“Bovine bounty hunters, now I’ve seen everything!” Maggie, Mrs. Caloway and Grace don’t kowtow to anyone, proving once again that four legs are better than two, and three heads are better than one.

In fact, if the audience I previewed the movie with is any gauge, it appeals to children both young and old (you know who you are). While the kiddies can chuckle along with some gratuitous belching, the “grownups” can appreciate the visual designs and wordplay. In one scene, when the horse, Buck, is referred to as “Stallion of the Cimoron,” well, you know, animators are cool like that. There’s nothing like a good ribbing among professionals.

And yes, as mentioned, there are songs involved — cowboy choruses composed by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater (the former of which you may remember from such indie no-names as The Little Mermaid and Aladdin). Technically speaking, the movie is a musical hybrid. While the characters mercifully break into song only twice, the rest of the music is under the action. One of the songs is actually a yodeling number, which, according to Alameda Slim, shouldn’t even be considered singing, anyway. “Yodeling is an art!”

With k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, Tim McGraw, and The Beu Sisters each contributing their vocals to the soundtrack, who would argue? Western is as western does.

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth
The idea to do a western goes back to 1998, six short years ago, when the Disney development team was “sweating bullets” over which direction to take the story. An early version of the movie was about a calf that wanted to be more like the horses that led the herd.

Producer Alice Dewey Goldstone (Hercules, The Lion King) explains, “Initially, we had a movie that was sort of a coming-of-age story. It was very dear, and I think we could have made it and done okay with it. But I think, honestly, it felt very familiar. We really wanted a comedy, we didn’t necessarily want something so earnest and sweet.”

So, in 1999, the story folks corralled together to salvage some of the characters and backgrounds already developed, and story artist Michael LaBash pitched the idea of three dairy cows becoming bounty hunters to save their farm. Other story artists and writers honed the new idea, including Sam Levine, Mark Kennedy, Robert Lence and Shirley Pierce, and, in October 2000, directors Will Finn and John Sanford jumped on the moving train of production to shape the final story.

Finn, who has been in the biz for 25 years animating on such films as Beauty & the Beast and The Secret of NIMH, recalls, “Because there had been some hitches along the way in developing the story, when we took it on, they said you can basically do anything you want with the premise, but you’re going to be in production from the get-go. We spent half the day creating stuff for the artists to do, then the other half of the day reviewing what they were doing. With everything coming together in bits and pieces, we were pretty bold with the story and with the arcs of the characters.”

With a basic framework to improvise and expand upon, Sanford (who helped with story development for Mulan and Lilo & Stitch) encouraged the artists to play with the initial outline. A lot of the story was therefore hashed out directly on the storyboards. He says, “You get the best work that way. You get the best of what the artists can bring to it. Then they are thinking visually. Animation should be more visual than talk. If we give them an outline, then they’ll bring back the most entertaining stuff.”

Having three protagonists was a bit tricky, in distinguishing one cow from another and making sure they were complementary personalities. Goldstone says, “Not only did the visuals help us, with their clear silhouettes and colors, and their face shapes are all vastly different from one another — but of course our casting is pretty distinctive, and that’s really helped us. Once we started incorporating the voice recordings into the storyboards, we realized we had so much material that we could just get rid of, because we no longer needed to set up their personality or understand their background. We had these great, talented actors to do that work for us.”