Tagline: What happens in the barn stays in the barn.
Down on the farm, the farmer thinks he’s in charge, keeping all the animals safe and sound. But when the farmer is out of sight, the lookout sheep shouts “Clear!” and all of the barnyard animals spring up on two legs, walk, talk, watch TV, and orchestrate outrageous practical jokes.
For Otis the cow, that last one is the most important. He and his best friends – Pip the mouse, Freddy the ferret, Peck the rooster, and Pig the pig – are world-class pranksters and always in the mood for a laugh. Otis is in a state of arrested development and quite happy that way.
Otis’s dad, Ben, is the cow who makes sure the farm is running on all cylinders. Each morning, Ben leads a meeting to take care of farm business and to issue warnings about their common enemy, the coyotes. (It’s a position that Ben takes seriously: “As long as I’m still kickin’,” he says, “no animal will be harmed inside that fence!”) Ben wants Otis to grow up and take responsibility. Much to Ben’s chagrin, Otis’s main project comes to life every evening. As soon as the Farmer hits lights out, the barn is transformed into Party Central. On this night, there’s even a pretty new cow, Daisy – Otis hams it up for her, and she can’t help but be attracted to his fun-loving personality.
That world is not for Ben. He’s outside, guarding the fence and protecting the farm from the coyotes. When Otis explains to Ben that being on watch isn’t “his thing.” Ben responds: “Otis, a strong man stands up for himself, a stronger man stands up for others.”
When Ben is no longer able to lead, Otis tries to keep order but the role of leader does not come as naturally for him. Without Ben to keep everyone in line, absolute mayhem breaks loose and it isn’t long before the farmer begins to get to the bottom of the animals’ secret… and the scheming coyotes begin to think that the farm could be theirs for the taking.
More than two hundred artists and technicians labored for nearly four years to produce “Barnyard” at Oedekerk’s Omation Studios, a state-of-the-art facility in San Clemente, California. The result is a film that pushes the boundaries of computer-generated 3D animation to a new level — it is certain to be admired as much for its technical achievements as it is enjoyed by appreciative, laughing audiences.
About the Film
When Nickelodeon began looking for a follow up to its Academy Award-nominated CGI film “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius,” they only had to look at Steve Oedekerk’s bulletin board, where Oedekerk had posted a lineup of characters from “Barnyard.” “The characters were irreverent and fun, but would also be able to tell a powerful coming-of-age story dealing with real family dynamics and issues,” said Nick Movies executive vice president Julia Pistor. “We knew it would be a perfect fit.”
With a long history of championing creator-driven animation on both the big and small screen, Nickelodeon contracted Oedekerk’s Omation Studios to facilitate production of the feature film, following the same successful production model it had done for both “Rugrats” movies, “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie,” and “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.” This model would allow Nickelodeon to stay nimble and on the cutting edge of new CGI technology, while ensuring that the creators’ original vision for the film would stay in tact. It has also proven to be an efficient business model for feature film animation production that other studios have come to emulate.
The idea for “Barnyard” was born nearly two decades ago, well before Steve Oedekerk had made his mark in show business. “I was at a friend’s house and his dog was looking at me,” he remembers. “And everywhere I went, it just kept looking at me. Since I am overtly visual I had this image of me leaving the room and the dog standing up on two legs and saying, `Man, it’s about time that dude left.’ And he strolls over to the cat and they go back to playing poker. It was just this funny little thought but it stuck with me. And it wasn’t too long before I thought, `Boy, that could really make a cool movie.’”
Years passed and Oedekerk became one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood; he had even begun directing his own hit films. But his idea about this alternate universe of animals never left his imagination. And then, one day, he saw one of the characters he had been dreaming of. In an art gallery in Laguna Beach, California, Oedekerk spotted a comic, life-sized sculpture of a cow – standing on two legs. “It was full size,” he says. “As big as me!” Oedekerk was a little stunned to see this image that had before existed only in his head and he bought it on the spot.
