Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Dog's Life by Aardman's 20 best films – ranked! After it was used for a perfume ad, Nina Simone’s jazz classic made it into the top 10 in the autumn of 1987. Inspired, no doubt, by the (non- Aardman) video for a successful re-release of Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite earlier in the year, this became a second bite at claymation- meets-1950s. , who directed, went with a sultry cat and some artistic shots of piano keys. 19. Next (1990) Aardman Animation secured a high-profile commission from Channel 4 at the end of the 80s: a five-part short film series called Lip Sync, mostly comprising animation of pre-recorded interview material. Next, directed by Barry Purves, deviates from the concept: its basic gag is that William Shakespeare himself is auditioning for an uninterested Peter Hall. On the stage, Shakespeare whizzes through references to every one of his plays; Hall couldn’t be less impressed. Clever. 18. Going Equipped (1990) A more orthodox interpretation of the Lip Sync concept: a small-time offender talks bluntly about prison life and how he became a law-breaker. It may not have the comedy disjunction of the more famous short, from the same series, but the direct, untricksy treatment remains melancholy and even haunting. Where it all began: Aardman founders and Peter Lord with one of their early creations, . Photograph: Adrian Sherratt. 17. Stage Fright (1997) , who would go on to direct the unlovely Viva Forever video and co-direct Curse of the Were-Rabbit, made his directorial debut with this impressive 11-minute short that mixes -ish ingredients to considerably creepier effect. A vaudeville-act dog trainer called Tiny loses his confidence after clashing with Arnold, a hulking silent-film actor; it all ends up a bit Phantom of the Opera. There’s something a little bit freaky about it. 16. Adam (1992) Lord was nominated for his first Oscar for this funny short, which showcases his more fingery, freeform style – compared to Park’s smoothly- polished modelling. A stream of jokes about the first created human, perched atop a tiny planet Earth, keeps this ticking along, with the real-flesh “hand of God” hammering points home. Not to get too meta, but there is some fun comment here on the god-like processes of claymation: Adam, after all, was fashioned out of clay in the first place. By the Lord. A coincidence? I think not. Watch the video for Peter Gabriel’s single Sledgehammer. 15. Sledgehammer (1986) Aardman was founded by Lord and Dave Sproxton in 1972, and early jobs included the opening credits for The Great Egg Race and squeaking homunculus Morph on Take Hart. But it was its involvement in the amazingly successful promo for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer single in 1986 that put it firmly on the map. Sledgehammer wasn’t strictly an Aardman production – it was directed by Stephen R Johnson (famous for Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere) – but they did craft the still-spectacular animated sequences, which include painted clouds flitting across Gabriel’s face, Arcimboldo-esque singing vegetables and Park’s legendary dancing chickens. Even if it runs out of ideas a bit in the final third, it’s still a great watch. 14. Wat’s Pig (1996) Lord stretched his narrative muscles with this rather lovely 11-minute short, which resulted in his second Oscar nomination. There is something of Monty Python in its medieval setting: twin princes, separated at birth, one growing up in the castle, the other in a hovel just outside. It’s the latter, of course, who has got the eponymous pig, the typically anthropomorphised critter beloved by Aardman, although perhaps not quite so instrumental to the narrative as Gromit. Lord’s deployment of a split screen, to parallel the brothers’ development, is inspired. 13. (2006) Reports at the time suggested the production of this rodenty feature wasn’t the happiest experience for Aardman, as backers Dreamworks put the hammer down after disappointing box-office figures for their previous collaboration, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It shows on screen and led directly to the companies ending their agreement. Even if Aardman seems incapable of making a bad film, such is its iron grip on quality control, the pressure to abandon claymation and move into computer-generated animation led to a charm deficit. The film has got all the Aardman ingredients – quirky characters, relentless gags, top-notch voice cast – but there’s something a tiny bit inauthentic about its vision of an underground London and, of course, the shiny, flaw-free visuals are a long way from the Aardman stock-in-trade. An animator makes adjustments on a character during the making of Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Photograph: Graeme Robertson/. 