Casting Crusoe: for the movie Water Horse, Weta Digital created a sea creature from infancy to adulthood and placed the character into its environment.(CG Creature/Water)

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Despite its name, the "water horse" looks nothing at all like a horse. Implicit in its name, though, is one of the two challenges that Weta Digital faced in creating visual effects for the movie Water Horse. That challenge, of course, is water, and more exactly, integrating a CG creature into that water. The other is the creature itself.

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The Columbia Pictures film, directed by Jay Russell, follows the relationship between Crusoe, the creature, and a young boy as the two stretch toward adulthood. When full grown, Crusoe resembles what people picture as the Loch Ness monster; that the story takes place in Scotland is no coincidence.

The story, which is set during World War II, stars Alex Etel as Angus MacMorrow, a lonely young boy. His father is a soldier who, we learn during the film, will not be coming home. As the fantasy adventure begins, Angus discovers an oddly shaped egg that soon hatches a sea creature, a water horse. The water horse is born an orphan; each creature creates one egg and then dies.

"Crusoe is one of the creatures the world is not supposed to know exists," says Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital, where a crew that topped 200 worked on 600 visual effects shots. "We had this idea that he's lonely, but also naive and playful. We first see him when he hatches from the egg and he's a baby bird: cute, but messy and ugly at the same time. He and the boy have to quickly find each other and bond."

Crusoe: Newborn