As your children may have been reminding you incessantly for the past few days (or vice versa!), it's finally here: the new VeggieTales movie, The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, opens in theaters nationwide on Jan. 11.

Since 1993, Mike and Phil (as Big Idea, their production company) have put out some 27 direct-to-video episodes of VeggieTales, pioneering CGI animation and capturing the imagination of children of all ages (including this 46-year-old's) with their inventive blend of value-driven storytelling, whimsical humor, and -- of course -- silly songs. Oh, the silly songs. VeggieTales took the next big step, to the big screen, in 2002 with the release of Jonah. But if Mike and Phil aren't names you automatically know, you are certainly familiar with their virtual personas: Phil is the man behind Bob the Tomato, and Mike is, of course, Larry the Cucumber.

In anticipation of next weekend's big event, Infuzemag.com spent a few minutes chatting with Lar -- er, Mike Nawrocki, the director of Pirates and one of the demented geniuses behind the VeggieTales.

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Sam: What made you decide to go with the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything as opposed to other characters?
Mike: We've just had so much fun with those characters over the years, from the silly songs to their inclusion in Jonah. For Phil and me, it was easy to write a story around the pirates. We though it was a great opportunity after Jonah to do more with these characters, even though they don't do anything, which is a bit of a problem! But the movie is about embracing the call to adventure and being heroes, and they're fun characters who have to journey far to learn what that takes.

Phil Vischer wrote the script right after Jonah, and he even wrote it before Pirates of the Caribbean came out! Since those movies have been so successful, it has turned out really well in terms of timing to have a movie about the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything be our next feature.

Is this a sequel to Jonah (the last theatrical release)?
No, it's not really a sequel, but it is kind of connected. In Jonah, the pirates met the kids in the modern day then we flashed back to the past to tell the story of Jonah,. We use a similar device in our new film. Here, they're busboys in a modern dinner theater, but they aspire to be on stage -- their hero is Sir Frederick, an actor in the dinner theater. But our lazy pirate friends have character flaws that keep them from reaching out and trying to do more. That changes when they are called to adventure, and will need to overcome their motivationally challenged traits as they travel back in time.

All of the other VeggieTales have a powerful Biblical, or Judeo-Christian, message behind them. What is the message Pirates conveys?
Well, it's really a parable. We have a king in the film, who's also the father of the princess who calls for the pirates' help in the past. It's a parable about how God calls us to adventure and equips us with what we need to heed the call. It's about what it means to be a hero, to do what's right, even if it means it's hard. God calls us not to "not do anything"! It's about God's power and how He gives that to us to do what He asks us to do.

Christians will definitely recognize that in a parable form, "for he who has ears to hear." It's more like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in terms of having a definite Biblical worldview, rather than the retelling of a Bible story, which about half the VeggieTales stories have been over the years.

What goes in to a full-length feature like this, as far as time and manpower?
It's a very demanding process. With CGI, everything you see has to be created, including the locations. Nothing's just "there." Before you start animating, you have to know what's in every shot, how long the shot is, etc. It's a two-year production cycle, and half that is in preproduction, which includes planning composition, your shots, the layout blueprint -- doing a rough of the whole thing, including a score, to make sure it will work the way you envision it. Sometimes it can take longer than two years; Pixar will take three to four years for their films. That's more typical of a big-budget animated film.

Once you get into production, you need to start creating the world of the film in 3-D.  This includes modeling, where all the characters, sets, and props are modeled in the computer. Next comes layout, a process where you "lay out" the composition of all the shots in 3-D -- the computer version of cinematography. Then of course animation, where the characters are animated within each shot using the finished dialog track to act against. Then onto lighting and compositing where are the sequences are lighted and assembled to create the final picture. Score and sound effects follow, and you have a whole movie!

So there's a whole lot to it, and it takes a lot of careful, detailed planning. The nice thing about it, though, is that you have so much control with CGI -- there are no surprises that the weather can bring, or anything like that.

What did you learn from the experience of making Jonah that you were able to use in making Pirates?
With our first feature film, we learned what we could do better next time, and this time we were able to get a lot more on the screen through the production process.

There's a tendency. when you're modeling, to build everything whether you're actually going to see it onscreen or not. For example, there are a lot of ships in this movie. Before we made Jonah, we would've designed all the ships all the way, down to every detail, and shot what we needed of what we created of those models. This time, we said let's do a rough version of this ship in preproduction, and only build what we see in the camera, rather than building out the whole thing. It's a lot like the way old Westerns were shot -- yes, you see a whole town there, but if you went behind those facades, there's nothing there. So, by creating only what we needed, what we were actually going to shoot on the ships, we were able to focus more on getting every little detail of what is seen just right. Because of that, there's more of what we actually created there on screen.