12. Creature Comforts (1989) The jewel in the crown of the series, and endlessly recycled since. Only five minutes long, Park’s film manages to be both brilliantly simple and fantastically audacious at the same time; building on the idea of animating a vox pop interview (see Going Equipped, above) but switching in zoo animals to create a hilarious disjunction between voice and visuals. Not only did it nab the company’s first Oscar, but it also turned into Aardman’s financial safety net, via a string of popular TV ads in the 1990s and an ITV series in the 2000s. 11. Early Man (2018) Aardman’s ability to attract the cream of British acting talent has been one of its strengths, but to get Eddie Redmayne hot off his Oscar win for The Theory of Everything was a major coup. He plays Dug, a bucktoothed cave-kid who spearheads a stone age tribe’s contest with a more sophisticated bronze age civilisation through the medium of football. Conceived, as usual, with Aardman’s amazing attention to detail, there’s something a little CBBC about the basic football-match idea in a World Cup year, a slightly anxious attempt to try to reach a mass audience. It’s still cute and funny, naturally. 10. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012) Adapted from Gideon Defoe’s Pirates! book, this is rather openly aimed at the primary school audience, with that title namechecking two key obsessions of the bookish kid. A great cast (including Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton and David Tennant) give it their all; if anything, they are hampered a little by an over-complex plot that shoehorns in a Pirate of the Year contest, Charles Darwin and a murderous Queen Victoria. It sounds great on paper, but ends up a little frenetic on screen. Watch the trailer for A Movie: Farmageddon. 9. A : Farmageddon (2019) Deriving from a throwaway gag in , Shaun the Sheep has become a safety blanket franchise for Aardman: after 150 episodes of the kid-friendly TV show, the second feature is just about to hit cinemas. I can report that it’s well up to scratch: a Spielbergian story of Shaun’s encounter with a blue-and-pink alien bunny who crash lands on a local pizza joint and ends up on Mossy Bottom farm. As charming and unpretentious as it gets. 8. (1989) In retrospect, it seems quixotic that this opening salvo in the series should have lost to Creature Comforts at the 1991 Oscars. Of course, thoughts of a national-treasure franchise were unlikely to be on anyone’s mind at the time, but this 25-minute tea-cosy space epic rendered in Plasticine was surely robbed, if only by Nick Park himself. All the series’ key elements are here: the script’s north of England mannerisms; the Jeeves-and-Wooster relationship of the central pair; the sheer fiendish delight in the Heath Robinson contraption Wallace comes up with; and the gentle knowingness of the film references. Compared with later efforts, it is perhaps not as drum-tight, story-wise (the wheeled cooker that wants to ski is still a headscratcher), but for a film school effort, it’s pretty sensational. 7. (2011) Aardman had more success with its second stab at computer-animation: a fun Christmas movie directed by Sarah Smith and written by Peter Baynham. Like most Aardman films, this is notable for its terrific action sequences – kicking off with a legion of elf-ninjas slamming millions of presents across the planet on Christmas Eve. Although there are family resemblances, this is actually pretty different from your traditional Aardman film: less obviously idiosyncratic and a little more conventional in story terms, reflecting the non-Aardman pedigree of the key talent. But it is impeccably put together and goes down a treat. Watch the chase scene from A Close Shave. 6. A Close Shave (1995) Park was fully into his stride with this third in the Wallace and Gromit series and it got him yet another Oscar as well as a prime Christmas slot on the BBC. Adopting a similar genre backstop as – a robot dog plots to steal sheep – this non-stop cavalcade of whimsy introduces the concept of Wallace’s love life and a superb chase scene with Gromit’s detachable sidecar. As ever, the attention to detail and sense of atmosphere is fantastic. 5. Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) I have bit of a soft spot for this as I saw this being made; the patina of tea-time cheeriness masks a painstaking labour of love for everyone who worked on it. Perhaps not the massive hit Aardman has always been searching for, but it is an undeniably successful foray into cross-platform franchising. If that sounds mercenary, it doesn’t come out in the film: it’s the most basically good-natured of Aardman’s films, with only gentle sparring between the enterprising Shaun and officious dog Bitzer. 4. A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) More romance for Wallace in what would turn out to be Peter Sallis’s last time in the role; Wallace’s yearning for former model Piella Bakewell achieves an implausibly tragic dimension after Piella is unmasked as a serial killer, shortly before ending up as crocodile food. Conceived on near- identical lines to A Close Shave, this is faultlessly realised, with a magnificent example of the by-now traditional high-speed chase as Wallace takes off after Piella’s runaway bike. At the other end of the scale, Park shoehorns in a reference to James Cameron’s Aliens. By e’eck, Gromit1: 1993’s The Wrong Trousers. Photograph: Allstar/Aardman. 