Making Hop Was Much More Complicated Than You Thought

Judging from the reviews of Hop, the only way you'll probably see it over the weekend is if you have a child who doesn't want to watch Toy Story 3 for the sixty-seventh time. (Or maybe if you just want to see more of the ever-charming James Marsden.) Though while the quality of the animation hybrid might be fairly stale -- Movieline's Stephanie Zacharek wrote that the film was as "emotionally hollow as an empty plastic egg" -- the process of getting it to the big screen was quite perilous.

Speaking with the Los Angeles Times, director Tim Hill (Alvin and the Chipmunks) discussed just how pressed for time production of Hop was.

[W]e only had 10 or 11 months to make the movie and, once we stopped shooting, six months. [...] The way you calculate this kind of movie [coming in] is you say, "What's the most time-consuming, what am I going to get screwed on?" You start to identify the hotspots that are really going to kill you. And in this case there were a lot of them. Animation you can change as you go -- it's not like live-action. You're spitballing way after you should be, and that's when we got into the "Oh [crap], are we going to make it?" And they [animation and effects studio Rhythm & Hues] finally said, "We're not going to be able to deliver your movie."

[...]

It was a crisis, basically. I think what they were doing is drawing a line in the sand. So we got it to them and then we said, "Where are we?" And they said, "This we can do and this we can't do." So there were a lot of things we still wanted to do and they would say, "We can't do that." They had hundreds of people working, but there wasn't enough time. They have to animate and go through so many processes. That's why it takes animated films two or three years to make instead of a year. They said, "You can throw all the money you want at us, but we can't do it."

Hill says it took a "worldwide effort" to bring Hop to the big screen. Which just goes to show you that making an animated Easter Bunny poop out jelly beans is a lot more difficult than it looks.

· 'Hop' director Tim Hill: Our movie almost didn't make it [LAT/24 Frames]