Heidi Fleiss has nothing on computer-generated animation, where the cast-iron rule has been that a million dollars will buy you a minute. A feature-length film typically costs $90 million to produce, and the costs of a few productions, such as “Shrek” and “The Incredibles,” have exceeded $100 million.

The producer of “Shrek” and “Shrek 2,” John Williams, is tired of playing by the rules he helped establish. Thanks to a financing plan he crafted with two veteran New York show business players, he was able to make his new 70-minute film, “Valiant,” with $40 million. What’s more, Mr. Williams’s new production company, Vanguard, has three more animated films in the works, all of which have budgets in the $35 million-to-$40 million range.

“Valiant” is a World War II tale about Valiant, a clumsy pigeon with the voice of Ewan McGregor, who barely squeaks through RAF training to become a homing pigeon entrusted with carrying documents from the French Resistance to Allied forces. It opened this spring in London, where reviews were mixed. The Independent of London called it “decent entertainment,” while the BBC’s Web site said it was “bland as birdseed.” Its New York opening was Friday. The New York Times called it a “poorly plotted, suspense-free” film and the Hollywood Reporter said the movie is a “plucky little bird that just won’t fly.”

The film was made in London’s Ealing Studios, but its financial plan was cooked up in New York three years ago, with the help of a lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Thomas Lewyn, whose ties to Hollywood trace back to the early 1960s, when he became a member of the board of directors of Paramount Pictures, and an entertainment banker, Roy Furman, vice chairman at Jeffries & Company. In addition to dabbling in the movie industry, Mr. Furman produces Broadway plays. In the past year, he co-produced “The Pillowman” and “Democracy,” and his roster for next year includes “The Color Purple” as well as “The Odd Couple” with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.

Animated features can take four years to produce. Typically, they’re created within a big studio, such as DreamWorks or Pixar. More often than not, the script changes throughout production, and chunks of painstakingly created footage end up unused. Another thing that commonly happens when a studio is at the wheel is executives change their minds about what should happen in the movie, and as decisions keep being made and unmade, the nature of the film changes, and the director and creator tend not to have as much say in the matter as they might like.

Mr. Williams was confident he could make a film in half as much time as usual, and for half as much money as usual, if he made the script so tight that there would be no reason to stray from it during production. And rather than having a studio put up all the capital upfront, he could pull money together from myriad sources, meaning he wouldn’t have to fork over most of the profits to one studio at the end.

Mr. Lewyn, an old acquaintance of the Disney Company’s chief executive officer, Michael Eisner, arranged a meeting with Disney’s Buena Vista distribution, and they worked out a deal in which Disney, in return for putting up only about a quarter of production costs, would get a smaller than usual share of end profits. Buena Vista has placed the film in more than 2,000 theaters and committed to spending $25 million on publicity.

Mr. Williams and Mr. Lewyn met about 25 years ago, back when the former was another struggling Hollywood producer. The two worked together on “Seven Years in Tibet,” a Brad Pitt film that took Mr. Williams 15 years to complete, mostly because of difficulties putting together the financing. In his post-“Shrek” years, raising money is proving less difficult. Mr. Williams, Mr. Lewyn, Mr. Furman, and Neil Braun, former president of Imagine Films, who joined the board of Vanguard, came up with a plan that was precise and strategic. They decided to film the movie in London, where they could get a $4 million grant from the United Kingdom Film Council. Rather than hire a full-time staff, they recruited globally, finding animators based from Canada to India.

It didn’t hurt that today’s atmosphere favors resourceful independent animators. Big companies such as Disney have been laying off in-house animation teams and looking for independently produced films, which are more feasible now that costs are coming down. Computer work stations that cost $80,000 a decade ago now go for about $3,000. The 3-D software, too, has dropped, from $20,000 to packages available for $2,000 at Circuit City.

Mr. Lewyn, who has never lived in Hollywood and doesn’t claim to be a great film historian, is still an industry insider, and he has some of the mannerisms of an old-school Hollywood player. He peppers his sentences with the names of Hollywood executives from the ’60s and he uses terminology of that time, calling the industry the “motion picture business” and saying “pictures” instead of “films.”

In the past 40 years, he said, he’s seen a great shift in the business. In those days, “when somebody said something, their word was their bond,” he said.

“People were real characters. They were wonderful. Even though they were the most complicated men to deal with, when they said something, you could bank it,” Mr. Lewyn said.

“Now,” he continued, “everything is a 200-page agreement and everything is run by big corporations.”

At age 31, Mr. Lewyn worked on the shakeup at Paramount Pictures and was appointed to its board.

“I was a kid,” the lawyer said.

He’d leave his Midtown law office after lunch and sit behind his desk at the Manhattan office of Paramount.

“I’d play show-biz executive,” he said. “It was so much fun, you have no idea. I didn’t know a thing about motion picture and entertainment law.”

Soon enough, he got the hang of things and was putting together the contracts for the company. He went on to claim such industry titans as Edward Bronfman, Michael Douglas, and David Puttnam as personal clients.

Mr. Lewyn and Mr. Furman, who’ve been friends for about 20 years, make an interesting pair. Mr. Lewyn is chamomile tea to Mr. Furman’s double espresso. Mr. Lewyn, the older of the two, is a calm man who speaks quietly and has taken an interest in Buddhism and meditation. His friend responds to “How are you?” with “Busy, busy, busy.” He dropped by Mr. Lewyn’s three-course lunch with The New York Sun last week for 20 minutes but ordered nothing more than “a glass of regular human water” and got up to leave well before Mr. Lewyn had taken his last sip of peppermint tea.

Neither Mr. Lewyn nor Mr. Furman claims to be anything other than a businessman. They both said they like the movie but will defer to audiences’ tastes.

“You really don’t know until a film comes out,” Mr. Furman said. “I do know what John has put on-screen is stunning computer-generated animation. My wife loves it, and she’s very critical of my projects. Is it dangerous? It’s ventury. But computer-generated animation is a sector of the motion picture area that is best-performing by quite a bit. It’s less risk in a risky business.”