3. The Wrong Trousers (1993) Clearly, it is hard to choose between the Wallace and Gromit shorts, especially as Park hit such a high standard so early and maintained it so well. But The Wrong Trousers gets the nod because it crystallised so much of what Aardman brought to the table: the jokey/sinister crime story; the homely details; and the astonishing application of real-world physics. The train chase scene has been rightly acclaimed – as exciting to watch as anything in Raiders of the Lost Ark – while Feathers McGraw, the penguin with the glove on his head, is an inscrutably memorable villain. Just as good 26 years on. 2. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) A W&G feature was no doubt inevitable, and after years of planning it finally emerged in 2005, in between the third and fourth shorts. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it was clearly the motto: a genre-movie superstructure (Hammer horror); a lovelorn Wallace; ridiculously complicated home inventions; and thrillingly inventive chases. The directors, Nick Park and Steve Box, imported major guest-acting talent, in the shape of Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes – and it’s possible that Aardman unlocked Fiennes’s comedy gene, more recently seen in The Grand Budapest Hotel and A Bigger Splash. Were-Rabbit does all that the short films do, only on a bigger canvas; the payoff for the audience is proportionately larger. Watch the (Not So) Great Escape scene from . 1. Chicken Run (2000) I will admit that I was bit of a sceptic when Aardman announced it would move into feature films after it had signed its deal with Dreamworks. Could this comfy-cardigan cottage industry outfit with a few TV shorts behind it really do it on the big stage? But Aardman’s first full-length film, masterminded by Park and Lord, remains a treat that even the ensuing disgrace of Mel Gibson can’t ruin. Like all Aardman films, this has a simple premise – The Great Escape with chickens – but such is the animators’ ability to humanise the birds’ plight that it turns into an improbably emotional epic. It is also arguably Julia Sawalha’s finest hour – she voices Ginger, the feisty hen who practically forces her dozy fellow chickens to save themselves – while Gibson does a fine job of Rocky, the rooster who becomes the great hope of saving everyone from the dreaded pie machine. The film proved that Aardman could hold its own with Hollywood’s great animation traditions, as a beautifully judged balance was struck between the two. Chicken Run was a massive hit, too, giving Aardman some elbow room; but it didn’t last long. In retrospect, Chicken Run actually looks a little miraculous: how on earth did Aardman pull it off? A dog's life. I t is hard to imagine Britain without Wallace and Gromit. The nerdish human, prone to technological mayhem and a love of flat caps and Wensleydale cheese, together with his mute canine pal, loyal and intelligent, seem to have been a perpetual part of national life. We have Wallace and Gromit fridge magnets, cuff-links, mugs, and T-shirts to prove the point. Their films and catch-phrases trip off the tongue. It is startling, therefore, to discover it is now a decade since the pair last appeared in a new story and that their entire film adventures account for no more than 83 minutes of lovingly animated celluloid. The prospects therefore for the next few weeks could scarcely be more exciting. With their new 84-minute adventure, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, these national icons are set to double their screen lives. That their creator, Nick Park, has achieved such expectation on such a slender output is a testament to his remarkable creativity. At 46, Park may have produced only a handful of films but he is rightly hailed as a cinematic genius - and a genuine British eccentric for good measure. For his part, Park - who remains single and childless - describes himself merely as 'an observer, quiet and contemplative', a view shared by most colleagues. 'Nick is certainly not stand-offish but he is not the one who is going to get rolling drunk when we relax after a hard day's work,' says Arthur Sheriff, who is accompanying Park on his current tour of Canada where The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was premiered on Friday. Similarly, friend and fellow animator Richard Goleszowski described Park as 'shy but spiritual'. Certainly, for a man with three Oscars, Park's life is strikingly modest. He lives in a small, two-bedroom cottage near Bristol, drives an old Peugeot, and spent his summer holiday this year in Scotland where he shared a house with relatives while indulging in his favourite hobby, watching wildlife. These two influences, family and animals, encapsulate his world and his work completely. His films are filled with deranged sheep, psychopathic penguins, mournful pumas and neurotic chickens while flat-capped, waist-coated Wallace, the most famous product of his imagination, is simply an animated version of his father, Roger, who died three years ago. 