Painting a picture: everyone's Hero owes its painterly look to a consistent vision and old-fashioned attention to detail.(Indie Film)

Out of left field, so to speak, at SIGGRAPH this past summer, came Everyone's Hero, a full-length CG film that caught many people's attention with its unique look--described by nearly everyone as "Norman Rockwell-esque." The film, about a boy who travels across the US to return Babe Ruth's bat to him, uses a bright color palette that is softened to create warm, painterly scenes that convey the sense of bygone days.

"It was nice at SIGGRAPH to have people tell us, 'Hey, I really like the look.' We had run as a stealth operation until then and hadn't talked about what we were trying to do," says Nick Foster, CTO of IDT Entertainment/Starz Media. "It was a good way of establishing ourselves as a new animation company."

That new animation company was IDT Entertainment, spun off from telecom company IDT Corp. in 2004. In that same year, IDT acquired the Canadian animation and visual effects company DKP Studios, where Everyone's Hero was eventually made. (Starz Media has since acquired IDT Entertainment.) Although DKP was nearly 20 years old, with a solid history of creating visual effects and animation for television and film, it had never been set up to create a theatrically released full-length CG film of this complexity.

"Consequently, we had to change the pipeline, making it more robust than it was when DKP was a contract studio doing simpler work, and work that was generally of shorter duration," says Frank Gladstone, vice president in charge of artistic development at IDT. While doing so, the film's creators worked hard to imbue the movie with the look and feel envisioned by those behind it from the start.

Everyone's Hero began as a story that Howard Jonas, founder of IDT Corp., used to tell his children at bedtime. Somewhere along the line, he shared the tale with Rob Kurtz, also at IDT, who eventually wrote the screenplay, along with Jeff Hand. Jonas decided he wanted Christopher Reeve to direct. According to Ron Tippe, co-producer of Hero, along with Igor Khait, Jonas wanted Reeve because, "this movie's about heroes, and there's no hero like Christopher Reeve." Reeve reportedly loved the story and was at work on the film when he died. Directors Dan St. Pierre and Colin Brady then stepped up to the plate. The film is being distributed by 20th Century Fox.

The movie's main character is young Yankee Irving, voiced by Jake T. Austin, who determines to rescue Babe Ruth's bat, which has been stolen, and return it to him in time for the deciding game of the 1932 World Series. His companions along the way include Marti, a girl voiced by Raven; Screwie, a baseball voiced by Rob Reiner; and Darlin', the bat, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg. The movie was intentionally made without the usual topical references and double entendres familiar to CG filmgoers. "There was a sense that a lot of the more successful CG films had a sort of cynical feel to them," says Foster. "They were typically animals or fairy-tale creatures who felt like they'd just stepped off an LA casting couch and into a medieval or suburban set, yet still felt hip. The idea, and this really came from Christopher Reeve, he adds, was to take a step away from that and do a story that was both gentle and not cynical in terms of the characters and told a different story that, hopefully, would resonate with American families. Underscoring that tone would be the movie's warm, nostalgic look.

Planning a Pipeline