Camp Lazlo The Movie (2008)

Camp Lazlo The Movie is a 2008 American animated comedy film based on the Cartoon Network television series, Camp Lazlo. The film was directed by Joe Murray, Sue Mondt (art), Brian Sheesley (supervising) and Mark O'Hare, and stars the regular television cast of Carlos Alazraqui, Jeff Glen Bennett, Tom Kenny, Mr. Lawrence, Jodi Benson, Jill Talley and Steve Little, with guest stars Grey DeLisle, Russi Taylor, Maurice LaMarche, Tabitha St. Germain and Frank Welker. The film takes place after the show's series finale. It is produced by Cartoon Network Studios and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.

In theaters, a Johnny Bravo short titled A Quiet Day in the Park was shown prior to the film. The film was theatrically released on July 18, 2008 with mixed reviews from critics despite being well received by fans of the series. However, the film was a box office success, grossing $98.5 million worldwide against an $10 million budget.

Story/Plot
Set a year later after the events of "Lumpus' Last Stand", the real scoutmaster, a steer who resembles Heffer Wolfe from Rocko's Modern Life, has regrew his fur and restarted/reopened Camp Kidney after calling in a lot of people to clean up Lumpus' dirty work over the Summer. During the grand reopening, Lazlo waited for next year to come and it came because he was so happy to be with his friends again after last year.

Meanwhile, Lumpus, former scoutmaster and deranged lunatic, has broken out of his sell at the mental asylum to get revenge on the real scoutmaster who got him arrested by the cops and on the campers who felt so blind that Scoutmaster Lumpus was an impostor. Back at Camp Kidney, everything's changed after Lumpus was arrested.

Because now, Camp Kidney has a swimming pool, a waterslide, a huge lake, a big mansion and newer cabins for the campers, plus there are new campers. Until the next morning, the real scoutmaster got hurt from a speedboat accident and was taken to a hospital, so he called in a substitute scoutmaster to take over while he's in the hospital.

Therefore, the substitute scoutmaster was none other than Lumpus in disguise. Lazlo felt suspicious about this substitute scoutmaster making summer camp a nightmare, so he and his friends decided to come up with a plan and set traps all around the camp to see who he really is. So, will they succeed or will their plan backfire and fail?

Main Characters

 * Carlos Alazraqui as Lazlo / Clam
 * Jeff Glen Bennett as Raj / Samson
 * Tom Kenny as Cow Scoutmaster / Slinkman / Lumpus
 * Mr. Lawrence as Edward / Dave and Ping Pong
 * Jodi Benson as Jane Doe / Patsy Smiles / Almondine
 * Jill Talley as Nina / Gretchen / Miss Mucus
 * Steve Little as Chip and Skip / The Lemming Quadruplets

New Characters

 * Grey DeLisle as Abby, the new member of the Squirrel Scouts
 * Russi Taylor as Sarah, the new member of the Squirrel Scouts, and Abby's sister
 * Maurice LaMarche as Matt, the new member of the Bean Scouts
 * Tabitha St. Germain as Old Lady Jeannie, Navy Turtle's neighbor
 * Frank Welker as Randy, the Cow Scoutmaster's new co-assistant

Recurring Characters

 * Sam Riegel as Norman
 * Ben Diskin as Gordon
 * Rob Paulsen as Ted / Larrison / Ignatious
 * James Arnold Taylor as Sheldon
 * Jason Marsden as Wilbert
 * Scott Menville as Lemuel / Harold
 * Tara Strong as Amber / Toodie / Suzie / Honey
 * Billy West as Mort
 * Jeffrey Garcia as Bill
 * Dan Castellaneta as Nurse Leslie
 * Ashton Kutcher as Chef Heimlich McMuesli
 * Patrick Warburton as Commander Hoo-Ha
 * Joe Alaskey as Mayor Pothole McPucker / Navy Turtle
 * Rodger Bumpass as Owl Cop
 * Gregg Berger as Pierre the Lifeguard
 * Kevin Michael Richardson as No-Neck the Lifeguard

Development
The same production staff that produced the animated television series Camp Lazlo also produced Camp Lazlo The Movie. The film was being developed in 2004 while production of Camp Lazlo began. In May 2005, Variety reported that Joe Murray and Mark O'Hare would direct in their directorial debut on an animated musical comedy film based on the television series. Production began in October 2005.

In February 2006, it was revealed that the film would be produced by Janet Dimon and Shareena Carlson, with Joe Murray, Steve Little and Merriwether Williams writing the film's screenplay. In July 2006, it was announced that Mark O'Hare would also be added as a story writer.

Casting
In January 2006, it was announced that voice actors Carlos Alazraqui and Jeff Glen Bennett was cast, reprising their roles as Lazlo and Clam, and Raj and Samson. This is Carlos Alazraqui and Jeff Glen Bennett's first animated feature film together. By October 2006, it was later announced that Tom Kenny would return to reprise his roles as Cow Scoutmaster, Slinkman, and Lumpus. The rest of the cast was announced in March 2007.