'Dad worked in his garden shed a lot, made things, was full of ideas, and acted in the same way Wallace does,' says Park. Roger Park, for his part, was immensely pleased with his son's success and proud to be a real-life Wallace. Similarly Gromit (the name, of a piece of electrical wiring, being provided by an electrician brother) is Park himself, according to most friends and colleagues: quiet, baffled, but competent. The pair were created while Park studied at the National Film and TV School in Beaconsfield, the fulfilment of an education that began at local school in Preston - where Park recalls being so average, few teachers could even remember his name - and then to Sheffield Polytechnic. In fact, the key moment in his career occurred when he was 11 when Roger Park - an architectural photographer - gave his son a camera. Park junior began filming hand-drawn strips of the family's pet hen Penny and a rat called Walter, using the family attic as his studio. 'That's how I spent my time,' he recalls. 'While my mates were out playing with their bikes, I was in the attic.' Like his father, Park longed to invent things but lacked Park senior's confidence and ability - so he lived out his inventive urges through his Plasticine creations. 'The nice thing about animation is that you can realise your inventions without understanding all the hard theory,' he says - hence the demented automated space trousers and Knit-o-matic machines that pepper his films. Park was still working on his first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, when he left film school. He contacted Peter Lord and David Sproxton of Aardman Animations, then responsible for TV hits such as Morph, and in 1985 was asked to join the company. 'I take no credit for his talent,' says Lord. 'He came to us fully fledged.' At Aardman, Park finished A Grand Day Out and also filmed Creature Comforts, in which a series of animated clay animals are interviewed about their lives in a zoo. Both were nominated for best animated short at the following year's Oscars. Creature Comforts won. Three years later, Park directed the film that made his name, The Wrong Trousers, a perfect amalgam of the themes that make his work so richly inventive and imaginative: Wallace's ridiculous over-enthusiasm for technology (including the space trousers that take him over); the fate of his poor put-upon dog, Gromit (who is cast from his home); and a sinister penguin who conspires to destruct Wallace's cosy world. The 30-minute, £650,000 film was the BBC's highest rated that Christmas, and won Park his second Oscar. By now, he was on a roll and in 1995 he directed A Close Shave in which Wallace falls for Wendolene, a wool shop owner, while Gromit is framed for sheep rustling. It won Park his third Oscar, more than Maggie Smith, Judi Dench or Anthony Hopkins have ever managed. Yet it was achieved with only a few hours film. Hollywood beckoned, and Park came under pressure to make films using the far more tractable, and cheaper technology of computer graphics. He refused and for the next five years laboured on the first of a series of joint deals set up between his company (Park is now a board director at Aardman) and DreamWorks. This was Chicken Run, a re-telling of The Great Escape with animated hens replacing Gordon Jackson and Richard Attenborough. It was highly amusing, a world hit, yet it failed to win awards. For his part, Park clearly pined for Wallace and Gromit. 'Nick has an art pad with him all the time,' says Sheriff. 'He scribbles out his ideas on it. All through Chicken Run, he just kept doing Wallace and Gromit sketches.' It was inevitable then, that Park would return to his most cherished creations for his next film. He and Bob Baker (writer of The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave) sat in a pub one day and came up with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, partly as a homage to those loopy werewolf films starring Oliver Reed as the accursed monster. Instead of preying on humans, however, their beast would devour garden produce. 'It's about people locking up their vegetables rather than their children,' he says. Thus Park claims to have created a new film genre, 'vegetarian Hammer Horror', though most critics say it is more like an Ealing comedy made in Plasticene. Certainly, his work is quintessentially English, gentle and cosy, never brash or garish. Not surprisingly, the gulf between the world of Preston's Prince of Putty and the financial expectations of Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation - which is bankrolling The Curse of the Were-Rabbit - has created tensions. (Park refuses to say how much DreamWorks invested but dismisses media estimates of £30 million as far too low.) Throughout the film's five year production, Katzenberg - looking out, from the start, for the concerns of American audiences - made daily phone calls to Park and would fly to Bristol, on his private jet every couple of months. There were vocabulary issues with almost every scene, Park admits - with the line 'Careful, Gromit, you'll buckle me trunnions' providing particular trouble, though the director resisted compromise on this one. But Park had to give way on his marrows, he admits - because Americans call them squash. Getting Wallace to say the word would have required utterly different shapings of Wallace's Plasticine mouth and so a complete reshoot of several scenes. And given that Park's production rate is roughly two seconds of film a day, with