It's often the case that, come Oscar time, a long-shot candidate for glory attracts a small but passionate cult of die-hards clamoring that attention must be paid. This year, that lucky duck is Surf's Up, which is nominated for Best Animated Feature, where it is scheduled to be steamrollered by Ratatouille when the awards are announced this coming Sunday. Surf's Up, which is set among a tribe of surfboarding penguins, and which features voice work by Shia LaBoef, Jeff Bridges, Zooey Deschanel, and James Woods, has already been through one trial of fire last week, at the annual "Annie Awards", celebrating the best in animation in film and television. Although Ratatouille easily dominated that event, Surf's Up did take home two of the smaller prizes, which is more than fellow nominees Persepolis, The Simpsons Movie and Shrek the Third were able to manage. Not too shabby for a box-office disappointment that was widely dismissed as a rider in Happy Feet's tail wind.
As Joel Sappell reports in the Los Angeles Times, the secret to the movie's cult success lies in its having been embraced by the surfing community. "The lead wave animator is a hard-core surfer, as is the film's editor. Recruited as consultants were surfing greats Kelly Slater and Rob Machado, who later gave voice to a couple of penguin sports commentators of the same names and general appearance." The movie also kids the often rocky romance between Hollywood and surf culture with an opening that parodies surfing documentaries such as the Endless Summer films and Riding Giants. The mockery is undercut, though, by a full embrace of the same natural wonders that those docs trance out on. Or, as Sony Entertainment Chief Amy Paschal puts it, "The water is amazing." It is indeed. "Initially," Sappell writes, "the sport was simply a backdrop for a "very cartoony" love story between two penguins living on a tropical island, says producer Chris Jenkins, who, as an animator, specialized in ocean scenes. Jenkins says the more he learned about the spiritual nature of surfing, the more potential he saw for a film with deeper meanings and metaphors." It was a peek at the animated water imagery that sucked in Jeff Bridges: "You look at it and go, 'I know this isn't a photograph, but it looks so damn real.' They showed me those waves, and I got hooked." Bridges' presence on the soundtrack is the movie's ace in the hole in more ways than one: not only is the actor a veteran wave rider whose name gives a project like this credibility, but it enabled him to revive, in all but name and species, the spirit of one of his most beloved characters, the Dude from The Big Lebowski. (Once you recignize that it's Bridges' voice emanating from the legendary surfing bird Big Z, it's hard not to picture the actor recording his lines while poured into a chair and wearing his bathrobe.) Once it was decided to make a movie that would serve as an ode to surfing rather than a cheap joke at its expense, everyone got into the spirit and went all out: "On one occasion, Quiksilver Entertainment, a partner in the film, supplied a surfer to show animators what it's like to nearly drown under a churning mountain of water. 'He was a writhing ball on the floor," says Jenkins. "You absorb moments like that.'" Though Surf's Up is still a dark horse in the Oscar race, the attention it's gotten from the Academy, and from the beach crowd, is a major consolation to the animators who were royally bummed by its failure to smash box office records last summer. Now, maybe if it's cult continues to grow, I can go on eBay and finally unload some of these Slurpee cups.
