THE MEDIUM Dancing With the Paws - NYT

August 16, 2009
THE MEDIUM
Dancing With the Paws

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
A recent episode of “The Backyardigans,” the sublime animated series on Nickelodeon, pays tribute to the composer Kurt Weill. Not the plot: it’s about a hippo-journalist whose alter ego fights a robot. But the music conjures Berlin cabaret, with original songs by Evan Lurie, the sly maestro of Hollywood scores.

I asked Lurie, by phone, whether he has ever composed a great stand-alone single for “The Backyardigans,” which is aimed at children ages 2 to 5. He chortled and said, “I came up with one melody” for the hippo-robot episode, “and I thought, That’s really a Kurt Weill song.” He hummed a bar. “But Kurt Weill would be writing about why a woman was wronged by a man, and this song was about why the robot wants cheese.”

Why does the robot want cheese? An absurdist sensibility drives “The Backyardigans,” which chronicles the derring-do of five chewy-looking swashbucklers — Tyrone, Tasha, Pablo, Austin and Uniqua — in a range of David Hockney hues. With each episode devoted not just to a separate quest but also to a different musical genre — 80 so far, including Irish jig, King Oliver jazz, funk, bossa nova, township jive, Kenyan high life, tarantella, psychedelic soul, countrypolitan — the show blows you away with its artistic exactitude. A memory from childhood floods back: the fierce insistence on precision, in tempo and in visual detail, known to any passionate player of make-believe.

“When I was in preschool, the backyard seemed endless,” the show’s creator, Janice Burgess, said. “Where our fence met our neighbor’s — that’s one of my sense memories from when I was 2. It’s this notional adventure space.” Her show convenes five animal personalities in a halcyon set of neighboring backyards that transform — via digital imaging — into eye-popping photorealist panoramas: deserts, oceans, tundras, jungles, rivers.

And then the dancing starts. In preparation for each episode, Beth Bogush, a former program director at the junior division of the Alvin Ailey School, gets music from Lurie. She devises routines for each song and assembles five flesh-and-blood dancers to perform the parts of the Backyardigans on film. Animators study this film and then, with reference to laws of physics and physiology, manipulate the Backyardigan figures on their screens until they credibly reproduce down to the last detail the dancers’ sashays, waltz steps, brushes, balls and lifts.

Where the main constraint on Lurie’s composing is the voices of the singers (each part is sung by an actual child with a roughly one-octave range), Bogush, for her part, is periodically hampered by the undancerly physiques of the on-screen Backyardigans. Let’s not mince words: Tyrone’s a moose, Tasha’s a hippo, Pablo’s a penguin and Austin is a kangaroo. (Uniqua is unique.) “Their arms don’t go over their heads,” Bogush explained by phone. “The distance from the characters’ crotch down to the floor is — a little different.”

With time, though, Bogush and the show’s animators have found ways to create richly detailed and often gorgeous moves for short-limbed, round-bellied bipeds whose bodies barely comply. Originally the plan was to create “The Backyardigans” using “motion capture,” a procedure that records human movement and translates it onto digital, on-screen models. This works well in creating, say, video-game versions of Tiger Woods, whose movements are wide and grand, but it didn’t work for “The Backyardigans.” The action, Burgess told me, looked “too floaty.” She didn’t want drift; she wanted snap — crisp movement with strikes and specificity.

As Burgess spoke of 3-D animation, I briefly thought she was talking about muppetlike models. But she meant computer graphics that represent geometric data in three dimensions. The figures in “The Backyardigans” are created in computer 3-D, while the backdrops are essentially 2-D digital paintings, which are less — as she put it — “real.” I wondered what “real” meant in this context, and Burgess cracked up: “ ‘Real’ means — I don’t know. It’s really in the computer?”

Burgess’s embrace of levels of reality made me think of the varieties of imaginative life. In dreams, and in literary and musical fantasies, pleasure often derives from disembodiment, from moving frictionlessly through space, from floating. But there’s another kind of fantasy life — make-believe in the physical world. This, as “The Backyardigans” makes clear, is the enterprise undertaken by session musicians, actors, dancers and children in their backyards. Make-believers (as opposed to fantasizers) want nothing more than the intense physical experiences that authenticate their games — the clatter of armor, the rope burn from a lasso. Don’t you remember how hard you used to work as a kid to get the sounds and textures of some backyard game — cowboys, pirates, police — exactly right? It was those details that seemed to prove that this new, and newly strange, life was really, really happening.

Points of Entry: This Week’s Recommendations

THE LIZARDIGANS Among the coolest local New York acts in history is the Lounge Lizards. It’s time to savor the moody, gorgeous solo work of Evan Lurie, one of the band’s original members. Lurie’s CD “How I Spent My Vacation”can be bought through Amazon.

YOUR BACKYARD FRIENDS The 2008 “Born to Play” CD, available on Amazon, will net you great “Backyardigans” music, including my favorite zydeco psych-up song, “Go, Go, Go.” To see the show itself, turn to iTunes: Season 1 can be bought entire; Seasons 2 and 3 come by the episode.

INFINITY AND BEYOND In 1994, the year after the computer-generated imagery in “Jurassic Park” opened our eyes, “Babylon 5” became the first TV show to extensively use C.G.I. Check out Renderosity.com about making your own 2-D and 3-D digital art.