“Barnyard” is not Oedekerk’s first foray into animation. He created and executive produced “Santa vs. The Snowman 3D,” and produced and co-wrote the screenplay for “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius,” which was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Animated Feature. But “Barnyard” is the first animated film that he has directed himself. After having helmed several live-action films, the animated experience was both daunting and inspiring.
“Directing live-action, you are working with the actors, basically setting up for a moment,” Oedekerk says. “From the time you shoot it that’s it, you have it, and then you go back to edit this thing that happened in this one minute of time on film. In animation, you’re building that minute for months, and in some cases years — the team of animators is working on the characters to the point of raising an eyebrow a little bit higher, nine months into the beginning of that shot. Directing an animated film is a combination of every exciting thing about creating every bit of minutia, and the horror of having to create every bit of minutia all rolled into one. If you like doing that kind of thing, it can drive you crazy as there are nearly endless creative opportunities – what do I want the trees to look like? What do I want the clouds to look like? It’s cool because you can craft everything to support the scene, and to support the emotional moment that’s going on.”
Those emotional moments form the heart of the film. “Otis is a character who was taken in by Ben. At the end of the movie he ends up doing the same thing for a young calf. This story is very personal to me because my sister and I are adopted; there’s an underlying theme about how great adoption is.”
In a movie filled with outrageous humor and surreal sight gags, it is telling that Oedekerk’s favorite scene is the warm moment when Ben and Otis, father and son, relax on a hillside and just chat. “Yeah,” he admits, “I’m kind of a softie.”
The writer/director/producer is also excited about the wide range of tones in the film. “It covers a pretty wide terrain of wacky funny to serious,” Oedekerk says. “The bad guy’s a pretty bad guy – an authentically scary dude. There’s definitely an adult depth to our story. Beneath the partying animals is a very heartfelt, live action-style storyline, a simple story about a guy and his dad and the family around them, and whether he’s going to step up and accept responsibility or be a goof-off his whole life. Come to think of it, that’s very much like my life growing up.”
About the Characters
The lead role is Otis, the fun-loving “party cow” who spends all his time secretly indulging in all things human, from riding around in cars to watching TV to playing practical jokes on the farmer. Sure, he’s rebellious and immature and has no sense of responsibility – who needs that when you can spend your life singing and dancing?
Oedekerk’s first and only choice to play Otis was Kevin James. “I knew he was gonna be a movie star from when I first saw him on `The King of Queens,’” Oedekerk says. “What I love about Kevin is he has this Jackie Gleason sensibility – he’s so funny when he’s frustrated. Otis ends up dealing with a lot of things he doesn’t want to deal with; his Dad’s always trying to get him to do stuff he doesn’t want to do. Getting the comedy to come from this frustration was essential and Kevin’s great at that.
“I’m a huge Steve Oedekerk fan,” says James. “He wrote a really funny script, just like he did with `Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls’ and `Bruce Almighty.’ I’d never done animation before, and it was something I wanted to try.”
In addition to the outrageous comedy that is Oedekerk’s trademark, James was also attracted to the heart and emotion in the role. “There are a ton of pranks in this movie – the cows all go crazy together and do whatever frat cows would do, but they also have to come together, accept responsibility in life, step up to the plate and be a man. Or cow. Whatever.”
James went whole hog learning his role. “I’m a method cow,” he says. “I’d graze for hours before a recording session.”
For the role of Daisy, the sensible and caring cow who provides Otis with the inspiration and trust he needs to become the leader of the barnyard, Oedekerk cast his friend Courteney Cox, best known for her role on the mega-hit TV show “Friends.” He says, “For the role of Daisy, I wanted an actress who the audience could fall in love with instantly. Courteney definitely has that quality. Daisy is the girl next door, very authentic and sweet, a good soul,” says Oedekerk. “It can be challenging playing pure goodness. In order to give dimension, you have to go to a very vulnerable place. Courteney did an awesome job.”
“Steve’s a friend of mine – he’s such a talented guy that I was really excited about doing this movie,” says Cox. “For Steve, this is real life – he writes about the things that kids go through and witness. For him, it’s not an imaginary world – it’s real.”
