"We've met some wonderful surfers, Kelly Slater and Rob Machado, two of the guys that are actually on the movie with us," says Jenkins. "And it's clear that they demonstrate this wonderful sense of innocent fun. They just have a very Zen-like calm about them and I think that amongst many other things, that attitude, that sense of being one with life and one with the wave had echoes all the way through the development of the project then."

Cody Maverick (voiced by Shia LaBeouf), Reggie Belafonte (voiced by James Woods), and Tank (voiced by Diedrich Bader) in Surf's Up Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation

While capturing the elusive spirit of surfing into Surf's Up was one major obstacle, achieving the film's documentary style was another. The film's shot selection is unlike any other for an animated film with point of view shots from inside the waves, seemingly hand held cinematography for one-on-one interviews with the film's characters and period footage that looks as though it really was captured during surfing's heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. The filmmakers received the highest of compliments when Errol Morris, the Academy Award-winning documentarian behind The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, came to see an early cut of Surf's Up.

"[Morris] said 'this isn't a mockumentary, this is a documentary.'" says Jenkins, who felt a jolt from the vote of confidence. "He says that we were being so honest to the medium that it was much more believable. None of us expected him to be so enthusiastically into this idea of this surfing penguin competition. It was very cool."

Audiences are likely to feel the same way when Surf's Up hits theaters in June. For all of its newfangled technology and an ad campaign touting it as a "major ocean picture," Surf's Up is an old fashioned coming-of-age story about a boy and his board. And although the film has the lazy pace of a day at the beach, its filmmakers have literally set a high watermark for computer animation and the budding genre of penguin films to boot. They may not dance or march, but these penguins know how to hang ten, which is why the people behind the penguins are pretty confident audiences will want to hang out with Cody Maverick and crew all summer.

Additional reporting by Brooke Hauser.