each figure requiring dozens of microscopic tweaks for each stop-frame shot, change was resisted. In the end, it was decided to replace 'marrow' with 'melon', a transatlantic cop-out if ever there was one. Britain will discover how successful the end result is in a few days when The Curse of the Were-Rabbit opens in London and then the rest of the country. To judge from Australian reviews, where the film had its world premiere two weeks ago, we are in for a treat: 'They are the Little Heroes from Little Britain. Utterly charming,' claimed one reviewer. Flat caps, Wensleydale and marrows can make it to the antipodes, it seems. The Atlantic is a bigger hurdle, of course, though so far things look good. After that, the future is unclear. Park admits to having absolutely no ideas and no projects on his books. His artpads remain covered in Wallace and Gromit doodles, however, and it is hard to imagine we have seen the last of Plasticine's answer to Laurel and Hardy. At five years a film, however, we may have a bit of a wait for their next great day out. · Additional research by Zoe Corbyn. Nick Park. DoB: 6 December 1958 (Preston, Lancashire) Jobs: Joined Aardman Animations in Bristol in 1985. Education: Sheffield Poly then National Film and TV School, Beaconsfield. Oscars for: Creature Comforts, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. How the Studio Behind Early Man Is Keeping It Old-School in a Digital World. I t’s 10 a.m. in an enormous studio in Bristol, England. For hours, a film crew has been adjusting lights and setting up cameras for the morning’s shoot. The stars of today’s scene are waiting off set, their intricate costumes receiving last-minute touch-ups, their stunt doubles ready. Action time. The camera begins its journey down a railway-like structure, capturing the scene frame by frame. There’s silence on set. Then disaster strikes. The ear of the leading lady has fallen straight off, landing on the set’s wooden floor with a soft “phut.” An assistant rushes over and the cameraman curses, knowing he’ll need to reshoot the scene. Everyone’s wondering the same thing: how easy will it be to reattach the organ? Despite the chaos, there’s no blood. No ambulance is called, no movie contracts studiously examined. Why? Because the star of this scene is a clay puppet, whose movements are animated in meticulous detail by a team of professionals at Aardman Studios. Aardman is the home of stop- motion animation, also known as “claymation,” and the studio is best known for the creation of Wallace and Gromit, an eccentric inventor and his intelligent dog who, in the 1990s, became some of England’s most beloved characters. Ahead of the release of the Aardman’s seventh feature film, Early Man , TIME visited their studio in Bristol. The family-friendly adventure comedy, which stars Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston and Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams and hits U.S. screens on Feb. 16, continues the studio’s long tradition of prioritizing a lovingly handmade feel even as the rest of the world goes digital. Aardman’s origins: From a teenage hobby to the Oscars. Schoolmates Peter Lord and David Sproxton began animating together as a hobby when they were teenagers, using a 16mm clockwork Cine Camera belonging to Sproxton’s father, an amateur photographer and a producer at the BBC. The pair played around with cut-outs from magazine color supplements and chalk drawings, spending weeks making fun one-minute clips. “Through pure nepotism,” according to Sproxton, their first work came with Vision On , a BBC show for children who were deaf or hard of hearing that ran from 1964 to 1976. Aardman Animations, named after an early character, was registered as a company in 1972, and the pair moved to Bristol around four years later. Lord and Sproxton worked steadily, earning recognition for their creation of the shape-shifting Morph, in 1977, who would become even more famous two decades later when he was included in the children’s program Take Hart . They received their first Academy Award in 1990 for Creature Comforts (1989). In the short film, directed by Nick Park, the voices of real members of the British public play out of the mouths of plasticine zoo creatures, to great comedic effect. Nick Park joins the team, bringing Wallace and Gromit. In 1985, four years before Creature Comforts , Lord and Sproxton joined forces with Nick Park, a talented animator and graduate of the prestigious National Film and Television School. Park had invited the pair to give a lecture at his college. At the time, he was working on his graduate project, A Grand Day Out , starring Wallace and Gromit. The now iconic duo looked a bit different then: Gromit was initially a cat — until Park realized that a dog was far simpler to animate. (The plasticine limbs could be longer and fatter, making it easier to walk it.) Lord and Sproxton recruited Park to help out with Morph, eventually offering him a full-time job. As a trio, they followed up on Park’s original Wallace and Gromit film with four successful shorts starring the duo, and an Oscar-winning movie, 2005’s W allace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit . But the studio