A strong voice cast and edgy writing hope to drive the series to success.

Aguilar explains the creative give-and-take by describing how the Father of the Pride production team proceeds with an animation review. "Our writers go through their notes and then we have a session with Jeffrey Katzenberg where we play back, for his benefit, the sequences that have come from Imagi. He gives us notes, and while we're doing that, we're videotaping ourselves. As we're seeing the animation, if there are any performance issues, we actually act them out on camera. So we get really detailed about exactly the timing and/or the expressions or whatever we want to demonstrate to Imagi. Then we send it to them so they have it to watch as many times as they want. And if there are any questions, they will e-mail us and ask, `Can we meet tonight and discuss this note?' Then we'll show up with the whole production staff — though typically not with Jeffrey — and they'll ask us their questions in a realtime videoconference. Even art reviews are done in that fashion. We're able to bring up particular images and they're able to see it at the same time as we are on the video screen."

Aguilar recalls, "The one hiccup that we've had — and it's not a bad hiccup — was having to work hard at getting them to understand our creative process. They don't understand this because they've never had experience with the American method of getting notes — and of how many notes there are! The level of detail is something that they struggle with. They don't understand why, when something is 80% OK, that we still want to push it to 100%. They think `It's close enough; we need to move on.' And we say, `No.'"

Cross-cultural issues may be at play here, acknowledges Aguilar. "In this show the humor is in the words. We're not very broad in our acting, so there are lots of very subtle eyebrow lifts or deadpan expressions. We've had to continually ask for less. The smiles were too big, the eyes widened too much." Aguilar's observation prompts Chuang to crack, "If I had to do this over again, I would have sent somebody over to teach a class in improv!"

Father of the Pride will display 3D animation and lighting that has never been seen on television to date.

Father of the Pride promises to offer 3D CGI that's at a higher level than what has been seen on television before. The reason, Aguilar thinks, "Is the realism. If you look at (UPN's) Game Over and (Nickelodeon's) Jimmy Neutron, the animation is very stylized and curvaceous, and not grounded in a sense of realism." For his part, Chuang believes, "We brought a level of richness and acting that's more akin to feature animation. There are subtleties in the facial expressions and the performance that's more in line with features."

Which is a long way from a project that Chuang recalls was originally envisioned as "more a direct-to-video project. But Jeffrey got NBC to buy into this, which caught us all a little off guard. He laid out the greatest challenge for all of us — to come up with a way to deliver quality on this scale."

With 13 episodes in production, DreamWorks expects to hear from NBC in October as to whether they will produce 22 more episodes for next year. "That will basically be a show every two weeks," says Chuang "Twenty-two episodes in high-def in one year is equivalent to making six feature films. So we're moving at an incredible clip." Building a digital backlot will be crucial, he observes. "We need to reuse as much as we can, even though we have over 100 characters by now." (The guest voices for Father of the Pride already include Lisa Kudrow, Kelsey Grammar and Dave Foley — not to mention an appearance by Eddie Murphy, when his Donkey character from Shrek goes to Las Vegas to make a commercial.)

Looking back on the two-and-a-half years that he's been involved in the project, Chuang concludes, "The real story behind this project has been the challenge of taking all the knowledge and experience we have and putting it to the best use. We can all remember the many years when people just talked about doing something like this, and now we have."

Ellen Wolff is a Southern California-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as Daily Variety, Millimeter, Animation Magazine, Video Systems and the Website CreativePlanet.com. Her areas of special interest are computer animation and digital visual effects.