Barnyard was sprung from a Steve Oedekerk musing that there is a world in which animals stand up once humans leave the room. All Barnyard images © 2006 by Paramount Pictures and Viacom International Inc. All rights reserved.

What do toys do when humans leave the room?

Watch Toy Story.

What do farm animals do when humans leave?

Check out Barnyard.

It’s the first animated feature from Omation Studios, helmed by actor/writer/director/producer Steve Oedekerk, best known for Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius (producer), Bruce Almighty (screenwriter), Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (director) and the Thumb parody series (actor/writer/director).

Says supervising technical director Jason Barlow, “We actually see these characters stand up, hanging on the fence. ‘Hey, how’d it go last night?’ ‘Oh, we had a great time. Great party.’ Those are the kinds of things that go on so when the humans turn around, they all stand up and they’re now normal everyday characters with human traits.

Oedekerk conceived of Barnyard before Toy Story was released, but he never got the chance to pitch it.

“In the background, we want to see some of these characters doing strange things like tai chi, for example. We want two sheep to give each other a massage. You’ll notice a lot of these the second or third time you see this movie. Really, we’ve taken the background characters for a crowd scene and made them more mid-ground characters.”

Our hero is Otis, a rebellious cow who loves to party, “hill surf,” tease the mailman and does obnoxious pranks along with his misfit buddies. But his dad, Ben, is leader of the farm animals. Ben tries to groom Otis into being responsible. When tragedy occurs, Otis is forced to learn responsibility to save the farm animals from marauding coyotes.

“The story is really about Otis and his coming-of-age,” Steve Oedekerk says. “The idea was a world where when you leave the room, animals stand up. It wasn’t even about a barn, where I first got the idea.

“I was pitching CG projects before Toy Story came out, and everybody thought I was an insane person,” Oedekerk says. “For Barnyard, when I first started picturing the characters… I really wanted to do it in CG. I really would have gotten this film made years ago, but I got so busy doing movies that we had our demo sitting around for four or five years. I never even pitched Barnyard.”

Then, while Oedekerk was producing Jimmy Neutron, Nickelodeon executives visited him at his clubhouse where he showed them his demo.

“And then it was just a dance with them,” he says. “They went, ‘Ooo, we want to do that one next.’”

Barnyard is the first production from Oedekerk’s Omation studio. Building their animation crew from scratch, talent had to be pulled from all over the world. Roughly a third trained “on the job.”

Production officially began in October 2003 at Oedekerk’s Omation studio, located in San Clemente, California. Building their animation crew from scratch, talent had to be pulled from all over the world, namely Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Bulgaria, India, and Pakistan. Roughly a third trained “on the job.”

Jason Barlow relates, “With over 180 characters to create, develop, manage and troubleshoot, we put together a really bright team of programmers and character riggers to develop a system that runs 24 hours a day.