wasn’t just making films. Aardman brought its signature style to music videos, from the Spice Girls’ “Viva Forever” to Nina Simone’s recording of “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” Their advertising partnerships with brands included McDonald’s, the bubble gum brand Hubba Bubba and Chevron. Aardman went on to make several critically-acclaimed features. The Great Escape -inspired Chicken Run , a collaboration with the U.S. animation studio DreamWorks which grossed nearly $225 million worldwide, making it the most successful stop-motion movie of all time. But the studio’s foray away from its stop-motion roots and into CGI in 2006, with Flushed Away , was a misstep. A commercial failure, it marked the end of the company’s partnership with DreamWorks. Soon after, Aardman returned to its original Claymation formula. The painstaking labor behind Early Man. Aardman’s latest outing, Early Man , is an underdog sports story set in prehistoric times, based on the (not so historically accurate) idea that cavemen invented soccer. Park had been nursing the idea for years. “What if lovable idiot cavemen had to stop using their weapons and fists and play a disciplined game?” he explains. “With sport, you still have the tribal aspects of ‘us against them,’ but the aggression is all channelled through a sport — it’s a real civilizing force.” Creating “ Braveheart with balls,” as he describes it, was no easy feat. The story is set in multiple locations including a lush green valley forest, badlands with prehistoric volcanoes and a city made of bronze. This meant roughly 40 sets were on the go at any given time, flanked by a crew exceeding 150. Animators were expected to achieve two to three seconds of footage per day, meaning a minute-long scene could take weeks to shoot. But for Park, the single biggest challenge was executing a stop-motion soccer match that was cinematic and exciting. “I was inspired by films like Gladiator ,” he says. “I wanted to channel the atmosphere and roar of the crowd and the way the camera is used.” For the stadium scene, the team built a soccer field the size of a room. The lower ranks of the stadium was built physically, but the rest of it, as well as the crowd, were later added with CGI. There was also concern about the fur fabric costumes worn by the cavemen. Generally, the puppets are readjusted by the animators around 12 times per second, which means they are constantly being touched. As a result, certain fabrics, like fur, have a tendency to change shape. Fur that’s animated frame by frame can often end up looking as though it is twitching, known in the animation world as “boiling.” But this did not worry Park. “I could see the animators’ look of horror when they realized they had all this fur fabric and hair to animate,” he says. “But personally I like the twitchiness, in the same way that I like to see the animators’ fingerprints in the clay. Often I would encourage the animators to be rougher; we don’t want the film to look too smooth or too slick so the audience is reminded of the craft and the handmade-ness of it.” Claymation’s enduring appeal. A lot has changed at Aardman since the 1970s. Far more materials are now used in puppet creation. While the earliest versions of Morph were made of solid clay and plasticine, the majority of today’s creatures are molded around solid metal armature, making them considerably more robust. Then there’s the advent of 3D printers, which Aardman has used to make everything from props to pirate mouths. The world of animation is also a different place. Forty years ago, Aardman was groundbreaking in its use of stop-motion technology. But these days, it’s not the only company favoring puppets. Laika, a production company in Portland, Oregon, and Aardman’s biggest rival, was nominated for an Oscar in 2009 for Coraline , and another in 2017 for Kubo and the Two Strings . 3 Mills studio in East London recently finished production on the Wes Anderson-directed stop-motion animation film Isle of Dogs , out March 23. And the French stop-motion production My Life as a Courgette (also known as My Life as a Zucchini ) won the Best Animated Feature Film at the 2016 European Film Awards. But Aardman’s fundamental craft remains relatively unchanged. Aside from dabbling in CGI for Flushed Away , the studio hasn’t strayed from the painstakingly slow stop-motion tradition that propelled it to fame in the 1980s. “You can work wonders with CGI and do some fantastic stuff with it, but it can feel a little bit emotionally cold,” says Sproxton. “Stop-motion animation is like a brilliant magic trick, and part of the fun of a magic trick is you know it’s not magic, but you have no idea how it actually worked,” says Lord. “You believe in the characters, even though a part of your brain is telling you they’re just made from clay and wool. I think that’s magical.” Correction: The original version of this story misstated the year the character Morph was created. He was introduced in 1977, not 1997. It also misstated the year of release of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and the number of Wallace and Gromit short films. The movie was released in 2005, not 2006, and there were four short