BOTH CRITTERS AND HUMANS PUSHED TO THE LIMITS ON ...; DOGGED PATH TO MAKING OF `DR. DOLITTLE'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

There was only one conceivable reason to remake ``Dr. Dolittle,'' 20th Century Fox's notorious, 1967 children's musical that cost a mint and flopped big time.

That reason was the new computer graphics technology, showcased so winningly three years ago in ``Babe,'' that could really make this grandaddy of all talking animal stories sing on the screen.

A funny thing happened on the way to the new ``Dr. Dolittle,'' though.

While designing the new movie as a contemporary Eddie Murphy comedy rather than the period musical based more faithfully on Hugh Lofting's series of kids books, director Betty Thomas discovered that live animals could have better senses of humor than virtual ones.

``I'd say what you see on screen is 95 percent live animals,'' explains Thomas, the former ``Hill Street Blues'' star-turned-director of such meta-media comedies as ``The Brady Bunch Movie,'' ``Private Parts'' and HBO's ``The Late Shift.'' ``I think that's a new high. We didn't start out trying to do that, but they learned a lot and were so responsive.''

In the new version, Murphy plays successful San Francisco physician John Dolittle who, on the eve of a profitable merger between his clinic and a ghastly HMO, finds his long-repressed childhood ability to communicate with animals has returned. He's soon, um, badgered by a homeless mutt named Lucky (voiced by Norm Macdonald), dissed by his daughter's guinea pig (Chris Rock), cornered into trying to help a pain-wracked, suicidal tiger (Albert Brooks) and generally considered the man to see for what ails all manner of yakkety beasts.

Initially, Dolittle wants nothing less than to be on a bunch of wisecracking critters' wavelengths. But he eventually comes around to accepting his mission of helping the fur-bearing and fowl - which, of course, makes everyone think he's gone nuts.

Tough project

Thomas admits she must have been a little nuts to take on this assignment. But she had great help from head animal trainer Mark Forbes and some 40 other beastie specialists (each species had its own trainer), and from visual-effects supervisor Jon Farhat, who oversaw the work of dozens of digital artists at CG outfits around the globe to make the talking animals come to life.

Wait a minute. Didn't Thomas say practically all of the animals were real? Well, yes, but . . .

``They're live animals, but we put CG facial parts on them,'' says Farhat, who admits this job was tougher than the astonishing transformation work his team performed for Murphy's last hit, ``The Nutty Professor.''

``We wanted to do something different from the other talking-animal shows, which was: If it didn't look like it could be done with the facial muscles those animals had, we wouldn't do it.

``It's still easier for a dog to move its mouth than for a computer to fake it, so we relied, mostly, on what the animal's sense of good acting was,'' Farhat continues. ``Rather than obsess over believable lip movements, if we could get something across with an eye expression or a nose scrunch, we did that. The other thing was, even though they could be trained to do all kinds of things, the animals couldn't necessarily do them at the right time or exactly the same way through repeated takes. That's also where the computers came in.''

Bring on the animals

Forbes, of Birds and Animals Unlimited, has been supplying trained critters to the entertainment industry for 10 years, including such multipup jobs as ``101 Dalmatians.''

But the big menagerie of species and demanding nature of ``Dolittle's'' character comedy made this the hardest job of his career.

``There were two big challenges,'' Forbes notes. ``One was the whole talking aspect, which involved a lot of CG and motion-control camera work (in which a take is reshot several times with different elements each run-through that are then composited together but which requires any recurring element to look and move exactly the same each time). You'd have to get a tiger to move an inch that way or a dog to cock his head at precisely the right angle. That was so exacting, as opposed to just throwing a bunch of animals into a room.

``The other thing was the number of different animals working together in the same scene. It's one thing to have a well-trained dog, or even a tiger, working by themselves. But different animals together compounds problems like crazy. You not only have the individual animals listening to their particular trainers - who all have different sound signals, whistles or whoops or what have you, that drive the human actors nuts - but they all have to be getting along with each other.

``And though you can train a lot of animals to tolerate one another ... we had to shoot the tiger and owls, the preying animals, separately.''

The human element

Then there was that other difficult creature, Eddie Murphy.

``Some people are animal people, some just aren't,'' Forbes says with a shrug.

``Eddie sure isn't an animal person,'' Thomas says in a less philosophical tone of voice. ``Nobody told me that when I started this movie. And of course Fox, in all their wisdom, was broadcasting `When Animals Attack!' all during this shoot, which was great for Eddie to see.

``It took awhile, it really did, for him to get comfortable with them, but he realized he had to. And I got him to do a lot of things with the animals that he swore he never would.''

For Thomas, in the end, the computers proved more frustrating than either the human actors or their furry and feathered friends.

``First we recorded the animal characters' voices, then played them back for Eddie while he tried to do the scene,'' she explains. ``Then he'd come up with new stuff, and we'd go back to the animal voice actors and they'd invent new gags and lines, especially after they saw what their animal could do. So there was all this improvisation going on, which drove the special-effects guys crazy.

``But the toughest thing, for me, was feeling cut off from the group of special-effects humans. I knew the computer people were really creating the performances. I wanted to be there every day with them, but they were literally in Canada and Paris, as well as Santa Monica, so you feel like you're no longer in control of that. When you suddenly get a funny idea or a new line that you want to add, everyone says, `Are you nuts?' We already spent $25,000 on this line!''

Forbes, too, is ambivalent about the wonders of mixing irrational animals and virtual technology.

``At first you want to think CG will make your job easier,'' he says. ``It doesn't. It makes the training more complicated. Now, animals have to do the exact thing at a certain point in time and space to match everything else. But on the other hand, you're able to do a lot more things than you could before.''

Farhat explains that the trick is in sticking with what your living, breathing performer does best; in other words, the process employed in making ``Dr. Dolittle.''

``Don't use technology to make it look real when you've got reality sitting in front of you,'' he says. ``That's the toughest thing to maintain, because producers think you can generate anything in CG. But you want to change reality, not make reality.''

And as for the more organically oriented professionals' complaints about high-tech filmmaking, Farhat points out that it's a two-way street.

``One of the hardest things was taping the tiger for our computer models, getting him to look scared and all of that,'' Farhat recalls. ``He didn't get along with people very well, you know. But he liked me, I guess, because he - how do you say it? - marked me.

``Talk about Hollywood being a town where you get pi---d on. I think I paid my dues.''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) While Eddie Murphy initially wasn't very comfortable with the animal menagerie on the ``Dr. Dolittle'' set, his talent for improvised dialogue also posed some technical challenges.

(2) ``Eddie sure isn't an animal person. Nobody told me that when I started this movie,'' says Betty Thomas, the film's director.