Horton Hears a Who! presented a challenge for Blue Sky Studios. Seventy animators worked on a tight schedule for eight months to create the film's distinctive style. Unless noted, photo credit for all images: Blue Sky Studios.

In many ways, the success of an animated film can be judged by how well it brings its characters to life. Casting the right voice actor is key, but finding the right lead animator can be just as important. For the lead character in its fourth animated feature, Horton Hears a Who!, Blue Sky Studios turned to David Torres, who has been with the company since the first Ice Age and helped shape the character of Diego, the saber-toothed tiger.

A graduate of the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, where he majored in computer animation, Torres worked for Disney Imagineering (where he animated animatronic robots), Will Vinton Studios and the game company Retro Studios before joining Blue Sky in 2000. In the week leading up to Horton's release, he talked with AWN about the challenges of bringing one of Dr. Seuss's most beloved creations to the big screen.

Craig J. Clark: How did you come to work for Blue Sky originally?

David Torres: Back in 2000, I applied for a job. I went through the interview process and they brought me on for Ice Age. And when I first got here, I remember it was very interesting because I hadn't done any feature work. The first day I was here it was like, "Okay, set up your computer, your e-mail." You know, all that boring stuff. "If you want, you can do a walkthrough with Sid." And I did that. And the very next day a shot was handed to me with Diego -- the first shot in the film that Diego was in. And they're like, "Well, there's no other shot with Diego in it, so you figure it out." (laughs) Okay!

CJC: Kind of a trial by fire.

DT: Yeah, I came in and just kind of hit the ground running. And we were a very small team then. I think at that time we were 16 and we grew to about 24 by the end of the film, so Ice Age was definitely a smaller crew. Horton is probably the largest crew we've ever had.

CJC: How many people were on this one?

DT: Animation-wise, we topped out at 70 animators and that was because of the scope of the film and the tight schedule that we had. We ended up doing it in about eight months. There are a lot of characters, a lot of background characters, and the style that we tried to achieve on the film was unlike any other film that we have done. So it was definitely a challenge and the rigs were a little heavier so that would cause slowdowns, so we ended up going to about 70 people.

As the lead animator on Horton, Dave Torres shepherded the main character through the film.

CJC: What did your duties as lead animator entail?

DT: It's kind of like the equivalent of a supervising animator on a character. What I did was shepherd Horton through the film. I helped evolve his personality. I worked closely with the other animators to keep him on model. But I also worked with other departments in the studio to make sure we were getting everything that we needed to accomplish the directors' vision. So it was pretty much my responsibility to make sure that the rigging components and controls that we had to achieve what we needed for the film were there and then pretty much just help him go through the animation department and make sure that everything was on-key.

CJC: Were there particular challenges involved in taking Dr. Seuss's 2D character designs and making them 3D?

DT: Definitely there were challenges there across the board. I can't speak to design as much, only because I wasn't part of the design process, but definitely in bringing the animation to the screen we wanted to preserve what we were seeing in the books. If you look at the books, there's definitely a graphic quality to his posing. A lot of profiles, a lot of groupings. If you notice the groupings in the book, he tends to arrange things from large to small or small to large, or he would stack things up on top of each other in threes. So we're trying to mirror that stuff in the film as much as we can. I think a lot of the animators here would kind of geek out on that stuff, just try to find moments in the film where, "Oh, we could make it like the book."

But as for Horton, he was definitely a challenge. We decided early on that he was going to be both a quadruped and bipedal, so he would go back and forth from being on all fours to just on twos and talking with his hands and being a little more expressive. Cartoony is what I would say.