films, not six. Aardman Animations. Peter Lord and longtime collaborator David Sproxton founded Aardman Animations together in 1972 and have presided over it ever since, gradually building it into a mini-empire for model animation. A large part of that growth can be credited to director Nick Park, who was hired as a part-time animator in 1985 while working on his student film, A Grand Day Out. The first in an immensely popular series featuring a cheese-loving inventor named Wallace and his sophisticated dog Gromit, A Grand Day Out was one of two Park films to receive Academy Award nominations for Best Animated Short in 1990; the other, Creature Comforts, earned him a well-deserved Oscar. He won two more with the successive entries in the Wallace & Gromit series, 1993's The Wrong Trousers and 1995's A Close Shave. Aardman's success in the animation world was again confirmed the next year, when Lord received his second Oscar nomination for the dialogue-free Wat's Pig. After a long resistance to Hollywood, Aardman signed a five-picture deal with Dreamworks for a reported $250 million. Co-directed by Park and Lord, their first feature-length project, Chicken Run, is a wonderfully elaborate goof on The Great Escape with Mel Gibson providing the voice of a brash American rooster who aids a flock of chickens in their plan to fly the coop. Park and Lord recently spoke to The Onion A.V. Club about Chicken Run, the animation process, and Aardman's future. The Onion: [to Peter Lord] What did you have in mind for Aardman Animations when you started it? Peter Lord: When we first started it, I suppose we were ambitious to do well. But I would have never dreamt anything like our success now, because the world of animation was so different back then. My ambition simply was to make money out of animation and make a career out of it. That was really as far as we ever hoped to go. There were only two of us at the time, myself and Dave Sproxton, and I never thought I'd ever walk into a studio with lots of people and lots of stuff, with a marketing department and a human-resources department. [Laughs.] I just thought we'd make films and bring in just enough to continue doing so. In Britain at the time, we were making five-minute shorts for kids, and doing a series like that was about as far as we'd imagined it would go. O: Was there a unified idea about what kind of animation would be coming out of Aardman? PL: Since it was just the two of us, it was really simple. Back in those days, the ambitions were very modest. But then we discovered Plasticine animation and found out how fun it was and how expressive it was. So, as the company became financially viable and started growing, I got to be ambitious and have this image of a whole stable of artists doing a range of projects. Not necessarily unified, though, because I thought we could be a home for all kinds of animators with different styles and visions. O: [to Nick Park] When you were finishing A Grand Day Out , you were working part-time at Aardman. In what capacity? Nick Park: I was working on whatever Aardman had, really. At first, it was a Channel 4 film called Babylon , which hasn't really seen the light of day for a long time. [Laughs.] Also, we were starting to get more into commercials, which I really enjoyed doing. Then there was this little character called Morph that Pete created that used to be our bread and butter back in the early days, sort of the British equivalent of Gumby. Morph is a little actor, really, that performs on this artist's desk, and I used to help out with that sometimes. We had him play around with pencils and paints and that kind of thing. He was really great fun to do. And then, the video for [Peter Gabriel's] "Sledgehammer" came along and I was one of the people who worked on that. But it was a great arrangement for me, because I was able to finish my own college film [ A Grand Day Out ] at the same time. It took me seven years to finally complete it. O: They were pleased enough with the film to give you the degree? NP: Yeah, they did. I think they did, anyway. [Laughs.] I went back something like eight or nine years after I started the course. I was the longest- running student at the National Film & Television School. PL: And all your teachers had died by then, right? [Laughs.] O: Considering the very subtle changes you need to make for expressions in 3-D animation, how do you assure that the animation remains consistent in a project as large as Chicken Run ? NP: That's one of the biggest challenges. Three or four years ago, I would have never thought this could work. As Pete said, Aardman has been this umbrella for people to work, but everybody has always been very individual and kept their own style. So, for a project like this one, the animators are asked to work in one style. But at the end of A Close Shave , we started to perfect a technique that was going to help lots of different people work in the same style and save a lot of time sculpting in front of the camera, as well. For Wallace, we pre-made these mouths to express each vowel and each consonant. I think we ended up with a set of about 20 mouths that were pressed out of Plasticine molds. We used this technique extensively on