When Ben Stiller and Chris Rock were asked to become a talking lion and a cartoon zebra, neither had toddlers to impress. Nevertheless, they signed up for Madagascar, an animated movie about escaped Central Park Zoo animals on the lam. “It just seemed fun,” Stiller recalls, now seven years later on the eve of the opening of the sequel, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. And it was fun, as it turned out. Fun for him, fun for Rock, fun for millions of moviegoers and more than half-a-billion dollars’ worth of fun for DreamWorks.
Doing voice work for animated films has never been a more popular career move for sought-after stars, one that’s enjoyable, shows some winking playfulness, offers very little risk and huge potential for upside. Think Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Renee Zellweger, Tom Hanks.
Chris Rock says, “I’m a comedian. Anything that’s funny I want to be involved in.” That might come as a surprise to fans of Rock’s trademark envelope-pushing adult humour. But he and Stiller say it’s the fact that these kid-centric movies are so rife with highlevel comedy that makes them enticing—to them as actors and to the grown-ups forking over cash at the box office.
This kiddie flick is densely populated with actors known for their decidedly adult fare. Listen for the voices of Alec Baldwin, Andy Richter, Cedric the Entertainer, Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame, The View’s Sherri Shepherd and the late Bernie Mac, who plays the noble dad to Stiller’s longlost lion, Alex. This time around, the four zoosters find themselves encountering animals of their own kind after a penguin-piloted plane crashes in the savannahs of Africa.
In the seclusion of a recording booth, actors do take after take after take of each scene, the dialogue and delivery going in any direction they choose. The animation, eventually, is made to match, and because cameras are trained on the performers, their expressions and movements may also be reflected in the finished product. Actors doing this kind of work need to have “a willingness to take chances and not worry about looking a little ridiculous sometimes in the recording studio,” Stiller says. Though Rock’s and Stiller’s characters spend much of the 89 minutes of screen time together, the two spent one day recording in the same room.
When the animators later show the performers how a scene is working on the screen, “You’re like, ‘Ooooh, I can do that one better. I can put a little more emotion in that one,’ ” Rock says. “Did you see Kung Fu Panda? That’s the best Dustin Hoffman performance I’ve seen in a while.” Stiller and Rock may have gone into the studio for 15 or 20 days for each movie, for three or four hours at a stretch, but that was it. The commitment they make is to come back as many times as necessary to record new dialogue or do another take on a scene.
Stiller is teaming with DreamWorks to produce an animated film about a villain in search of a superhero to antagonise. (It was written with Robert Downey Jr. in mind, but if that doesn’t work, Stiller may do the voice himself.) And Rock, who did the voice of a mosquito in Bee Movie for DreamWorks, says a “Mosquito Movie” is possible.
Rock is a father of two now and so is Stiller. “My youngest daughter likes to brag,” Rock admits. “Any party we’re at, by the time the party’s over, every kid knows I’m the zebra from Madagascar.” Animation: not just the push of a button Madagascar and its sequel Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa took 400 people eight-and-a-half years to make. But back to back, the two movies wouldn’t even take three hours to watch. Directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath led the production efforts on both movies.
It started with the idea of zoo animals with New Yorker attitudes being asked to survive in the wild. Computer wizards and artists painstakingly built an entire digital universe for the characters and the story, inspired by Warner Bros. classics such as Loony Tunes). Each animator typically did just f ive or six seconds of animation a week.” “By the time we’re finished, Tom and I look at each other and go, ‘How the heck did we do this?’ ” Darnell said.