A movie bear of very big brain

Some have insisted that the real star of A.I. is a toy called Teddy. NEIL YOUNG talks to Jack Angel - the voice behind the fur.

Even the harshest detractors of A.I. love him. Teddy, the 60cm teddy bear who accompanies android David (Haley Joel Osment) on his epic quest to become a real boy, has been described as "A.I.'s hero", "the most touching movie character created without a physical actor since ET" and "an R2-D2 for the new century".

Stan Winston's special-effects team, one reviewer wrote, "should win Academy Awards for Teddy alone", while another went further: "He should be up for best supporting actor in the Oscars this year. Or better yet, get his own Teddy movie."

Osment and costar Jude Law can consider themselves well and truly upstaged, but Teddy could so easily have been the most off-puttingly Spielbergian element about the film. The fact that he is, instead, so "miraculously un-cute" is largely due to the growly vocal chords of 70-year-old Jack Angel.

Speaking from his San Francisco home, Angel is still amazed by the response he's received for what he describes as "far and away the best experience of my career", even if the film didn't live up to box-office expectations.

"It opened big then it went straight down the toilet," he says, wondering if a blockbusting success might have led to the bonanza of voiceover work that greeted 2001's Douglas Rain (HAL) or Star Wars' James Earl Jones.

Few "VO" artists achieve that kind of renown, but Angel has worked with the best, from Woody Woodpecker's Daws Butler ("a great friend of mine, I admired him no end") to Mel Blanc, the "man of 1000 voices" ("he was brilliant, but when I met him he was a crotchety, nasty old man").

Angel also cites the ABC network's longtime announcer Ernie Anderson, "he had this great huge rich voice", now better known as the father of Magnolia wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson.

A former radio announcer, Angel specialised in roaring, fantastical creatures in obscure TV cartoons: "But I've reached the point in my career now where I don't want to do those monster voices any more. I've been hurting my throat badly from doing that - if I work for a day, I cough for four after."

Spielberg selected Angel for audition after listening to 100 taped applicants. "Everything was shrouded in secrecy. I thought it was a cartoon series of some sort, they gave no indication of what it was. They didn't even say it was going to be a bear. They just said it should sound like Eeyore, except not so dumb, so I dropped my voice to its lowest register.

"Everybody else would have gone for a more high-pitched, squeaky, toy-bear voice, but mine was nothing like that. When Robin Williams was recording his part [holographic oracle Dr Know] he said, 'Oooh, Teddy sounds so malevolent!' I asked every person on the set if they were casting the part of Teddy, would they have chosen my voice, and they all said no. Steven loved that."

Teddy is the resilient "supertoy" referred to in the title of Brian Aldiss' original short story, Supertoys Last All Summer Long.

But he seems to have had an extra significance for the project's original director, Stanley Kubrick, who inserted a very similar bear right at the end of Eyes Wide Shut, and thus for Spielberg.

Kubrick-watchers have traced the "bear" motif back to The Shining and beyond, and giving David's mentor such a deep American growl was, perhaps, Spielberg's homage to his own bear-like mentor.

Angel was in a unique position to observe Spielberg's painstaking fidelity to Kubrick's intentions (his usual instruction was "less emotion").

Angel recorded the vast bulk of his lines in a single day, but was asked to remain on set for the duration of the shoot. "We were pretty much side-by-side for four months and developed a lovely relationship. It was in the middle of the US election campaign, and he spent a lot of time on the phone with Al Gore."

But such privileged access had its downside: "When I saw the finished movie I was shocked by the number of Teddy scenes they'd eliminated - it was just wholesale slaughter."

Angel's frustration will be shared by A.I.'s viewers.

He's the only aspect of the film, one suspects, that would have found favour with artificial intelligence's literary master, Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?).

Especially if they'd left in a remarkable-sounding moment when Teddy is roused from slumber, still half-asleep, muttering "I am not a toy!" to his dream-world doubters. "It was such an integral part of establishing who Teddy was, but it just hit the deck," regrets Angel who, like Teddy's legion of worldwide fans, can hardly wait for the DVD.

- INDEPENDENT