FEATURE FILM

without digital technology the film could not have been done at this level.
     The Powerpuff Girls Movie is a stunning example of how the traditional way of doing things can be merged with the modern way of doing things with none of the seams showing. On the traditional side is the story process. For about six weeks, McCracken, Faust, Story Artists Charlie Bean, Paul Rudish and Don Shank and Writer Amy Keating Rogers locked themselves in the second floor conference room of Cartoon Network's Burbank, Calif. studio and forged a story outline (actually two, the second involving a triumvirate of supervillains who battle for world domination, an idea Faust says left little room for "cuteness and little charming things").
     Over the next five months the story team boarded the entire film and wrote all the dialogue, taking each of the film’s three acts one at a time and splitting up the work five ways. "Of course, not everything matched up perfectly," says Faust. "We had to go in and tweak things here and there, but that’s how we did it - no script."
     Once the boards had been approved, tradition gave way to high tech - at least much higher tech than the Powerpuff team was used to, particularly in lieu of the fact that the series was one of the very last on TV to still ink, paint and photograph cels (for the record, only the last two episodes of the last season of Powerpuff Girls - it’s fourth - were digitally scanned).
     Instead of shipping all of production over seas, McCracken and Art Director Mike Moon kept a substantial amount of work stateside, doing all digital compositing on the feature at the North Hollywood, CaIif.-based Virtual

Magic Animation. As a result, the level of control on the animation - which was done by Rough Draft in Korea - and the overall look of the film were greatly heightened. Every single character layout drawing was sent from Korea back to Burbank, where McCracken and Faust checked, approved and, if need be, revised every single extreme. Genndy Tartakovsky, the film’s animation director, timed each of the lay outs before they went back to Korea for animation.
     The final animation from Rough Draft was further enhanced through compositing. In fact, instructions often called for unfinished animation that could be digitally manipulated. "Almost every scene in the movie had some thing about it that was handled that way," says Moon. "There were many cases of animating characters really large in the center of a 12-field piece of animation paper and then shrinking them down [digitally] to maintain the clarity and crispness of that large drawing."
     In addition to the standard digital applications - sweeping camera moves and image replication - the filmmakers used compositing techniques to give movement to flat-painted backgrounds. "The tag sequence of the movie has a series of animated bg’s that typically wouldn’t look very good if they were handled in the traditional way, nor were they very easy to animate overseas," Moon says. "We requested that they not animate anything, but rather paint separate flat elements of buildings and then we were able to take those, pile them together to form city blocks, and then distort them and run them past the camera in perspective. You end up with this dimensional action, but it looks exactly like a hand-painted background and you don’t have that jump