Robbert Smit has been hailed as Australia's most experienced animation director. Not only has he worked on such television series as Scooby Doo, Dark Wing Duck and Two Stupid Dogs, but he has also directed the feature films Footrot Flats and Blinky Bill. As such, he is well-versed in the difficulties associated with adapting an Australian favourite into an animated feature film, a challenge he has risen to once more in his role as animation director of Energee Entertainment's production of The Magic Pudding. Recently I spoke to Robbert about this adaptation of Norman Lindsay's classic children's tale.

Albert, The Magic Pudding, voiced by John Cleese, gets a hand from Bill Barnacle. All images courtesy and © Energee Entertainment.

Stephen Lynch: Unlike some animated features, you've actually tried to keep very close to the original design of the characters from the book. What sort of problems did that pose?

Robbert Smit: That's a tricky one, because I actually wanted to make it even closer to the book drawings. More of a pencil sketch line, which in traditional animation you would achieve with cel artwork. However the requirement with this production was to push the boundaries and frontiers of digital application, so we had to modify the line work a little bit so that it could be more digital friendly. It's very difficult to do a sketch drawing and paint it on digital, because the colours go everywhere, so we had to work with a clean line to contain the colour areas of the character design. To compensate for the loss of that rough Lindsay line look, we added a lot of body contour shadow, drop shadow and highlights to the final image.

SL: That was particularly evident in the character of Bill Barnacle.

RS: When characters are small you can get away with minimal body contour shadow. It's when you get up close to big characters and big body areas that you really need some additional moulding to break down the big flat areas, which on a cinematic screen can be very overwhelming.

Left to right, Bill (Hugo Weaving), Sam Sawnoff (Sam Neill), Bunyip Bluegum (Geoffrey Rush) and Albert enjoy a chat, some pudding and lots of singing and dancing in the Outback.

SL: How were the CGI shots on the film achieved?

RS: They were all done on the Inferno system. That was probably the most extreme hi-tech equipment that we used on the film.

SL: Did they pose problems with regard to budget?

RS: Yes. We virtually had to go through the whole script, once we had the storyboard, and allocate areas where we could maximise the use of the 3D. Scenes, which with traditional animation would be very difficult to achieve, became quite achievable with the 3D format.

SL: Apart from the first appearance of the pudding where he drops through the clouds, what was the stand-out CGI shot for you?

RS: The one where he actually explodes. That was probably the biggest. It took 3 days to process, with each frame talking something like 1.4 minutes. It took some huge crunching. But all we did there was supply the artwork for six puddings and then we multiplied that over and over again. It was completely composited in Inferno using basic artwork and creating this massive explosion. To get that sort of quality and that amount of puddings would have been almost impossible to achieve in any traditional sense. There were great benefits of having that facility available.