C.O.R.E. chose Houdini to animate The Wild to achieve a close to photorealistic style.

“In building their pipeline [C.O.R.E.] could create custom tools themselves using their own programming team and scripters [via Houdini’s developer’s kit]. In some cases they went that route. But by having a partnership with Side Effects, their other option was to come to us and say ‘can you fix it?’ We had programmers working under the surface, fixing things there.”

Edward Lam, Side Effects’ senior software developer was one of Side Effects’ people based at C.O.R.E during production. His presence there typifies the software company’s commitment to Houdini and The Wild. “Houdini is a procedural package. It’s composed of different tools that can be put together in a flexible manner to achieve results. The C.O.R.E. people knew they could do it in Houdini and that they could trust us for more efficient solutions. They could put the pieces together themselves, but software development made it faster.

“We talked beforehand about list of things they would need to improve productivity. We would often consult with them on specifics, to understand what tools they needed and how to come up with the most efficient way of doing things: ‘you need these tools and here’s how to put them together.’

“Sometimes we offered a bit of training in how to use tools, sometimes we would write some ‘operators’ — nodes that would put the tools together for them. For example, the texture department needed a tool to maintain work changes the modeling department made upstream from them. Traditionally, the texture department would have to redo their work. We created an Attribute Transfer tool that allows them to adjust the existing texture over a revised model.

“We were able to make the tool for that purpose in a general way because of Houdini’s inherent flexible architecture. When the rigging department started doing characters, the tool was flexible enough to let the modeling and texture changes upstream adjust their work too. Attribute Transfer permeated through the entire pipeline with no tweaking. For example ‘grooming’ — positioning the feathers on each bird characters — normally took two to three weeks, but the AT tool let animators reuse work and groom a new bird in two or three days. Attribute Transfer was one of the first tools we developed for The Wild; in 2004 we put it in the main Houdini package and released it to other users. Meanwhile, other software packages have come up with similar, AT-style tools since we introduced ours.”

With a production pipeline now in place, C.O.R.E. Feature Animation is up and running as an independent service provider, ready to take on projects from studios and distributors other than Disney. For his part, Williams reflects on the ordeal of by fire of bringing his first animated feature to the screen. “It’s funny, the day Disney said we want you to do this movie, Bob Zemeckis called and wanted me to do one as well — the same goddamn day. This one came up first, that’s just the way it is. This one was moving along like a freight train.

“It was crazy. Apart from the tech issues we dealt with, coming up with story that worked was really, really tough. This was huge, massive. We were trying to satisfy many masters at same time. We had to have something else ready every four weeks to show to Disney. We ended up working in sort of a reactionary mode all the time. Disney was going through their own growing pains with Pixar in or out, who knows. Then along comes our little film and all of a sudden people started taking notice. The big boys were there, they thought ‘wow, look at this.’”

Williams notes that he and The Wild were around “for both Pixar exiting [their estrangement from Disney] and Pixar coming back [Disney’s purchase of the company].” In that respect, The Wild may have been — like Valiant — another attempt by Disney to find an independent studio capable of filling Pixar’s computer-generated shoes. Now that Pixar is permanently in Disney’s orbit, and with their own in-house facility [responsible for last year’s far more cartoony Chicken Little] up and running, Disney may no longer have the need it once did to find an outside partner for its CGI fix.

Joe Strike lives in New York City and writes for and about animation. He has recently completed a children’s novel.