The actress says her role is “pure sugar – Daisy is so sweet. I’m kind of a sarcastic person, so it was interesting for me.”
Wanda Sykes plays Daisy’s best friend, Bessy, a cow with an acid tongue and no-nonsense `tude. “Bessy is all attitude,” says Sykes. “She tells it like it is. Still, even though she’s got a tough exterior, she’s got a big heart. She’s very protective of Daisy, keeping an eye on her and making sure she doesn’t get mixed up with the wrong crowd.”
“Wanda is a walking comedy machine,” Oedekerk says. “If she has a funny line, she hits it out of the park. If the line ain’t funny, Wanda’s still coming off great. I just think she can pretty much do anything that she wants to do.”
Veteran actor Sam Elliott plays Ben, the well-liked, respected, and organized leader of the barnyard… and also the loving but somewhat beleaguered father of Otis. Responsible where his son is juvenile, out on watch while the boy is partying, Ben loves his son deeply for who he is but wishes he’d learn to grow up a little.
Oedekerk says, “I think one of the most alarming moments I had on the feature was when we were recording Sam. There’s this one line in the film where Ben walks in on Dag, the evil coyote in the chicken coop, and he just goes, `Put the hen down, Dag.’ Everybody in the sound booth simultaneously went, `Whoa!’ He’s an amazing actor and an amazing person. He brings so much to the table in terms of his performance.”
Miles the mule is, according to Oedekerk, “the soul of the piece. Miles becomes Otis’s guide after Ben’s gone,” Oedekerk says. Ben’s right-hand man and best friend, Miles is the voice of wisdom. Due to his old age and experience, he sees and understands more than the rest of the animals. (At the same time, he’s not above boogieing when it’s party time.)
“Danny Glover was my number one choice for Miles,” Oedekerk continues. “I could already hear him in my head when I was writing. “He came in and effortlessly knocked down the character as I pictured him. There was perfect symmetry between what I wrote and Danny’s performance.”
Andie MacDowell plays Etta, the matriarch of the hens in the barnyard. She is the Coop Sergeant, the wise old hen who takes care of the chicks and teaches them her ways. Maternal and intuitive, she’s one of the first to realize that Otis is troubled, but never discusses it, realizing that the cow needs time to work things out on his own.
“I love Andie’s voice,” says Oedekerk. “She has such an authentic nature to her; I get a wonderful feeling every time I hear her.”
MacDowell was attracted to the role by the chance to please her family. “My kids will think it’s a lot of fun to go to an animated movie and see their mom as the mother hen,” says MacDowell. “They think I’m a mother hen in real life, so they’ll think that’s ridiculously funny.”
The actress shed her natural Southern accent for the role. “I wanted to sound like an old-fashioned, storybook mother hen,” she says. “The voice came naturally to me – I just didn’t think she should sound Southern.”
Otis’s best friends rival him in their ability to goof around, play tricks, and have a good time. Pip the mouse (voiced by Jeff Garcia) is Otis’s small and carefree best bud. This little guy with a big voice is outspoken and opinionated, always throwing in his two cents on every topic. The neurotic Freddy the ferret (voiced by Cam Clarke) is not the brightest animal in the barnyard, but he’s got good reason to be a little mixed-up: he’s just trying to keep down his natural desire to eat his best friend, Peck the rooster (voiced by Rob Paulsen). Peck is soft-spoken, level-headed, good-hearted – you almost wonder how he ended up with these jokers. The last member of the quintet is Pig (voiced by Tino Insana). All Pig’s ever wanted to do is eat and party in mud and slop. The good news for Pig is that he’s a pig – so that’s exactly what he gets to do all day long. Pig is the most well-adjusted animal in the barnyard.
The most mysterious animal in the barnyard is Wild Mike. If music’s playing, he’s out of control – Wild Mike is the party animal of all party animals. A tangle of hair and arms and legs and who knows what else. “You can’t quite tell what kind of animal Wild Mike is,” says Oedekerk, “and that was really the goal. Right now, I’m the only one that knows; everyone else will have to wait for the `Barnyard’ series on Nickelodeon. And he’s really Otis’s weak spot – when Wild Mike starts dancing, Otis cannot hold still. He has to dance with Wild Mike.”
