubber bands.

“If the computer doesn’t know how to do it, we’ll figure out a way,” Cronkhite says. “We’ll build the tools necessary to make it happen, if possible.

“So, we kind of take a leap of faith a little bit in the beginning.”

With “Madagascar,” the leap paid off, as animators eventually received characters that could be molded like clay.

“With Alex (the lion), we can take his head and squish him right down to his crotch, if he’s jumping off some high embankment,” Grignon says. “You only do it momentarily, for the briefest amount of time, but believe me you feel the difference. If you didn’t do that, it just starts feeling very stiff.”

Whether audiences will notice is yet to be seen, but Grignon is cautiously optimistic about “Madagascar’s” future.

And having worked as an animator on the original “Toy Story,” he knows a thing or two about successful films.

“This feels very similar to the feeling on ‘Toy Story,’ where everybody working on it was kind of like, ‘I think this is really great,’ ” he says.

“But as odd as it sounds now, before ‘Toy Story’ was released, there was no certainty that it was going to fly. There were a lot of concerns that people wouldn’t be able to watch computer animation for an hour and a half.”