The board members who loved ‘Surf’s Up’

Crowded into a theater on Oahu’s famed North Shore were some of the world’s best big-wave riders. They’d been invited to preview Hollywood’s latest stab at a surf movie, and there were plenty of skeptics on hand.

Dating to the late 1950s, when Gidget first grabbed a board, the studios could never seem to get it right, populating their films with goofy stereotypes and implausible plots. But this one was different. When the lights went down, giant waves rose up on the screen -- peeling and pitching perfectly. White water exploded toward the sky as the translucent barrels crashed on coral reefs. A pint-sized surfer sliced across them.

Dazzled, the audience hooted and hollered. Whoa, those waves were unreal.

Literally.

Odd as it may seem, “Surf’s Up” -- an Academy Award nominee for best animated feature -- has been embraced by the surfing community as arguably the most authentic studio offering about wave riding since “Big Wednesday” in 1978. This, even though its marquee stars are penguins and a laid-back (stoned?) bird named Chicken Joe, who was picked by Surfer magazine as “the most intriguing surfer of 2007.”

Veteran watermen brought their experience to play in virtually every facet of the movie, which mimics the documentary style of countless DVDs stacked in surf shops, from Bruce Brown’s classic “Endless Summer” to his son’s soulful “Step Into Liquid.”

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. And then there’s Jeff Bridges, who plays an aging and reclusive penguin, once the greatest surfer of all. Bridges has been paddling into Malibu’s swells since he was 14.

The actor says he was sold the minute the producer and directors let him peek at their waves. “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.”

Blame the birds?

Although reviews of “Surf’s Up” were mostly good, the movie was a box-office disappointment for Sony Pictures Animation, making only $17.6 million domestically in its opening weekend in June.

Some studio executives say that by the time “Surf’s Up” debuted, moviegoers were suffering from penguin fatigue. Their picture had been in development for years but was a step behind the Academy Award-winning documentary “March of the Penguins” and the animated “Happy Feet.”

Oscar prognosticators expressed surprise, even shock, when “Surf’s Up” received a nomination alongside Sony Pictures Classics’ “Persepolis” and Pixar Animation’s “Ratatouille,” the favorite to win. It trumped two Golden Globe nominees, “The Simpsons Movie” and “Bee Movie” with Jerry Seinfeld. But the arched eyebrows had less to do with the movie’s merits than with its apparent invisibility among industry insiders.

“I don’t know anyone who’s seen it,” says one Academy Award consultant for a rival studio.

Sony Entertainment chief Amy Pascal, who calls “Surf’s Up” a “love letter to surfing,” says the film was swamped by a summer of big movies but did ride a wave of acclaim among one appreciative audience segment -- animators, many of whom help pick Oscar nominees.

“There’s incredible love for it in the animation community because it’s something you haven’t seen before,” Pascal says. “The water is amazing.”

In fact, weeks before the Oscar lineup was announced, the animation society’s Hollywood branch nominated “Surf’s Up” for 10 of its Annie Awards, just behind “Ratatouille,” with 13.

“Surf’s Up” is, of course, a longshot to win an Oscar. But if the surfing world could vote, the movie would likely paddle off with the statue.

Initially, 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.

“There’s an eternal quality to the ocean,” he says. “There’s always going to be another wave and another opportunity. The lesson is: Don’t look to what you’ve missed, look to what’s coming your way.”

With the original concept scrapped, “Surf’s Up” was turned into a “mockumentary” about the quest of a headstrong young penguin (Shia LaBeouf) to win the Penguin World Surfing Championship. Along the way, he encounters a huckster promoter (James Woods), a cutthroat rival (Diedrich Bader), a winsome lifeguard (Zooey Deschanel) and a surfing legend named Big Z (Bridges), who teaches the upstart competitor that winning isn’t everything.

The new plot required a greater need for authenticity, Jenkins says. “It was important that we weren’t painting another parody of surfers.”

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.”

Going to the experts

In their early research, Jenkins and directors Ash Bannon (“Toy Story 2”) and Chris Buck (“Tarzan”) planted a table on the sand during a world-class surf contest at Trestles, just south of San Clemente, and interviewed surfers as they got out of the water. Former U.S. champ Machado says he didn’t know what to make of the guys with tape recorders and odd questions.

“They told me they had this idea to make an animated surfing movie,” Machado recalls. “I figured they were going to animate me. I walked out thinking, ‘That was really weird. I don’t get it.’ They didn’t ask about me. They were more interested in my feelings and emotions when I surfed.”

But months later, when he was asked to be a consultant, Machado says, “it all made sense. They weren’t just tapping into surfing as an avenue for a movie. They were learning about the surf culture and how it evolved.”

By then, Machado’s pal, eight-time world champion Slater, also had been recruited through his sponsor, Quiksilver. Together, the pair helped animators create dead ringers for waves at such legendary spots as Pipeline on Oahu and Mavericks near Half Moon Bay in Northern California. They described the physics of the waves, how the bottom influences speed, how the rider interacts with the tube.

“They wanted to do good by us and create something we could be proud of,” says Slater, who with Machado and extreme-sports announcer Sal Masekela were later written into the movie as contest commentators for SPEN (Sports Penguin Entertainment Network).

No one was more obsessed with film’s realism than John Clark, who led the wave animation team and recently won an Annie for his work. He grew up near Slater’s home break in Cocoa Beach, Fla., and started surfing when he was 5. He never let up.

Clark considered the waves as important as any character in the movie and scoured surf videos and photographs for every conceivable angle. He was obsessed with guarding against visuals or story lines that would “make surfers groan.”

“My goal,” he says, “was to fight tooth-and-nail to ‘keep it real.’ ”

One of the film’s most dramatic -- and real -- moments is a wipeout scene in which the aspiring penguin champion is pounded and dragged under by a succession of dark, monster waves, modeled after Mavericks’ dangerous break. Clark says he drew from experience. “I know what it’s like to be annihilated by huge waves.”

And by smaller ones.

During the film’s production, Clark suffered a freak accident while surfing head-high waves in northern Malibu. The tail of his board sliced the bottom two-thirds of his eyelid, denting the eye itself.

“I scared everyone out of their wits,” he says. “I was the only one animating waves at the time.” But two surgeries and six days later, Clark was back at work -- and back in the water.

Clark says that although everyone was disappointed by the film’s showing at the box office, the Oscar nomination “is confirmation that the movie is as good as we thought it was. . . . I wanted my part to be such that it was the one movie that came out of Hollywood that surfers really liked.”

The dude got it right.

As the review in Surfing magazine put it: “For the first time ever, Hollywood doesn’t make us want to quit surfing, it makes us want to go surfing.”

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joel.sappell@latimes.com