The Wild is Disney’s first animated feature release this year. All The Wild images © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Wild, opening April 14, is Walt Disney Pictures’ first leap into 2006’s jungle of animated feature films, a domain in which the studio was once upon a time king.

What’s unmistakable this year are the visual and thematic similarities between The Wild and DreamWorks’ Madagascar. Both films focus on the escape from New York’s Central Park Zoo by a lion-led band of animals, and their adventures in the Big Apple before heading out for parts unknown. While Madagascar reached theaters last year, Disney’s publicity material makes a point of crediting producer Beau Flynn and writers Mark Gibson and Philip Halperin for pitching The Wild to Disney “over nine years ago.”

These similarities continue a what many in the industry perceive as a rivalry between the two studios that stretches back to the day Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney to partner with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen and launch DreamWorks. It’s a situation that’s led to some interesting coincidences in the past, not the least of which were the late 1998/mid ’99 insect movies: DreamWorks’ Antz and Pixar’s A Bug’s Life.

No one at DreamWorks is talking about the origins of Madagascar (above), but other studios have developed cartoon concepts centering on pampered animals going out on their own. Courtesy of DreamWorks Animation SKG.

No one at DreamWorks — whose summertime release, Over the Hedge, will premiere next month — was available to comment on Madagascar’s origins. It’s worth noting however, that Madagascar and The Wild aren’t the only two cartoon concepts centering on pampered animals out on their own. At one point Warner Bros. was said to be working on The Zoo, its own film about critters with New York attitude. Then there’s Open Season, due out from Sony in the fall, about a pet bear talked into giving up his cozy domesticated lifestyle, while Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane recently teamed up with the Farrelly Brothers to write and direct the brothers’ Party Animals script.

“There are so many of these movies being made now with talking animals, there’s bound to be some similarities,” allows Clint Goldman, The Wild’s top-billed producer and partner to the film’s director Steve "Spaz" Williams in the pair’s San Francisco-based-production company, Hoytyboy Pictures. “The key thing is, is the voice of the movie, the poetic/dramatic thread different from other movies, so the one you’re seeing stands alone as a piece of entertainment? Madagascar had its audience and we’re clearly going to have an audience for our film.”