No movie studio has ever invested this much time and money on a ground-breaking, "photo-realistic"fantasy tale based upon the late Cretaceous.

Who would think that the Pillsbury doughboy, Jack Skellington and the talking dinosaurs in We're Back  would lead two young, innocent guys to give up more than five years of their lives to make the world's most incredible dino movie?

In an amazing, three-way, cross country conversation carried off without the benefit of cellular phones, D.I.G. discovered what it's like to go five years with no vacations just to create one of the kewlest things anyone has ever seen.

Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette: How did the story alter in the period of time that you worked on it?

Ralph Zontag: When we started this picture 5 ½ years ago, a lot of time had already been put into the original story. We had the nucleus of a story line about dinosaurs, extinction, and the beginning of mammals. We kept a couple of names but really we started from scratch. Suri was one of the Lemurs from original. The idea of having primitive mammal and dinos interact and the time period were retained, too.

The initial idea was an all stop-motion film that would be as totally realistic as you could achieve with that method. They wanted to create a world of dinosaurs with all the violence. We needed something to work into the Disney way of thinking without damaging the studio’s ideas of the film to be made.

Eric Leighton. When we came on we wanted to maintain the realistic feeling. We were never interested in a G rated film. As soon as you’ve gone to photorealism you can’t make that world a “cakewalk.”

D.I.G. Dialogue must have been a difficult problem. The original story had no dialogue at all.

E.L. We had a hard time getting into the dialogue We tried a “voice-over” narration approach and did a test on a different sort of voice over using the Homeward Bound approach where the audience hears the thoughts of the animals, but their lips don’t move.

R.Z. We threw out “thoughts” and narration because it would make it difficult to tell a story and get into the characters' heads.  You want to have the richness and personality of the characters.

People referenced a film made about 15 years ago called “The Bear” That film was a story, but it was shot with real animals and it had no dialogue. We didn’t do “The Bear” because it was proven to us in earlier tests you could not really connect with things coming out of that character’s head. To give the viewer real empathy with the character you needed dialogue. This is especially true when you are dealing with mythic, “heroic” types of characters.

R.Z.  It is ultimately a huge, huge risk. If you are going to put this much budget into a film, you want it to have a better chance of survival at the box-office. You have to make enough money to justify the film.

E.L.  The “no dialogue” idea was conceptually compelling, but I felt myself detached from it. I wanted to be inside the character's head. I didn’t want just motion, but character, too.

The opening of the film is about as long as you can go with a totally naturalistic approach and still reach a wide audience.

D.I.G. How about the songs?

E.L Songs were discussed only as a joke.

D.I.G. Did having two directors create any particular strengths or problems in your working relationship?

E.L  It worked out fairly well. I was in charge of the animation crew. Ralph (who previously directed We're Back: A Dinosaurs Story) was in charge of story. 

Since my background was in puppet stuff, I was used to the types of problems that we would run into. I worked on Nightmare Before Christmas, the Pillsbury Doughboy and lots of other replacement animation and stop motion. Traditional 2D (two-dimensional or flat) cel animation isn’t the same. In 2D you can “squash and stretch,” you can exaggerate speed.  Morphing gags are okay to exaggerate expressions that you can’t get away within a photorealistic world.  I was used to doing a lot of effects stuff and nightmare stuff with three-dimensional objects.

D.I.G. Did your stop-motion experience carry over into working with this new “photo-realistic” CG animation system? Animators talk about their characters “acting” Did this apply here, too? 

E.L You had to be able to get your “acting” across in a way that was also physically believable. You have to build an armature for a puppet and also for a computer. My approach to stop motion is very analytical. On an exposure sheet (in studio jargon: an X sheet where all of the dialogue is broken down a syllable at a time) I filled out and physicallized them. I got the performance I wanted by acting it out myself and timing my movements with a stopwatch. Then I analyzed every  part of this movement. Like my hips for example. I would wiggle them and then think: How much do my hips go side to side? I created curves in the computer based on the dynamic of the actual movement.  Would it make a nice smooth S curve?  A dinosaur’s step would be like a bouncing ball.  That’s exactly what you do with computer animation. It’s done with a computer tool called a Curve Editor.