Animation and design
The film was animated in-house by Cartoon Network Studios in Burbank, California. Animation for the film began in January 2007 and ended in May 2008. The animators took the blending of traditional and computer animation to a new level in the movie.

Toon Boom Animation's Toon Boom Harmony software was used as the main software package for the production of the film. The character animators found some difficulty with this approach, and decided to use traditional paper and pencil drawings, which were then scanned into the computer systems, for Camp Lazlo The Movie. Pencil on paper animation sequences would be digitally inked-and-painted, enhanced and composited into backgrounds using Toon Boom Harmony.

The character animation was done on paper without going through the clean-up animation department, and scanned directly into Photoshop. Joe Murray explained that they went paperless for Camp Lazlo The Movie to help them introduce the 2D pipeline. The artwork was then enhanced to affect the appearance of painted strokes and fills, and combined with backgrounds, using Adobe After Effects.

The visual effects and backgrounds for the film were created digitally using Wacom Cintiq tablet displays. The backgrounds were hand-painted initially then scanned in and digitally enhanced using Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. C. Raggio designed all of the film's 3D CGI props, sets, and vehicles, which were created in a variety of software, including Avid's Elastic Reality 3.0 and Silicon Graphics.

Camera movement was one of the key aspects in planning ''Camp Lazlo The Movie. ''Yet, even though the camera is quite active, the movement is very subtle. C. Raggio regards this as essential. "One of the great differences of Camp Lazlo The Movie from The Road to El Dorado is that it's very much an animated big screen movie. Very much a Heavyweights type film. Therefore, it really didn't lend itself to the huge, majestic [style of] film. It's intimate, funny. So, it's a very different cinematic style. Although we have beautiful shots, of course, a lot of the work that we did on this movie was in the subtlety of the shots."

This subtlety becomes evident at once in the "Motorboat" sequence in the lake, where the Cow Scoutmaster's accident occurred. "The camera is very active," Raggio explains. "It's following the characters. What you're actually seeing here is something you saw only rarely on The Road to El Dorado. And when you saw it, you made sure you saw it. This [the Motorboat] is actually fully 3D, so what it gives you is truly the feeling of the space...By putting it into literally a 3D box, we were able to give you the feeling of confinement. But due to the process we actually developed, we were able to move the camera off the animation that we put in. So that way we weren't anticipating the animation. The camera was actually following the animation to make the whole thing seem natural. There was an enormous amount of work put into this movie just so the audience wouldn't notice the great things that we did. But I think overall it certainly gives you the impression of a well-crafted movie, and hopefully it'll keep the audience in the film." Some of the fun pans are 3D. Others are traditional that are created to make them look 3D.

The production staff have developed their own technology to enhance camera movement. Fellow storyboard artist Barry Caldwell elaborates on one particular process. As he explains, they use the motion blur [software program] that was written here, and it's come in so handy. When they have a fast pan, they can apply the motion blur to it at different ratios depending on how much blur they want, and it gives them a nice directional. It really makes it look like a live-action sort of blur. They can also apply that to 2D character animation as well. So that gives them a fun sort of way to push the camera work into a different area.

They were able to use some of the technology that were used only in the exceptional scenes in The Road to El Dorado and pretty much use it throughout Camp Lazlo The Movie. By "exceptional" C. Raggio means a blend that fuses the artistic quality of 2D paintings and drawings with 3D sets. The layout department created over twenty 3D sets on Camp Lazlo The Movie more than four times as many as The Road to El Dorado. Much of the clean-up animation, digital ink-and-paint, and compositing were outsourced to both California and South Korea.

Another process that was developed at Cartoon Network is a sprite system called "Spryticle", which is created inside Autodesk Maya. In the sequence called "The Boat Accident," Cow Scoutmaster fixes the motorboat, but didn't realize that it was being sabotaged by Lumpus. Dan Smith, the sequence lead on "The Boat Accident," details how the process replicated a hand-drawn splash 10,000 times: "The big effect for this sequence is splashing water, which in the past hasn't been done in a lot of computer graphics mostly because of the complexity required to get...little driplets and the spray of water. So we came up with a system that we call Spryticle...that allows us to use hand-drawn animation copied onto the location of a particle system. A particle system is really a bunch of spots that we move around with world forces like gravity and wind and turbulence. And then on each one of those spots...we put the hand-drawn animation. So what Spryticle does is really give us a way of multiplying this hand-drawn animation a thousand fold. "Spryticle, what's powerful about it is its randomization techniques. The ways to make each one look a little bit different. I had to get splashes to interact with the boat, interact with the lake it was bouncing off of...you know, make the splashes characteristic to the scene. Traditionally, to hand draw water which is one of the hardest things to draw, we're looking at drawing every single frame...I'd say it would take a crew of 2D animators a good part of a year to draw all this.

