Baby Genius

Baby Geniuses is a 1999 American family comedy film directed by Bob Clark and written by Clark and Greg Michael, from a story by Clark, Steven Paul, Francisca Matos, and Robert Grasmere. It stars Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd, Kim Cattrall, Peter MacNicol, and Ruby Dee. The film has the distinction of being the first full-length feature to use computer-generated imagery for the synthesis of human visual speech. 2D warping techniques were used to digitally animate the mouth viseme shapes of the babies which were originally shot with their mouths closed. The viseme shapes were sampled from syllables uttered by the babies on the set. Baby Geniuses received critically negative reviews from critics, but it grossed $36.5 million worldwide against a production budget of $12 million. In 2004, it was followed by a sequel, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, which was a box office bomb, and received reviews even more critical than the first film, getting nominated for Worst Picture at the 25th Golden Raspberry Awards. Plot Two scientists, Dr. Elena Kinder and Dr. Heep use genius-baby studies to fund BabyCo's theme park "Joyworld". According to Dr. Kinder's research on toddlers/babies, babies are born possessing vast, universal knowledge and speak a secret yet impossible-to-translate baby pre-language called Babytalk. However, at age 2–3, the knowledge and language are lost as the babies "cross over" by learning how to speak human languages. All babies raised in Dr. Kinder's underground research facility were adopted from the orphanages Babyco supports (as they serve to filter out which babies should be raised under the Kinder Method and which babies shouldn't be raised under the Kinder Method) and transformed into small geniuses through use of the Kinder Method, and then used in experiments to decipher this secret yet impossible-to-translate language used by the eight baby geniuses.