For the voice of one particularly obnoxious character, the whiny, bad-tempered, cow-tipping little creep known as Snotty Boy, Oedekerk had to look a little closer to home: Oedekerk supplies the voice (not only for Snotty Boy, but several characters).
“Yeah,” he says ruefully, “with Snotty Boy it’s really a question of `Who could be that annoying?’ I realized no one exists that’s that hateable so I had to do it myself. That’s sadly, sadly what that came down to.”
About the Production
Once the voices were recorded, the animation process could begin in earnest. Even though the film would eventually be animated using computers, it started off in much the same way as conventional 2D animation – with hand-drawn story boards and character designs. The storyboard is then filmed and married to the recorded voices so that the filmmakers can get a rough idea of how each sequence will play. “It’s really more like a flip book,” Oedekerk says. “There’s no animation. Between those two elements – the really rough visuals created by very talented story board artists, and the voice cast – that’s the animator’s guide to starting to build the physical performance.”
Sometimes the voice actors are videotaped in the recording booth and the animators can look to their expressions and gestures for clues to their animated counterparts. And sometimes the animators videotape themselves.
“All animators are actors,” says animation supervisor T. J. Sullivan. “We’ll get a shot, we’ll go through it, think about it a little bit, listen to the audio for a while and then draw it, get an idea of how you want to block the scene before actually going in to animate. Or if you can actually act it out, you do it in front of a video camera.”
Todd Grimes, another animation supervisor, adds, “You might see something in your face that you wouldn’t have thought about, little subtle things to put in the animation.”
Performance is so essential to the art of animation that Lead Animation Supervisor David Andrews considers his job primarily “to be an acting coach to the animators. Many were a lot of young animators, straight out of school. I coached them on their acting so that they would make acting choices that would support the characters. We had some women on our team so that helped with our female characters. But we involved some men, too, doing female acting, too. That was pretty funny. But it was all about keeping Steve O.’s vision of the story through the characters.”
Creating those characters posed many challenges. For one thing, four-legged animals aren’t built to walk on two legs. Trying to make them do so created some peculiar design problems. David Andrews recalls, “They’re walking on their toes, because they’re cows. You know how the heel of a cow’s leg or a dog’s leg is one third up from the ground? So they had to walk on their toes. You could fake a little heel and toe with the hoof but with that anatomy it looked odd. The challenge is always to get the illusion of weight on a large character like that. Because it’s a 3D world, they look more rounded and dimensional so when you cheat the weight to do cartoony stuff, you have to sort of sneak that in. You’re allowed a lot of leeway in comedy – you can break the laws of physics but you have to do it carefully.”
Visually, many of the characters underwent transformations over the course of the production. Some of these involved simply tweaking the characteristics that were already in place. Others required total overhauls. On his journey from a statue in an art gallery to a living, breathing character on film, Otis was altered in many but subtle ways.
“Otis had to be right,” says David Andrews, “so he took a little while to come out of the pipe. Does he have a crest on the top of his skull or does he have a flattop? Are his nostrils sunken in or are they flush with the tip of the nose? What does the contour of the side of his body from his ribs to his hips look like? It’s a gentle S-curve and it’s gotta be the right S-curve.”
Dimitri Joannides, Head of Look Development, Texture Department and Marketing Art, adds, “There’s just so many versions of everything. If you look at the spots on Otis, you go `Oh, it’s Otis,’ but we experimented with thirty to forty different patterns. I remember sitting with Steve on a palette table very late at night just putting out all these different possibilities. And there’s a little flower designed cow spot on Daisy that I worked on. I could show you many different versions. Finally, the right one is just obvious.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to rework it a few times, just to get the right feel out of it,” says T.J. Sullivan. “There’s something you can’t put your finger on. You try a few things, brainstorm with the guys, and figure it out.”
