After Reeve’s death, the project briefly lost momentum until IDT brought on Daniel St. Pierre and Colin Brady as directors and producer Igor Khait to complete the film. IDT wanted its release to coincide with the 2006 World Series.

The producer describes his first meeting with Reeve as, “one of those absolutely unbelievable moments. I went to his house the day after I was hired. I was waiting inside the front door for him with the sunlight coming in from the second floor window. About 100 feet away I hear somebody say, ‘You must be [here Tippe pauses for a whispered breath] Ron.’ He was blowing in his tube, which is how he manipulates his chair, and out of the sunlight comes Christopher Reeve. It was one of those times in your life when you knew you were about to embark on something that was going to be fantastic.”

Kurtz spent close to eight months developing the film’s story with Reeve, traveling to the actor’s Bedford, New York home. When asked what beyond the man’s handicap accounted for the tremendous impact Reeve had on everyone involved in the project, he pauses for a moment, then answers.

“There was no handicap. With Chris, it was the gracefulness of his life, the ease of his personality, his sense of fun. He was the opposite of a difficult Hollywood star. Think of the best times you ever had hanging out with buddy from high school or college. That’s what it was like. The handicap disappeared, the wheelchair was gone. He’d have juice or a glass of water and I’d bring it over to him. He’d take a sip and say, ‘Thanks Rob,’ and that was it.”

After Reeve’s death in late 2004, the project briefly lost momentum. Janet Healy, producer of DreamWorks’ Shark Tale had recently joined IDT as its president of animation. Healy brought aboard two experienced animation pros to continue work on the film, Daniel St. Pierre (who also served as production designer) and Colin Brady. St. Pierre’s credits include overseeing the “deep canvas” look on Disney’s Tarzan, while Brady’s roots are in the 3D world, with a co-directing credit on Toy Story 2 to his name.

Healy also brought in Igor Khait (whose own animation résumé dates back to Steven Spielberg’s animated Family Dog series, and who contributes a brief blues guitar number to the soundtrack) to make sure the film was completed in time for its fast-approaching fall 2006 release. “It took us a couple of months to retool and refine the movie that Chris had started making,” Khait explains. “Animation movies always evolve; you’re always discovering new stories as you go along. We started to deconstruct and rebuild, while trying to stay true to the story’s original theme — persevere. We had to make sure we didn’t stray from that and tell the story in limited time we had left until the film’s release.”

Everyone’s Hero was scheduled for a fall 2006 premiere, just in time for the baseball playoffs and World Series. (“It’s not a Christmas movie,” Khait notes.) For the next year and a half Khait lived in Toronto, riding herd on the film’s day-to-day production at IDT Ent.’s DKP Studios. (In order to meet the release date, some scenes were lit, rendered and textured at Reel FX in Dallas, Texas.) The film was animated in Maya 6.5, with some proprietary plug-ins to create hair and skin textures. Cloth simulation was done with commercially available Syflex software, “tweaked” by the effects department to the movie’s needs; lighting and rendering were handled by off the shelf Mental Ray software.

Fusion software was used to composite the many layers of animation, including a complex train sequence. “Those shots were challenging,” Khait recalls. “The train was transitioning through different environments. We had to be careful to make clear the progression from inside the station out to ever more rural areas, and balance out the changing light in different environments. We also used moving light sources to create an illusion of speed. It was really a combination of 2D and 3D in those shots — it involved a lot of painting that had to be planned very carefully.”

Brady’s background is in cartoons while St. Pierre comes from the world of art direction and production design. Their differences became the strength of the film, notes Brady.

While Khait took care of logistics and scheduling, Tippe was on hand as well, overseeing the film’s creative aspects. In the film’s publicity materials, Brady notes that St. Pierre’s background is in art direction and production design, while his own work tends towards the cartoony, and compares their working relationship to Lennon and McCartney’s: “Our differences were really the strengths of the film.” Tippe offers his own perspective on the dynamic between the two directors. “It’s important to get people to lay out their points of view, to and then get them to compromise. Otherwise why have two directors? My job is to get the best out of them. I worked hard to get them to articulate what they both really wanted, and when they disagreed, come to happy medium they both could live with. Nobody’s going to be 100% happy unless they’ve been working together for five years.”

In many ways, Everyone’s Hero is a throwback to an earlier age of animated features, and not just because of its 1930s setting and “G” rating. There’s a refreshing absence of cynicism, over-the-kids’-heads throwaway lines, pop-culture quotes or smarmy, clueless parents in the film. The bond between Yankee Irving and his folks is warm and palpable, and while the boy goes on an amazing and perilous journey that no 10 year-old is ever likely to attempt, he’s always presented as brave and resourceful child, not a miniature, wise-cracking adult. The wisecracks belong to Whoopi Goldberg, who voices Babe Ruth’s bat “Darlin’“ and Rob Reiner, aka a sarcastic New York baseball named “Screwie.”

“Screwie’s the kind of character I love,” says Kurtz. “I was really thinking of Danny DeVito or Billy Crystal, but Rob was absolutely perfect. He did this wonderful, cigar-chomping seen-it-all voice.” Tippe shares Kurtz’s enthusiasm for Reiner, even though the actor replaced Tippe’s scratch track. “Rob was phenomenal, he was so collaborative. You go in with the script and record the lines, but an actor who’s engaged says ‘Can I try something else?’ In the film Screwie bounces down a flight of steps. The original script was just a series of “‘ow-ooh-ahs’, but Rob turned that into ‘My head! — My butt! — My head! — My butt!’”