The film's animation was done both domestically and overseas at Rough Draft Studios in both Glendale, California and Seoul, South Korea, with visual effects and computer animation contributed by Pacific Data Images in Redwood City, California.

Soundtrack
Andy Paley alongside John Debney composed the score for the film.

Promotional tie-ins
McDonald's released eight toys in their Happy Meals to promote the film.

Box office/Commercial reception
Camp Lazlo The Movie was released on July 18, 2008, originally planned to open earlier that spring. With heavy competition and little promotion, the film grossed $98.5 million worldwide against a budget of $10 million.

Critical reception
The film received mixed reviews from critics. Based on 96 reviews, the film has received a 56% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with its consensus reading, "Camp Lazlo The Movie is a pretty great movie. Although, it might've had some movie references throughout the entire film". On Metacritic, the film achieved a rating of 67 out of 100, which indicates "generally favorable reviews".

Theatrical release
The film was theatrically released in theaters on July 18, 2008. In theaters, a Johnny Bravo short titled A Quiet Day in the Park was shown prior to the film.

Home media
The film was release on DVD on November 1, 2008, in widescreen and full screen editions, by Warner Bros. Entertainment. It contains an 18-minute featurette, a Johnny Bravo short titled A Quiet Day in the Park, The Making Of Camp Lazlo The Movie, featuring interviews with most of the principal cast and crew; a 20-minute animatic segment featuring scenes from the film with dialogue by the original artists the film's trailer.

Trivia

 * This is the first ever feature film of the series.
 * This is the first animated Camp Lazlo movie to hit theaters.
 * This is also the first ever Camp Lazlo movie in general to hit theaters. The previous Camp Lazlo film (Camp Lazlo: Where's Lazlo?) was a television movie.
 * This is the second theatrical film with a wide release to be based on a Cartoon Network TV series, after "The Powerpuff Girls Movie" released 6 years prior.
 * The film shares the same style as the 2004 TV series.
 * This makes it the fourth and last time for Cartoon Network Studios to produce theatrically released films, as the studio resumed to producing television films up until the release of Regular Show: The Movie, which would be their next theatrically released film.
 * The original cast reprised their roles in the movie, with the exception on Carlos Alazraqui, Jeff Glen Bennett and Mr. Lawrence as the recurring characters from the series. Instead this film has respectively Sam Riegel, Ben Diskin, Rob Paulsen, James Arnold Taylor, Jason Marsden, Scott Menville, Billy West, Jeffrey Garcia, Dan Castellaneta, Ashton Kutcher, Patrick Warburton, Joe Alaskey, Rodger Bumpass, Gregg Berger and Kevin Michael Richardson taking on the roles.
 * This is the 2nd collaboration between Tara Strong, Tom Kenny, Grey DeLisle, Rob Paulsen, Kevin Michael Richardson and Frank Welker. Their first was "The Powerpuff Girls Movie" released 6 years prior.
 * The film shares and uses the same style as the show ‘’Camp Lazlo’’.
 * This is the 2nd collaboration between Tom Kenny, Mr. Lawrence and Jill Talley. Their first was "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie" released 4 years prior.
 * This is Joe Alaskey's final feature film role before his death in 2016.
 * In the Rough Draft Studios episodes. The Movie, also animated by Rough Draft Studios, has even better animation than the show.
 * This is the 2nd collaboration between Ashton Kutcher and Patrick Warburton. Their first was Sony Pictures Animation 's first animated film,  Open Season  released 2 years prior.
 * This is the 3rd collaboration between Grey DeLisle and Tom Kenny. Their first was "The Powerpuff Girls Movie" released 6 years prior and their second was  Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi   released 5 years prior.
 * This was the last animated movie for Warner Bros. Pictures to be hand-drawn animated, as the studio has been producing computer-animated movies up until the release of Regular Show: The Movie (2015), which would be their next hand-drawn animated movie to be released in theaters. Both Camp Lazlo The Movie (2008) and Regular Show: The Movie (2015) released in the same year as a stand alone film in the Star Wars franchise, being Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), respectively.
 * Most scenes are fully hand-drawn animated, while some scenes also incorporate 3D computer animation.
 * This is the 2nd collaboration between Jeffrey Garcia, Rob Paulsen, Frank Welker, Billy West and Carlos Alazraqui. Their first was   Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius   released 7 years prior.
 * This is Jeffrey Garcia's second Warner Bros. animated film, after "Happy Feet" released 2 years prior.
 * This is the 2nd collaboration between Tara Strong, Joe Alaskey, Kevin Michael Richardson and Dan Castellaneta. Their first was   Rugrats in Paris: The Movie   released 8 years prior.
 * This is Dan Castellaneta and Russi Taylor's second animated film together, after "The Simpsons Movie" released a year before.
 * The film bears a few similarities to Disney's 1995 film, "Heavyweights".
 * This is the second Cartoon Network theatrical film to super seriously not bomb in theaters, after  Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi   released 5 years prior.

Credits

 * Main article: Camp Lazlo The Movie/Credits