Racing Stripes is Babe meets National Velvet. All image unless otherwise noted © 2004 Racing Stripes Prods. Llc. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Digiscope. 

Technology in filmmaking has made astounding improvements since the television days of Mr. Ed, when audiences bought the illusion of a talking horse through the “magic” of chewing and lip-synching alone. With the quantum leaps in visual effects software enhancements over the past decade and a half, the live-action talking animal genre has seen an evolution in quality and believability with each new project. Just since 1995 and the release of Babe, which became a popular benchmark for the genre, the techniques and methods for believable conversation between animals have improved significantly. With the film Racing Stripes hitting theaters Jan. 14, the genre has again raised the bar in bringing to life some of the most impressive and impossible animal kingdom conversations ever to grace the big screen.

Former animator and Quest for Camelot director Frederik Du Chau makes his live-action debut with Racing Stripes. This family friendly film tells the tale of Stripes (voiced by Frankie Muniz), a zebra whose ambition in life is to be a racehorse. With the help of a menagerie of vocal barnyard friends, Stripes learns to never give up, despite the prejudices of both small-minded humans and equines that want to squash his dreams. In bringing Stripes and his pals to anthropomorphic life, Du Chau turned to Digiscope’s visual effects supervisor Dion Hatch to create and coordinate the various effects needed to make these chatty critters believable. Hatch explains that the collaboration worked well because of their mutual respect for each other’s expertise and creative input. “Some directors have no idea about the visual effects, from the technical side, or aesthetically what can be accomplished,” Hatch explains. “Frederik is very up on the visual effects world and he spends a lot of time reading all about it. He also has a 2D animation background, so he is very experienced in that world. The way this film was conceptualized and finalized, it worked due to the fact that Frederik storyboarded out every shot and in the way he shot the film. When an animal talks in Racing Stripes, you see it turn its head, while it is simultaneously talking. [In] a lot of the earlier movies, because of the technology, they had to keep the animals more static. So we tried to get a lot of head movement and I think it helped push the look further.”

Of course, the Racing Stripes concept quickly brings to mind the infamous W.C. Field’s adage, “Never work with children or animals,” and that still stands true for any filmmaker dealing with those potentially unruly subjects. Countering the natural tendencies of animals to not interact peacefully or on command was a constant battle for the filmmakers on the set and, in turn, for the post process. Hatch says working around those issues became core to the success of the film.

“Obviously, animals aren’t going to do what you want always. So what Frederik did was storyboard every animal and set up every dialogue line. For example, in the case of Tucker (voiced by Dustin Hoffman), he is a curmudgeon donkey coach who trains Stripes, and he has a lot of scenes with Frannie the goat (voiced by Whoopi Goldberg), where they banter back and forth. On the set, you had to have one turn to the other, while `talking’ and to get two animals to do that, well, major kudos to the animal trainers! Each animal had one trainer and they would run back and forth to get the animal to look one way or another. A lot of times it didn’t work, so we would have to do a split screen to get it to work out. Plus, a lot of these shots also had bluescreens because you can’t put certain animals together with other animals. There were a lot of times we would have to roto off the animals and put them in other scenes. A zebra isn’t the nicest animal, which we didn’t want to portray in the film,” he chuckles.

“There would be nights, like during the Blue Moon Race sequence, where Stripes challenges his nemesis, Trenton’s Pride (voiced by Joshua Jackson). When we first started shooting in South Africa, we spent a lot of cold nights trying to get them all to behave. A number of times, Stripes tried to take a chunk out of the Clydesdales and vice versa. But overall, Stripes motion worked out well.”