Most people have an idea, at least, of what the director of a live action film does. As the director of an animated film like Pirates, what do you do?
There are actually a lot of similarities between what live-action directors do and what animation directors do. Directing voice talent in the booth with the script, for example, means you're directing the actor's performance in delivering the lines, and that extends back to casting, too -- finding the right voice actor for that role.

That translates into animation, also, as the animator is animating to that voice character's performance. The animator is an extension of the actor's voice in that process. The director makes sure that the voice and visual representation fit, so getting that right and directing that accordingly is part of my job. The director is the guardian of the story because there are so many people, so many great artists with a lot of great ideas, who touch the film and the director makes sure that all this input is keeping the story on track and making the film better on the whole. So there's no megaphone, but there are a lot of similarities!

A lot of times what you're looking for in an actor's voice can be a surprise in the sound booth, too -- the actor will come up with a nice twist to the line, and that'll cue the animator in a way you hadn't expected, so that you wind up with a "performance" between the voice actor and the animator that wasn't necessarily part of the script, but really is better. That's the magic of working with talented artists! And part of being the director is making sure that the ideas that artists come up with make the whole movie better.

But there are some differences, too. In animation, the editing happens first, and in live action, it happens later. With animation, you typically get one shot and your voice characterization is locked for that particular shot.

Really, it boils down to one being in the virtual world, one in the real world -- and there are parallels between the two.

Music is always a big part of the VeggieTales experience. Can fans look forward to more silly songs in Pirates?
Oh, yeah! There's a lot of great music in Pirates. It's been a whole lot of fun to work with Steve Taylor and the Newsboys, Toby Mac, Relient K -- they did a cover of the theme song a couple of years ago, and that's in the movie. Steve wrote a song for a montage in the film titled, "Yo Ho Hero" -- which he performed with the Newsboys. "Spanish Gold," which Phil wrote, comes in at pirate dinner theatre scene. "Jolly Joe's" is sung at a pirate tavern where they serve root beer and ginger ale.

If people stick around through the end credits, they'll get a couple of surprises: "Rock Monster," a rewrite of the B-52s "Rock Lobster," is sort of our official Silly Song of the movie. And the final credit roll happens over "What We Gonna Do?," written and performed by TobyMac, as cheese curls run across the screen.

I think fans will love the score, too. Kurt Heinecke did an amazing job with the score. We recorded it with an 80-piece orchestra in Prague in the summer of 2007. It turned out so well. Kurt sequences everything in the score out in his office, and we had a copyist write it out for an 80-piece orchestra. If there's one thing that Pirates from the Caribbean inspired, it's the score. We were all impressed with Hans Zimmer's score, and how that really elevated the emotional power of the film. I think Kurt succeeded in capturing a similar spirit, although in a way that is unique to the story we're telling.

One of the worst-kept secrets about VeggieTales is that adults love the humor as much as children do. Is that just a happy accident, or do Phil and you try to make every VeggieTales production appeal to adults and kids alike?
It's one of those things where we write to make ourselves laugh. We obviously want humor that is appropriate for kids, and we're not going to cross any lines where parents would be concerned, of course. It's kind of like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, where some jokes you didn't get as a kid but that crack you up now.

How do you decide which stories to tell?
It comes in a variety of different ways. Sometimes it's a particular lesson we want to highlight, especially with direct-to-videos. For example, we got a bunch of letters from parents interested in seeing a story about sharing, and so we did Lyle the Kindly Viking. But the inspiration for a story can come in other ways, too. Snoodles' Tale came out of Phil's devotional time with God, something God revealed to Phil in that time and space.

So, what's next for Big Idea and VeggieTales? Anything you can share with us?
Sure, yeah! We're continuing with direct-to-DVDs, and we have one coming that is tentatively titled Huckleberry Larry and Tomato Sawyer. It's a fun story about helping others, and I love Mark Twain, so we had to do this.

We have another feature script in the works for the Bob and Larry movie. It's an origin story about how Bob and Larry met, one we've wanted to do for a while. We'll have to see how that goes based on how Pirates does. But I'm pretty confident. I couldn't be happier with the way it turned out, and I hope the fans enjoy the new film, too!

VeggieTales: The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything official site
Big Idea official site

 

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