Director Steve “Spaz” Williams not only talked Disney into abandoning its hybrid approach, he also convinced them to bankroll a new animation studio in Toronto to produce the film.

Disney’s original intent was to make The Wild a hybrid film, with its animal characters composited over real-world backgrounds, much like Who Framed Roger Rabbit or The Garfield Movie. In 2001, the studio asked Industrial Light & Magic alumnus Williams, the creator of numerous and groundbreaking live-action/CGI meldings to direct. “Disney had done it before with Dinosaur,” Williams recalls. “I’d done it with the Blockbuster ads [featuring a talking, photorealistic hamster and rabbit], I’d done it with Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 and every movie I’d ever worked on as chief animator.

“They said because of your computer graphics and live action [background] you’d be good for this. I said, ‘That’s great, but I think we should do the whole thing CG because there are so many unknowns when it comes to developing these stories. You don’t want to have to be re-putting sets together for reshoots.’”

Not only did Williams talk Disney into abandoning its hybrid approach, he also convinced them to bankroll a new animation studio in Toronto to produce the film: C.O.R.E. Feature Animation, an offshoot of effects shop C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures. (In this respect, The Wild follows the lead of numerous live-action American movies and TV series that have used Toronto to replicate New York City.)

Williams and Goldman had many reasons to base their production in the Canadian metropolis. According to Goldman, “The last five years Spaz and I worked almost exclusively in TV commercials while looking for another feature gig. We worked in Toronto exhaustively and had lots of relationships with people there.

“Beyond that, we were trying to make a movie where the graphics were truly leading edge. For us to set up a studio in the [San Francisco] Bay Area and compete against DreamWorks, Pixar, ILM or Tippett Studio for the same sort of labor pool would’ve been, in my opinion, an impossible task. In addition to the CGI studios, Sega is right down the street, Electronic Arts is just down the road. In Toronto, we were the big game in town, we were the show. We had support from the government, C.O.R.E. and support from the Canadian animation community.”

The filmmakers realized they’d have to move out of the San Francisco area in order to create a movie where the graphics were truly leading edge. In Toronto, The Wild was the big game in town.

Williams adds his own thoughts about working in Toronto: “C.O.R.E. was already there, doing CGI for commercials and movies. When Disney came to me, I said if we were going to do this film we needed to build a facility to do it, an off-site dedicated place that we knew how to run. I was sort of at the forefront of setting up pipelines [from his ILM days], so I knew the way I wanted to do it.

“I’ve known Bob [Monroe] and John [Mariella, C.O.R.E.’S owners together with Kyle Menzies] for years. They had a good track record and they survived; they’ve been established for 15 years. We kind of piggybacked off of that, just kind of supersized their facility.”

It was a hometown boy makes good opportunity for Williams. The Toronto native and graduate of Sheridan College’s animation took the reins of what turned into the largest Canadian production ever, a project that came with a supersized set of challenges. “The first time I saw anything was in February 2002,” he says. “I saw a script, but it was nothing compared to what the movie is now. It’s completely different, the characters and the entire film.

“We took this thing from zero, we built a facility and a story. These other [CGI animation] companies already had an established pipeline. It’s one thing to do a movie and put it in a pipeline, it’s another thing to build a goddamn pipeline. It was crazy; it damn near killed me.

“We completely gutted many, many ideas on this thing. It was literally like steering a battleship thru an obstacle course. The biggest difficulty was putting the story together and getting it to work. Sometimes we had to change the cast based on how that was going. We changed stuff all the time, then you’d run into huge technical problems that would make you go back and address a bunch of [previously nailed-down] shots as a result.”