Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams has a lot riding on Walt Disney’s April 14 release of The Wild, an all-CG kids feature he directed with help from Toronto visual effects house CORE Digital Pictures.

The Toronto-raised animation whiz – known for introducing Steven Spielberg to the CG mechanics that went into Jurassic Park – says he got The Wild gig after Disney parted ways with prodco Pixar Animation Studios in 2002 and decided to farm out production on the film, which has a reported budget of $80 million.

The Wild portrays a teenage lion, Ryan, who is rescued by friends after being accidentally shipped from the New York Zoo to Africa. Kiefer Sutherland (more Cancon) voices Ryan’s father, Samson.

Disney executives were drawn to Williams, who co-runs the San Francisco-based prodco Complete Pandemonium, after seeing his popular Blockbuster Video commercials, which feature a CG’ed talking guinea pig and rabbit. Williams brought CORE on board after seeing its own furry handiwork on features Dr. Doolittle and The Nutty Professor.

But completing The Wild within Disney’s creative hothouse of intrigue and insecurity was no picnic. Williams recalls a lukewarm July 2005 test screening after which Disney studio heads began walking away from the project.

‘It could have died right then. But I thought ‘I’m not going to let this go.’ I said ‘Give me a month and I’ll fix it,” he recalls.

Williams replaced some scenes to kick The Wild’s storyline into shape, and it worked. Just before Christmas, Disney hosted another test screening and, this time, the audience satisfaction score leapt off the charts.

‘They were flipping out from the energy,’ Williams says of the Disney executives. The result is a heavy marketing campaign ahead of next month’s release.

John Mariella, VP and cofounder of CORE, praises the approximately 325 artists who managed to paint realistic, digital animals with detail uncommon in most animated features.

‘Think King Kong covered in fur. Now multiply that by six,’ he says of key characters in The Wild, including a squirrel, a vulture, a snake, and a penguin voiced by none other than Don Cherry. ‘You have five or six characters occupying most frames, and accompanying jungle and other background, so it’s intricate.’

Williams and CORE artists also had to decide how realistic the furry creatures could get without turning into near-photos. CORE used Pixar’s RenderMan software to shade in fur on the modeled bodies, before writing their own code to increase volume and shine.

‘The point was to paint – not the color of fur, but the length of the fur. As you stroked a brush across a lion’s back, you’d call for a stroke to represent short and medium length. The more you stroked, the thicker the fur became,’ explains Mariella.

CORE even employed a ‘mane manager’ to ensure that clumps of fur didn’t unduly move through parts of the lion’s body when it turned its head.

Now that Disney has announced its plan to acquire Pixar, Williams doubts the mouse house will ever farm out animation again, to a Canadian company or anyone.

‘If I’m lucky, they’ll pull me in to do something,’ he says, adding that in the meantime he’ll return to his farm outside San Francisco, where the die-hard Toronto Maple Leafs fan will continue ‘drinking beer and taking slapshots’ in the backyard.

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