The superstars of the New York Zoo, the darlings of the audience: the lion Alex, the hysterical zebra Marty, the glamorous hippopotamus Gloria and the hypochondriac giraffe Melman, as well as the penguins, lemurs and chimpanzees are back with us !!!
In the long-awaited continuation of the favorite animated comedy of all time, a magnificent four is on a deserted island coast.
The only way out of this situation is to trust the insane penguins who are taking care of the repair of the broken plane. But penguins would not be penguins if they did without surprises. Only taking off, the whole honest company lands in the very heart of African savannahs.
Now the stars of show business will have to meet with wild relatives. Leo meets family, Gloria - love, and the rest? See for yourself! Just be careful, the penguins are close!
If in the first film the action takes place in Madagascar, then in order to truly recreate the unique atmosphere of sultry African landscapes, the filmmakers went there to gain impressions from the original sources. Watching the strange plants, which, incidentally, there are more than 14 000 units, animals and birds, and even a specific decline in the desert, we really believe that the work is done impeccably.
Animators also had to work on the appearance of pets. To animate a long mane, the artists improved the system of wigs from Shreka-2. The most difficult thing was to make Alex's mane. She moved dynamically - automatically, reacting to movements of the head and body. Animators manipulated it manually. This system allowed the mane to interact with complex geometry (for example, when the character holds a paw or hand on Alex's mane).
A team of professionals from DreamWorks Animation and PDI / DreamWorks, led by script writers and filmmakers Tom McGrath and Eric Darnell, managed to ensure that computer animation looks in the spirit of hand-drawn cartoon masterpieces by Chuck Jones and Tex Avery.
"We were inspired by the best examples of classical animation, beginning with the thirties and forties of the last century, when the comic effect was achieved largely due to the movements and animation of the characters," explains McGrath. - And we knew that this film should become a comedy of this type. It should be just a farce. "
"If the first" Madagascar "was talking about who such characters are and what they mean to each other, in the second, the quadruple shows us the situations in which we often find ourselves. Questions of generations conflicts, self-identification, search for love, will not leave anyone indifferent. We are confident that the second cartoon turned out even better and funnier. "
"Our characters are very stylized and not based on reality, so we had complete freedom of action in terms of their movements and appearance," Darnell adds. - They are, as it were, two-dimensional in concept, but they are executed in three-dimensional form on the computer. This is a real cartoon. "
Producer Mireille Soraya agrees with him: "This film is much more like a traditional cartoon film than anything we've done before. We used this design for creating characters, and for the whole design of the animated film. "
The cartoon style of Madagascar allowed the artists of the company PDI / DreamWorks to give the characters a style trait, called "flattening and stretching" - an indispensable feature of the classic drawing animation, when the character under the artist's pencil deforms, and then takes the original shape. Pencil is easy to do, on a computer - much harder.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG, notes: "The technology of computer animation continues to flourish, and these new stages inspire script writers into new bursts of imagination. We did not hire 200 "crazy scientists" who are trying to come up with all kinds of unprecedented things, so that we then puzzle over how to use them. Just the opposite. We receive a script, for the implementation of which we need a lot of special techniques and technologies ... then there are 200 crazy scientists and join the battle, - he laughs. "But the point, after all, is to tell a beautiful story."