Animated chicken puts Sheboygan in movies

Animated chicken puts Sheboygan in movies

Filmmakers picked up reference from ‘Step Into Liquid,’ a documentary with scenes shot here
Posted June 8, 2007

By Troy Laack
Sheboygan Press staff

“Surf’s Up,” the latest children’s animated movie being released in theaters nationwide today, includes a geeky, longneck chicken from Sheboygan and was inspired by a surfing documentary that had some scenes shot here.

Chicken Joe, a teenage rooster who surfs Lake Michigan off the Sheboygan shoreline, is one of the main characters in Sony Pictures Animation’s “Surf’s Up,” said Chris Jenkins, the movie’s producer and writer. The movie references Sheboygan twice — when Chicken Joe is interviewed near the beginning of the film and at the end when all the characters are announced individually.

In doing research for “Surf’s Up,” which is about a penguin surfing competition, the moviemakers were inspired by “Step Into Liquid,” a surfing documentary released in 2003 with scenes shot in Sheboygan, Jenkins said.

“It’s sort of like the premier penguin surfing competition of the world and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to bring somebody from Sheboygan,’“ Jenkins said. “Then we said, ‘Well, what if he wasn’t a penguin?’ You know, Midwest, chicken, and then that was the sort of certain cartoon alchemy about the idea.”

Surfer Larry Williams of Sheboygan, who is in “Step Into Liquid,” said the local scenes were shot during the annual Dairyland Surf Classic over Labor Day weekend.

“It was a documentary about the stoke of surfing around the world,” said Williams, 53. “They followed my twin brother and myself for five days. We just had a small, 2- to 4-foot choppy swell.”

While “Step Into Liquid” was a documentary, “Surf’s Up” is a mockumentary about penguin Cody Maverick, who is followed by a camera crew from his home in Shiverpool, Antarctica, to the surfing competition in the South Pacific, according to the movie’s Web site. Along the way, Cody meets and befriends Chicken Joe.

Williams, an organizer of the annual Dairyland Surf Classic, in which surfers from across the world compete for $4,000 in prizes, said “Surf’s Up” would promote the sport in Sheboygan.

“It does, even though it’s tongue-in-cheek, it gives some validity to what we’re doing here,” Williams said.

Jenkins said in “Surf’s Up,” Chicken Joe is everybody’s favorite character, because he’s unassuming.

“He goes through all sorts of troubles without realizing that he’s in trouble at all and he’s totally charming,” Jenkins said.

In the movie trailer, gibberish-speaking, headhunter penguins capture Chicken Joe and stick him in a kettle over a fire to cook him, but the surfboarding fowl thinks he’s relaxing in a hot tub.

Actor Jon Heder, who played the one of the main characters in each of the films “Blades of Glory,” “The Benchwarmers” and “Napoleon Dynamite,” is the voice of Chicken Joe.

“Surf’s Up” will play on two screens at Sheboygan Marc Cinema, 3226 Kohler Memorial Drive, and Dennis Udovich, the theater’s general manager thinks it will do well here.

“Sheboygan is a very family-oriented city and family films go over really big,” Udovich said. “Animation has come to a different level now with computer generated stuff. It’s unbelievable.”

“Surf’s Up” comes on the heels of “Happy Feet,” a Warner Brothers animated comedy film about penguins, which came out around Christmas.

“In the last year, the penguins have been the real craze for everybody for some reason,” Udovich said.

Reach Troy Laack at tlaack@sheboygan-press.com and 453-5133.