The board members who loved 'Surf's Up'
CROWDED into a theater on Oahu's famed North Shore were some of the world's best big-wave riders. They'd been invited to preview Hollywood's latest stab at a surf movie, and there were plenty of skeptics on hand.
Dating to the late 1950s, when Gidget first grabbed a board, the studios could never seem to get it right, populating their films with goofy stereotypes and implausible plots. But this one was different. When the lights went down, giant waves rose up on the screen -- peeling and pitching perfectly. White water exploded toward the sky as the translucent barrels crashed on coral reefs. A pint-sized surfer sliced across them.
Dazzled, the audience hooted and hollered. Whoa, those waves were unreal.
Literally.
Odd as it may seem, "Surf's Up" -- an Academy Award nominee for best animated feature -- has been embraced by the surfing community as arguably the most authentic studio offering about wave riding since "Big Wednesday" in 1978. This, even though its marquee stars are penguins and a laid-back (stoned?) bird named Chicken Joe, who was picked by Surfer magazine as "the most intriguing surfer of 2007."
Veteran watermen brought their experience to play in virtually every facet of the movie, which mimics the documentary style of countless DVDs stacked in surf shops, from Bruce Brown's classic "Endless Summer" to his son's soulful "Step Into Liquid."
The lead wave animator is a hard-core surfer, as is the film's editor. Recruited as consultants were surfing greats Kelly Slater and Rob Machado, who later gave voice to a couple of penguin sports commentators of the same names and general appearance. And then there's Jeff Bridges, who plays an aging and reclusive penguin, once the greatest surfer of all. Bridges has been paddling into Malibu's swells since he was 14.
The actor says he was sold the minute the producer and directors let him peek at their waves. "You look at it and go, 'I know this isn't a photograph, but it looks so damn real.' They showed me those waves, and I got hooked."
Blame the birds?
ALTHOUGH reviews of "Surf's Up" were mostly good, the movie was a box-office disappointment for Sony Pictures Animation, making only $17.6 million domestically in its opening weekend in June.
Some studio executives say that by the time "Surf's Up" debuted, moviegoers were suffering from penguin fatigue. Their picture had been in development for years but was a step behind the Academy Award-winning documentary "March of the Penguins" and the animated "Happy Feet."
