Animation Woes Dog Spielberg- Burton Series : Television: CBS’ drive to air the much-hyped ‘Family Dog’ is stalled again. First episodes called ‘not up to snuff.’

A new series of production problems on “The Family Dog,” the animated TV series from two of Hollywood’s most powerful feature-film directors--Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton--has once again stalled CBS’ drive to put an animated program in prime time.

Last month, the two executive producers quietly laid off the series’ remaining production and animation staff, at one time 75 members strong. Now they are dismissing the services of Wang Film Productions, the massive animation house in Taiwan that animated the designs of the “Family Dog” staff.

Spielberg and Burton were reportedly unhappy with what they saw after viewing the first completed batch of “Family Dog” episodes that arrived from Taiwan last month, sources said.

“The comedy was bland,” said one source close to the production. “The sharpness of the humor and the dog’s personality were not captured through the animation. It was not up to snuff. It looked like a play that needed a few more rehearsals. With animation, lots of luck.”

Spielberg and Burton have apparently asked Nelvana Productions in Toronto to make fixes in the much-hyped and long-awaited series, budgeted at $600,000 per episode and built around the odd-looking dog that Burton created several years ago as a CalArts student.

Burton has a strong relationship with the Canadian animation house, which can handle the work in-house. (Generally, storyboards and main character poses are done by staff animators with the detailed animation work completed overseas where labor is cheaper.) Nelvana is producing animated versions of Burton’s stylized film “Beetlejuice” as a Saturday-morning series for ABC and a weekday series for Fox.

“Nelvana has always supported the vision of CBS and Tim Burton,” said Nelvana spokeswoman Hayley Sumner. “Together, CBS and (Spielberg’s) Amblin Entertainment have chosen Nelvana to enhance their project. Nelvana will be completing all the shows for ‘The Family Dog.’ ”

CBS declined to comment on the situation, but Amblin confirmed that the series is being sent to Nelvana for “fixes and completions.”

This isn’t the first time “Family Dog”--a slanted look at family life through the eyes of a household pet--has been pushed around by its owners. The CBS series, based on an animated episode of Spielberg’s TV series “Amazing Stories,” was heavily promoted last February during the Grammy Awards. When the program missed its March deadline because of a network schedule too tight for the laborious process of animation, CBS moved “Family Dog” to the fall.

Now, sources suggest that it won’t be ready for airing until at least October.

“It’s probably a good sign the artwork has moved from Taiwan to Canada, where dogs are considered pets rather than cuisine,” quipped the series’ third executive producer, Dennis Klein (“Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “Buffalo Bill”), who wrote all 13 episodes of “Family Dog,” plus five back-up scripts.

Three of the 13 episodes are still with Wang Film Productions awaiting a final sound check. After that, presumably, they will be sent to Nelvana.

Several animators questioned by The Times said they had doubts that any animation house could make significant changes in a completed animated series that required nine months per episode to produce.

“Animation is a chain with many links, and any bad link ruins the whole chain,” one animation studio executive said. “Occasionally, you can do a retake, where you pick a very important scene and go back in and reanimate it. But you can’t redo the whole film. You can’t afford to.

“I’ll tell you, with ‘Family Dog’ the timing of the jokes is everything. And that is not an animation problem you can easily fix. That’s a preproduction problem. I don’t think live-action producers and network executive understand the difficulties of animation. Everything must be perfect in the script, months in advance, or you’re going to have problems down the road.”

Former staff members of “Family Dog” acknowledge that troubles arose more than a year ago in the early stages of production. Storyboard artists, in short supply because of an industry-wide increase in animation work, were difficult to find. Complicating the process was the subtle humor of Klein’s scripts. Several artists were fired and others brought in from England and Canada.

“(Burton) was awful busy directing ‘Edward Scissorhands’ at the time,” one storyboard artist recalled. “We would have liked for him to be around more than he was. But they both (Burton and Spielberg) came around when they could, and relayed changes back to us when they couldn’t.”

“CBS gave us some time and money to make fixes,” said a former member of the “Family Dog” production staff. “What confused me was that we got a chance to do the changes, and we were told CBS liked them, and then suddenly they gave it to somebody else to make the changes.”

Now the burden falls on Nelvana, which is also working on the prime-time animated special “Rosie and Buddy” for ABC, to groom “Family Dog.”

Klein, whose first experience with animation has been “Family Dog,” said, “I find myself wondering if Dusty Springfield was inspired to record ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” while working with animators.”