I made a monster

loveable green ogre Shrek to life.

THE problem with Shrek, says animator Anthony Hodgson, is that the loveable green ogre is such a funny shape. He is not trying to be fattist or anything, but making Shrek bend over is... difficult.

"He has got extremely short legs and a really big belly," says Anthony, quite unaware of the hurt he gives to those of us who share these characteristics.

"So it is difficult to make him bend over or look down. As soon as he starts tilting forward, his chin crashes into his chest, and his belly into his legs!"

Lovers of the original Shrek movie hopefully won't have noticed this deficiency in their hero's range of movements.

Fortunately, by the time Anthony and his fellow animators were working on Shrek 2, technology had moved on. In the new film, says Anthony, the ogre has a new belly.

"And it definitely makes his bending a lot better!"

Shrek's legions of fans will be mightily relieved to hear it.

The bendability of a computer-generated ogre seems an odd thing to be discussing on the telephone at 6.15 in the evening.

It is a sunny 10.15 in the morning in Redwood City, California, where Anthony is calling from, however. You can excuse his pre-occupation, because the finer points of ogre movement are his business.

Seven years ago the former York schoolboy was a self-employed animator and childrens' TV scriptwriter - he worked on programmes such as The Blobs - living in London.

He already had a couple of short animated films under his belt and had done a stint as resident animator at the Museum of the Moving Image in London.

Then out of the blue he received a call from Dreamworks. They were planning a new animated film about ants, and were recruiting animators.

Was he interested?

He wasn't sure at first. "But I had a friend who worked in California," he says, "and they were going to fly me out for an interview. So it was a chance to see him and get a free holiday."

That film about ants Dreamworks was making turned out to be Antz, the animated blockbuster starring the voice of an anxious Woody Allen that turned into a worldwide hit.

Anthony, a former Canon Lee schoolboy who was brought up in Clifton Without and first studied graphic design at York College, hasn't looked back since.

Antz, which came out in 1998, was followed by Shrek in 2001 - an even bigger monster of a hit which won an Oscar for best animated feature.

Since then Anthony, 35, has risen within the Dreamworks ranks to the position of directing animator, and now calls California home.

He lives in San Francisco, works at the Dreamworks animation studio in Redwood City, has an American wife, and sports a curious mid-Atlantic accent that if anything sounds more Swedish than American or Yorkshire.

He says San Francisco is "notoriously chilly for California" - though not compared with York. "There is more space, a bit more sunshine, less rain."

None of which stops him coming over here once a year with his wife Nif to visit his family, who still live in York.

But back to Shrek. The film, in case you have not seen it, was the tale of a green-skinned ogre - voiced by Mike Myers - whose beloved swamp is invaded by an A-list of fairytale celebs.

They have been banished to Shrek's back-of-beyond bogland by the diminutive despot Lord Farquaad: and he's not going to remove Snow White and her fellow luvvie squatters from Shrek's swamp unless the ogre succeeds in rescuing Princess Fiona (voiced by Cameron Diaz) from the clutches of a dragon.

Shrek sets out on his perilous rescue mission accompanied only by a smart-ass Donkey (Eddie Murphy) - and the pair's double act is one of the things that made the film such a warm-hearted, comic delight.

In the new film, Shrek and Princess Fiona are married - much to the horror of her royal parents.

There are also some great new characters - including an ambitious fairy godmother (voiced by Jennifer Saunders) and a swash-buckling, Zorro-ish Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas).

Bringing this gallery of characters to life is Anthony's job.

There were about 25 animators on the original Shrek film - and even more on Shrek 2.

As a directing animator, Anthony is in charge of a team of about eight. He goes to more meetings than he would like - but he does still get to do animation. So how do they bring Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, Puss and the rest to life? Drawing doesn't come into it, he says - which in his case is a good thing, because by his own admission he can't really draw. Instead, everything is done on computers.

The original design drawings for each character are used to 'sculpt' a 3-D computer model with its own 'virtual skeleton'. The joints can then be moved around on the computer just as if the virtual model were a "real" puppet.

It is all done by numbers - in fact, one of the key tools is a spreadsheet, says Anthony.

Each joint has a sliding scale of values, and by inputting a number - 90 say - the joint will move a certain amount.

The animators also plot graphs to show the characters' movements over time, with time on the horizontal axis, and movement on the vertical.

Facial expressions are achieved in basically the same way.

Each face has a number of "points" that can be moved - each of Shrek's eyebrows alone has about 15 of them, says Anthony - to create a range of expressions with great sensitivity.

It is not all done "point by point", however. The computer has "higher level" controls which can generate a complete expression.

"So there is a smile control which you can dial up and gradually increase the smile, or the same with a frown or the slope of the eyebrows," says Anthony.

Using these techniques, teams such as Anthony's work on an entire short sequence of the film, first blocking in the characters and their movements and gradually building up the detail.

The sequence is then passed to other departments in the Dreamworks studio to add in clothes, hair and even the backgrounds.

It all sounds a bit, well, mathematical. How does he connect with the characters he's creating - and is it artistically satisfying?

It is still about telling a story, he says: it just requires the development of certain technical skills to enable you to do that.

Being able to communicate emotion - to make the characters laugh or feel sad, angry or frustrated - is what keeps it interesting. I really enjoy the work."

So does he have a favourite character? He prefers the animals because they are more "cartooney".

"My favourite is the Donkey. The human characters tend to be more difficult to animate, partly because if you don't get it exactly right, everybody will think 'that's not how a human moves'". Not surprisingly, nobody actually knows how a walking, talking donkey should move; so the animators have a freer hand.

While they were making the original Shrek, none of the animators realised how good the film was. They were too close to it, says Anthony. It was only when they saw the finished version in its final mix that they knew what they had got.

Shrek 2 looks certain to repeat the magic. Already it is breaking box office records in the US, and is perfectly timed for the summer season here.

Anthony is now working on Shrek 3. Isn't there a risk that could be too much of a good thing? He thinks for a moment.

"There is still a long way to go and a lot to do with it," he says.

"With the universe they have created there's a huge number of opportunities and you can take it a million different ways."

Clearly, the Shrek story is still far from over over.

Updated: 09:27 Tuesday, June 29, 2004