In a setback Roscuro's model had to be altered during production because his face was too ratty, which prevented viewers from feeling any warmth from him.

Ross, who oversaw the voice performances, insisted on a large ADR stage with boom mikes so the actors could move around and interact with one another. It didn't matter that the dialogue overlapped."There were times when I had Kevin Kline [as Andre the chef] and Stanley Tucci [as Boldo the vegetable creature] throwing food at each other or when Ciarian Hinds [as the villainous rat Botticelli] sees the light at the end, I took a huge spotlight and shined it in his eyes because what I'm gonna get from an actor at that moment with real light in his eyes would be better."

Gabriele Zucchelli (AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron), who served as animation supervisor, oversaw around 60 animators divided into seven teams. Pre-production began in 2006.

"It's been an interesting experience since from the beginning it's been similar to live action, particularly for the animation. A lot of comparisons were drawn to the way a live-action movie is shot in terms of cinematography, the environment and the goals. From my perspective, the intent from the beginning was to create a world that had to feel believable. We didn't want to viscerally capture reality. And we didn't want to telegraph any emotion that the characters needed to deliver. We wanted to keep it more subtle. And really more interesting because the film is a fairy tale that has moments of humor and drama. The pace is gentle: there is peril, there is action, but it is not always on the nose. And you're supposed to feel for these characters. The best part of the process for me allowed us to discuss the scene and really focus on the best way to communicate a piece of dialogue or action or reaction or moment. And that triggered a lot of interesting conversations."

Tim Watts (Corpse Bride, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas), an animation lead, says he started in design and storyboard and later on moved over to animation. "On my team we did quite a bit of Roscuro and Despereaux. We did quite a number of important sequences involving Roscuro coming back to the princess to apologize for causing her mother's demise. And this required us to concentrate on Roscuro coming to terms with his conscience. It was very emotionally charged. I think Roscuro was Gary's favorite character and he was concerned that a lot of the weight of the film rested with him. He was extremely picky.

Framestore’s benchmarks on Despereaux included 40,089 individual assets with 25 hero characters that were modeled, surfaced and textured, as well as 12 secondary characters. In the end, 1,726 final shots were delivered.

"Midway through, Gary said we shouldn't be using Dustin Hoffman quite so literally and offered up Walter Matthau. I think what he was getting at was that Hoffman's movements are quicker and often more alert and that Roscuro should have a little bit more of a lazy and relaxed quality, especially in the banquet hall when he first comes across this soup. He equated it to Matthau's love of life in The Odd Couple."

Meanwhile, Barry Armour, the visual effects supervisor with previous live-action experience at ILM (Minority Report and The Phantom Menace), was quite at home with Ross' approach.

"One of the major aspects of this show that is different from most other animation pieces is there is an immense number of assets," Armour explains. "So there was a lot of surfacing, texturing and modeling that had to work in many different environments."

The environments are divided between the kingdom of Dor, the Mouse World and the Rat World, each posing challenges of scale for humans, mice and rats. "The idea was to reuse as much as possible, so that's where the variance comes in," Armour suggests. "What's interesting from a surfacing point of view is dealing with the scale of the bump: it needs to be adjusted in easy and consistent fashion so that an old piece of leather used as book binding in the human world and reused as the back of a chair in mouse world should look like a chair and not book binding. And then making sure that all the models react properly to myriad lighting situations from broad daylight to very soft interior lights to rat world, which is all point sources: little matches that serve as torches."

Here are a few Framestore benchmarks on Despereaux:

• 40,089 individual assets

• 25 hero characters were modeled, surfaced and textured, as well as 12 secondary characters

• 60 hero environments were modeled, surfaced and textured

• 413,138 hairs on Despereaux's head

• 1,726 final shots delivered

• 126,248 final frames: the biggest delivery in one week was 335 shots, with 1,200 shots delivered during the last month of production