Jeff Bridges and Shia LaBeouf on the set of Surf's Up Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation

Jenkins and the Surf's Up crew went to great lengths to preserve the purity of the performances. Unlike many other animated films where members of the cast are recorded separately, Surf's Up took the unusual step of recording the cast together, giving actors like Jeff Bridges, who plays Maverick's beach bum mentor in the film, and Zooey Deschanel, who voices Maverick's love interest and lifeguard Lani Aliikai, a chance to work in the same room and improvise dialogue. The result is a film that feels fresher and more alive than most animated fare, something that came as a revelation to Jenkins, who was a visual effects animator and supervisor during Disney's golden era of the 1990s on films including Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. Even though it's still the norm to do individual vocal sessions in animation, Jenkins says now he would never go back to doing it any other way.

"We don't want the average audience member to even think about it," says Jenkins. "We want them to experience as they would a live action movie. We were doing a reality TV/documentary-like thing, and we knew that if we ever fell down on the cadence of that speech or if we ever made the audience too aware, too clever, or winked at the audience, then the movie would start to fall apart."

Of course, there is a reason that most animated films haven't attempted to record the cast together, since, as LaBeouf notes, the production can become a logistical nightmare.

"We would block a full scene in a sound stage," says LaBeouf, describing his interaction with fellow castmembers. "And then we would walk through the whole scene as though we were penguins, and they would mike it so that we could go to our first mark and there'd be a mike there, and we could walk to our second mark and there'd be a mike there. I don't think that's ever been done in animation. We spent arduous hours just blocking scenes. And having more than one character in a room has never been done either, where you have five, six different characters in a scene, they're all miked and you have to keep my voice out of Jeff Bridges' microphone."

Casting these characters proved critical since, in addition to being recorded, animators also filmed the recording sessions to incorporate the actors' mannerisms into their characters onscreen. Rather than just casting marquee names, Surf's Up filmmakers took pains to find the right person for each role, so that the film features a cast of characters voiced by actors whose vocal presence is as distinct as their onscreen performance.

Chicken Joe (Jon Heder) and Cody Maverick (voiced by Shia LaBeouf) in Surf's Up Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation

While LaBeouf's star has risen since production was completed on Surf's Up, filmmakers were impressed with his sense of comedic timing and the depth he brought to the role of a son who grows up without his father. This theme touched upon LaBeouf's personal experiences with his own dad, which was something he already mined for his breakthrough role in The Battle of Shaker Heights, as documented on the second season of the HBO reality series Project Greenlight. For a father figure, Jenkins says that he penciled in Jeff Bridges as soon as he came up with the character of Cody's mentor Big Z, even though Bridges had never done an animated film before.

"There was only one person that could play this old kind of out-of-shape surfer dude, that had the right voice characteristics, had a California voice characteristic who could go as deep as we needed him to go," says Jenkins, who adds that animators convinced Bridges to take the part by creating a short clip of his penguin character speaking in the voice of his most famous role, The Dude from The Big Lebowski. As Bridges was wowed by the animated reinterpretation of his most iconic role, LaBeouf, just like his character Cody, was in awe of working with Bridges.