The other challenging character was Wild Mike. “Steve had a clear picture in his head of what he wanted, and it was just trying to find the right look,” says Sullivan.
“Wild Mike is kind of our Yoda,” says Dimitri Joannides. “I’ve studied a lot of designs, and `Star Wars’ went through thirty or forty versions of Yoda. I’d say we’ve given them a run for their money. It started with little sketches Steve did… I’ve kept them all. From start to final model, there were so many different ways it could have gone – his body, his skin, looking amphibian, covered in hair. He’s been great, because I think in the end he’s designed the way he should be. He’s crazy.”
Todd Grimes adds, “Steve wanted the film to show that there are many animals that live on a farm. He didn’t want scenes that were sparse in terms of characters.” As a result, some 180 characters are seen in the film.
Indeed, as David Andrews points out, it’s a rare scene that features only one or two animals. “Sidekicks are in a lot of shots,” he says. “For example, Pip, the mouse, rides around on Otis’s shoulder. It makes it a lot of fun because you always see them together. Otis’s friends are also around often.” And there are some scenes, such as the “nightclub” in the barn, in which nearly all the characters in the film are onscreen at the same time.
Sounds simple enough – but in practice, the technical team had to be on top of their game to achieve these artistic demands. According to Jason Barlow, Lead Technical Supervisor, his team was astounded by “the sheer number of characters that we had to maintain on any given day – support, rebuild, fix. Not to mention the hair/fur requirement – we had over 120 characters with hair or fur of some sort: tails, manes, pretty much every instance of hair that you could think of.”
As animation is completed, one of the final stages is to add lighting. It might be assumed that the lighting effects are simply a part of the artistic process, as it is in painting or conventional 2D animation. But Connon Carey, the lead lighting and digital intermediate supervisor, points out that lighting 3D animation is just like lighting a live action film. He says, “You have a virtual set and it’s lit just like a real place. The same principles that apply in real world lighting apply in computer animation lighting. Lighting something from the front is going to make it appear flatter than lighting something from ¾ to the side. We’ll cheat the lighting, placing it in certain areas so the characters will pop a little, be more prominent. We force the viewer’s attention to where we want it to be with the lights. You don’t want characters blending into the background – our job in any given sequence is to make sure the lighting and the shadows fit the mood of what the director’s intention is.”
And once the movie looks right, it’s time to pay special attention to the way it sounds. In addition to the musical score by John Debney, the many songs that pepper the soundtrack were carefully chosen by Oedekerk early on in the process. “It’s such a great, eclectic use of music,” says executive producer Aaron Parry. “From Aerosmith to the North Mississippi All-stars to Peter Gabriel. It’s rare that a song score truly supports what’s up on the screen and really helps plunge you deep into the world of the movie. Plus, we want the audience to feel like they’re going to a party. I think kids really get into it.”
One song performance that the kids’ parents will find intriguing is a rendition of “Won’t Back Down” (written by Tom Petty and Jeffrey Lynne), performed by Sam Elliott. “We knew we wanted that song, as it really exemplified Ben’s character. I mentioned I wanted to have Sam sing the song himself and remember being immediately asked, `Do you think he’d do it? Does he sing?’ and I said, `I hope so, let’s ask him.’ Then Sam came in and really blew everyone away, it’s like he’d been hiding this secret singing career on the side.”
“Music is very foundational in the barnyard,” says Oedekerk. “It’s not a musical per se, but I did want animals to be playing music and performing. For me, it’s a throwback to the classic Merrie Melodies and Silly Symphony cartoons. I always loved those and this is kind of my tribute to them.”
These production notes provided by Paramount Pictures.
Barnyard: The Original Party Animals
Starring: Courteney Cox Arquette, Sam Elliott, Danny Glover, Kevin James, Andie MacDowell, Wanda Sykes
Directed by: Steve Oedekerk
Screenplay by: Steve Oedekerk
Release Date: August 4th, 2006
MPAA Rating: PG for some mild peril and rude humor.
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $72,637,803 (62.4%)
Foreign: $43,839,084 (37.6%)
Total: $116,476,887 (Worldwide)