Madagascar 3 Raises the Bar for Animated Movies

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted has so far grossed $376,596,522 in box office receipts worldwide. The animated flick stars Ben Stiller, Jada Pinkett Smith and Chris Rock and runs for one-and-a-half hours. In this instalment of the Madagascar franchise, characters Alex, Marty, Gloria and Melman are still trying to get back to their beloved Central Park zoo in New York, but first they need to find the penguins. When they travel to Monte Carlo, they attract the attention of Animal Control after gate crashing a party and are joined by the penguins, King Julian and Co., and the monkeys. Their attempts to get back to New York are consistently hampered by the Captain of Animal Control who wants to make Alex part of her collection…

Madagascar 3 opened in Kenya on June 22nd and was screened at Fox Theatres, Nyali Cinemax, Starflix, IMAX Theatre (20^th Century Plaza) among others. The 3D movie cost an estimated $145,000,000 to make and consists of more than 120,000 individual computer-generated frames! One part – a flashback sequence - incorporated massive fire effects and highly detailed crowd close-up shots that took 2.8 million hours to render.

HP technology was used to help DreamWorks animators create the breath-taking scenes. Artists used more than 200 high performance HP workstations to help design everything in the film—from the Zooster characters to digital effects such as complex fire and highly detailed crowd close-ups. Advanced HP ProLiant BL460c blade technology, geographically dispersed in four server render farms across the United States and India, provided peak compute power at crucial stages of production. The blade servers powered an incredible 200 terabytes of data and more than 65 million render hours.

HP technology has previously been used in creating DreamWorks’ ground-breaking animated features, including the “Shrek” series, ”How to Train Your Dragon,” ”Kung Fu Panda,” ”Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Puss in Boots.”