One of the most important advancements was in the application of what is known as “squash and stretch,” a visual cue most associated with the classic Chuck Jones and Tex Avery cartoons. In cartoon terms, it is when an animator deforms an object, squashing it down or stretching it out, usually to convey motion or impact. An invaluable technique in the hands of traditional animators, squash and stretch was much harder to achieve in any significant way on a computer because as an object stretched, it would simply snap apart.
Since “Shark Tale” is the first CG film to be produced entirely at DreamWorks’ Glendale campus, most of the animators had been traditional 2D animators who were trading in their pencils for a mouse for the first time. The comedy of “Shark Tale,” coupled with the fact that the characters had the flexibility of…well…fish, demanded that the animators find a way to incorporate squash and stretch.
Bergeron expounds, “It’s very easy to deform a figure with a pencil stroke, but in a computer, it’s hell because the figure just breaks. So in the beginning, we did a pencil test to show the technicians what we wanted and I asked them, ‘Can we do that?’ They said, ‘Well, let’s try it,’ and they did better than try. It worked great.”
Janet Healy continues, “We built a system of controls that enabled the animators to bend and stretch the faces and bodies in any direction and as far as they wanted without losing the cohesiveness of the figure. Giving them that ability allowed for more snappy, pose-driven animation. It meant they could get the kind of physical performances you see in ‘Shark Tale,’ which I think added to the comedy.”
The use of squash and stretch can be seen throughout “Shark Tale,” but it is perhaps most consistently seen in the movement of the tentacled jellyfish, Ernie and Bernie, especially when they reach out to “touch” someone. Rob Letterman states, “Ernie and Bernie are two pranksters who love to tease and torture Oscar, but it was the animators they truly tortured, because the jellyfish were the hardest to animate.”
Lignini agrees, “Ernie and Bernie have these tentacles—their dreadlocks—that are constantly in motion, and we had to keep them from intersecting. In CG, everything is virtual, so things don’t stop when they meet; they continue on and cross into one another, so we had to work to take care of that.”
A different kind of challenge surfaced with regard to animating somewhat anthropomorphic fish characters who shifted in an instant from swimming like fish to sitting or standing like humans and vice versa.
Kevin Ochs attests, “One of the biggest challenges was animating characters who are sitting or standing and acting much like humans, and then, in a split second, swimming off like fish. It’s actually more complicated than it sounds. When a fish swims, the point of articulation is high up in his body, but in a character who’s walking, the movement is centered in his hips…or right above the legs. We had to come up with tools for the animators so they could switch the characters from fish to ‘human’ and back to fish again. It was really an uphill battle to make that look seamless.”
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