What is the 'Gorilla Technology Envelope'? Zookeeper Kevin James and Co. Explain

I'll leave it to our esteemed critics to supply the complete lowdown on this week's Kevin James comedy Zookeeper, but in the meantime, at least one intriguing element emerged from my viewing last week: The film's forlorn, TGI Friday's-craving gorilla, Bernie. Voiced by Nick Nolte with a sort of gruff, mechanized sheen, the beast is one of several at Boston's Franklin Park Zoo who chips in to help their beloved zookeeper Griffin (James) land the girl of his dreams (Leslie Bibb -- or is it Rosario Dawson, playing his veterinarian colleague? What is a zookeeper to do?). But it's also the one most notably pushing the technology envelope on the set. Or more specifically, according to a claim about which I just had to solicit some clarification from James and Co., "the gorilla technology envelope."

Seriously! According to Tom Woodruff Jr., the Oscar-winning co-founder (with Alec Gillis) of effects house Amalgamated Dynamics Inc., Zookeeper represented a premium opportunity for the company to "push the gorilla technology envelope." Woodruff himself wore a specially developed gorilla suit, complete with a head containing 33 servomotors that looks just cheesy enough to pass as fake when Griffin breaks Bernie out of his cell for a TGI Friday's date, but just authentic enough to coexist with the very real lions, bears, monkey, giraffe, elephant and other animal specimens populating the zoo. In the film's press notes, Woodruff elaborated: "When we designed Bernie, we did something that I've wanted to do for years and years that hasn't been done before. To really copy a gorilla's physique, you have to have very short legs, very long arms, but also a very long torso. If you put a person into a gorilla suit, the person's legs would be too long." To ensure the correct proportions for Bernie's torso and short legs, the filmmakers cut a hole in the fake floor where Bernie spends much of his time seated; Woodruff popped up into the gorilla suit, to which shorter puppet legs were attached.

On the one hand, there is some serious uncanny valley stuff going on here -- that unsettling, realistic-but-not-quite-realistic-enough state of artificial being -- that humans usually reserve for the notorious motion-capture characters in films like Robert Zemeckis's recent A Christmas Carol. On the other -- until the ridiculous ending, anyway -- Bernie is weirdly sympathetic in his posture, his gesticulations and expressions. It's an essential quality in a character that Gillis calls arguably the most front-and-center animatronic part since E.T., and there's something fascinating, even refreshing (especially from Nolte, among the shrieking voice work by Adam Sandler, Judd Apatow and Maya Rudolph and others) about the results.

"We tried to metamorphosize a human into a gorilla, but that didn't work," director Frank Coraci quipped at last week's Zookeeper press conference in Manhattan. He and his fellow panelists -- James, Dawson, Bibb and producer Todd Garner -- had apparently not received the memo about "pushing the gorilla technology envelope" before being alerted to it by Movieline. But at least from a creative point of view, it seemed to make sense to the principals once it came up.

"We just wanted to have a gorilla that looked real, since all of the other animals in the movie were real," Coraci continued. "We had this company ADI; we looked at all the gorillas that had been built for other, prior movies. We wanted to have control of making Bernie's personality and how he looked, so we decided to create a new gorilla for our movie with the latest technology -- servomotors and stuff -- so it looked real. But it was fun because we got to create a personality for Bernie from scratch. We were talking about the character; we thought, 'Should we go for an old, crabby guy?' Then, 'No, he's got to be sweeter.' It was just fun to really create a character from scratch, and he did whatever we wanted."

James simply remembered the experience as "fun," adding that its practical purposes paid off as well. "We had two guys in the suit, because one guy's legs were really long," he said. "He was probably the better actor, I would think, but we couldn't use him any time on the move because he was..." James turned to Coraci: "What was he? Seven feet nine?" Both men shrugged. James turned back to me. "And gorillas don't have long legs, apparently. I didn't know this. So we had to switch them up. But they were great. Comedically, they were great. They were awesome acting together with me, and with their movements and stuff like that. It was great to play off of that."

Garner chimed in as well: "And what cracked us up was that the puppeteers would act off of Kevin, so you'd get different performances every time out of the gorilla. Which sounds crazy! But it fun to be able to see them improv with Kevin based on his actions."

"And the face of this gorilla!" James exclaimed. "It's insane what they can do with him. I've gotten more emotion of him than out of some other actors." The dais broke into hubbub. "But no one up here!" James hastened to add.

"I'm not happy about this," Bibb joked.

Dawson leaned in toward James. "Was it easier," she asked, "to act with the animatronic gorilla than it was with the little dots where the other animals would be?"

"Yes," James replied. "Yes. It's nice to have something there that's not just a tennis ball or something. That was good."

"And he couldn't sit next to a live gorilla," Coraci said. Right -- that's a whole other envelope altogether.

Zookeeper opens nationwide on Friday. Drop back by this site Thursday for Movieline's review.