But the biggest concern, of course, was translating the iconic Yogi from the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons into a believable CG character in a live-action world. "Early on, getting the Yogi design to work was a challenge," admits Joe Ksander (9), the animation director that spearheaded the animation team. "The live-action world has cartoon-inspired, pushed designs, which better enabled Yogi and Boo Boo to inhabit it. That being said, we wanted to keep a lot of what was appealing about Yogi and his performance. The original design was big on asymmetry and large, graphic shapes. It was the South Park of its day. We cued off of that, even though we knew we had the ability to do more fluid and complete animation in CG. In terms of the performance, he was very restrained in keeping with the original character.

"This character is as big as any of the human actors and occupies the same space. He's the driver of the story. We were concerned that in storyboarding him that we got enough of the character onscreen before we started animating. After the film was shot, we storyboarded every single scene to give us an idea of the performance choices and what the gags are and who Yogi and Boo Boo are. It's not something that is generally done with these live-action movies."

Alex Orrelle, founder of Crew 972 in Israel, worked closely with Brevig and Ksander as animation director heading up the story team. Orrelle was involved in rehearsing some scenes with the actors, finding things that they do that the bears could react to, and make it feel as if they were really there.

"I came on quite late, briefly before shooting started," Orrelle says, "but my main job during the shoot was that, every time a sequence was shot in New Zealand and went into rough edit, I would receive it as a QuickTime and would discuss it with Eric to make sure that his vision for the animated performances were coming through. And then I would digitally draw the characters into the QuickTime or onto the back of the shot's back plates with key poses that describe the performance ideas for these characters, and get them approved for Eric. And then send it over back to editorial to cut my drawings back into the QuickTimes.

"It was a lot of fun because of all the drawings, and a great way to inform the film and to start working out the business for the character animation, which I was largely in charge of from the creative side. I had to adapt what I know of Yogi from the original in more of a live-action scenario and live-action feel. We literally had to find a new appeal for these characters, a new way to make them fun to look at. The little that's there from the original is the striking of confident, strong poses. CGI tends to be over-animated, so we can't have that with Yogi Bear, who's voiced by Aykroyd as very arrogant and we had to match that. We would watch the film and say, 'Hey -- wouldn't it be funny if Yogi hits his head on the side of the train car when Boo Boo's trying to help him climb in?'

"The way the characters are rendered is so realistic that we also had to stay close to physical reality, making sure that stuff moves properly and realistically, which the folks at Rhythm & Hues are great at."

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.