The filmmakers found Rob Reiner very collaborative when creating the voice of Screwie. He added to the character.

According to Kurtz, Reeve always wanted Mandy Patinkin to play Yankee’s father Stanley. “An hour after getting the script, Mandy called back to say he had to play the part. Chris never suggested it, but when I asked if [Reeve’s wife] Dana would like to play the mom, he said, ‘I was really hoping you would say that.’ Chris was the kind of guy wouldn’t necessarily assume that, given who he was, he could just call that as the film’s director.”

William H. Macy, who seems to specialize in playing hard-luck losers in live-action, voices a cartoon version as the bat-swiping Chicago pitcher Lefty Maginnis. (In one of Hero’s best-animated sequences Maginnis, riding atop a train in pursuit of Yankee Irving goes through a series of wild contortions in order to dodge the overhead signal lights whizzing past him. “That scene was Jan’s baby,” says Tippe, crediting Jan Carlee, the film’s head of layout and one of its directors of photography.)

The biggest surprise in the voice cast however, is only referred to as “Surprise Guest” on the movie’s website. Much as Robin Williams portrayed Aladdin’s genie while keeping his name out of the credits, one of Reeve’s classmates from their Julliard drama school days portrays Napoleon Cross, the villainous owner of the Chicago Cubs. The pudgy character’s pompous boasting and gleeful bobble head doll-abuse (“Stop hitting yourself,” he tells two Babe Ruth dolls while banging them together) provide some of the film’s funniest moments. After letting the actor’s name slip, Kurtz adds that, “Chris wanted [his colleague] to do some sort of fun cameo, to enjoy this project with him because they were the best of friends.”

Hero avoids giving its 1930s, depression-era setting the sepia-toned nostalgia treatment. Instead, the impoverished time period is evoked via a reference to the absence of available jobs and Yankee’s friendship with three good-natured, freight train-hopping hoboes (one of whom is voiced by Tippe himself). When Yankee hitches a ride with an all-black baseball team, the movie doesn’t grind to a halt for a history lesson about the segregated “national pastime” of the day; instead, a stadium banner reading “Negro League” in the background is all that’s necessary to tell the story.

The two things that differentiate Hero from other animated movies says producer Ron Tippe, are that the story, and not the comedy, takes priority and that IDT let the filmmakers do their job without interference.

In a fascinating sequence for any architecture buff, Yankee sneaks aboard a train leaving from New York City’s long-demolished Pennsylvania Station. The film’s meticulous CGI reconstruction of the station is as close as anyone in 21^st century will ever get to seeing the place with their own eyes. Tippe credits St. Pierre and the film’s art team for going “back to photographs and architectural drawings — they did a huge amount of historical research for the film. When Yankee walks into the train station it’s beautifully lit and you get a sense of how vast and ornate it was.”

As Tippe sees it, “What makes us different from the other [animated] movies is that people usually go for comedy first — we didn’t. We went for story first and foremost. Once we got the structure down, then we went back in and asked ourselves, what’s funny about this situation? The tension between Darlin’ and Screwie for example — can it be funny? What makes it funny?

“Chris had a lot to do with that attitude, and we just carried it on after he passed away. Don’t forget Dana was one of the executive producers, along with Chris. I updated her on a weekly basis and we spoke regularly.”

There’s another difference between Everyone’s Hero and its animated competition, one that Tippe is passionate about. “We made this film in two years, for less money than 99% of the movies out there. Every company should do this — say, ‘We’re giving you two years to make a movie and X dollars’ — then let them make the movie and don’t interfere. To their credit, the executives at IDT for the most part let us make our movie and didn’t second-guess us. This is not a movie made by committee, this is a movie made by filmmakers — and I think it shows.

“That’s a critical paradigm shift in my opinion, that these people fully trust the creators. We’re not going to spend $100 million and do this for four or five years. That’s one of the things that interested me in this project. We were going to be creatively challenged by having to work with less. Our crew was 25% smaller than on a comparable project. That’s very freeing. You realize your only option is to make good decisions. You realize you can’t spend five months or 10 months or two years designing one character — and I’ve seen it done like that.”

Everyone’s Hero, dedicated to both Chris and Dana Reeve (who died of lung cancer in March 2006) opens on Sept. 15. “Dana was very involved up until the very end,” recalls Khait. “As a member of the cast and as one of the exec producers, she was always present. She was very supportive; she knew we wanted to, and she made sure we did, make Chris’ movie.”

Joe Strike is a regular contributor to AWN. His animation articles also appear in the NY Daily News and the New York Press.