Chicken Run , where we had all these sets of beaks with teeth in them. And that helped keep the chickens looking the same. But I remember starting A Close Shave : There were more animators than ever working on that one, and they were all put through Wallace & Gromit lessons, where they learned how to move the brows and the eyes and the mouths. We did that even more on Chicken Run. Every Monday night, we had workshops so everyone would handle the characters in the same way. O: What was the division of labor between the two of you throughout the shooting? NP: We split the movie pretty much in two. This was made easy by the fact that we both originated the story idea together and kicked it around for about a year. We had our pet scenes we wanted to do, but after that, we did roughly alternate scenes. PL: I think it divided into something like 25 scenes a piece, maybe more. One scene might be 30 seconds and another might be four minutes. We kind of reckoned that any slight differences in our approach—which, God knows, were inevitable—would be covered up by the differences in the mood of the scenes we were shooting. O: What would a typical day on the set be like? PL: Like hell. [Laughs.] Imagine you're in Dante's Inferno and you have some idea. No, actually, it was mainly pleasure. Nick and I would arrive in the morning, and the first thing we'd do is watch the dailies from the previous day, see what they look like projected and then try to cut them into the reel. That was often the worst part of the day, because then you'd have to go through the agonizing decision as to whether the scenes you shot were good enough to keep. And if they weren't good enough, you had to negotiate to get them reshot, which always caused great dismay amongst the whole production, because a reshoot is some days' work lost. So the first part of the day was always very stressful. Then, once you got past that stretch, you had to go down to the studio floor and spend the morning directing the sets. At worst, there would be 15 sets each to worry about, and to be honest, you didn't have to work with all of them every day, but you'd easily visit 10 or so. One set may be in the middle of a shot, so there isn't terribly much to say. Another may be just starting a shot, so there's everything to say—about the performance, lighting, camera moves, set dressing, everything. Some may be rehearsing, some may be going for the final takes, some may be just doing blocking, and some you'd get to and they hadn't even started. So all the things that film directors do, Nick and I would do, but all overlapping. For example, you could be looking after two sets at the same time, and two different animators are working on two shots that have to be cut together. Sometimes the second shot would be starting before the first shot, and keeping track of all that would get really mind-boggling. Then, in the afternoon, we'd work on selecting voice takes from the actors, who had done maybe 30 takes of a line, and try to edit the picture from there. O: Considering the amount of planning that goes into each shot, is it difficult to add little individual touches as you go along? NP: [Plasticine animation] is a technique that's perfect for improvisation. It's usually a contradictory thing when you speak of animation to talk of improv, but with this technique, it happens, and I think it's because it's really a performance in front of the camera. You have your camera, you have your puppet, and your animator knows the intention of the shot, but there are so many ways you can carry it out. So it's like any other performance. You may know you've got to keep the shot within three seconds, and it may take you a whole day to do, say, a second and a half, but you have so many opportunities throughout that day to change your mind on how the shot goes. And ideas come to you, because you've got all that time. With drawn animation, it's like you're creating a more sophisticated flip-book, so you've got to look through your drawings and keep going back and adjusting. And with computers, you can keep changing the animation and layering it. You don't have that chance here. Here, you've got a puppet and you're just working forward, and if it doesn't quite deliver, you start again from the beginning. You really live in the moment, like an actor would on a stage. Each day is a singular performance. O: How does the stop-motion process figure into how you conceive a character? PL: It does affect it in a certain way. The conventional answer to that would be to say that our chickens were totally crazy, because in stop-motion, one of the things you have to fight is gravity. Our characters are basically standing on a table on their own two feet. So if a student came to me, I would say, "Young man, give your character big feet. Very big feet and thick legs and a little body." [Laughs.] Because that would be easier to animate. And our chickens have huge, round bodies and little thin legs and these spindly four-toed feet, which don't lie flat. So we defied the conventional wisdom of stop-frame animation. With Plasticine animation, you've got specific rules, because Plasticine is flexible modeling material which you can damage with ease. The chickens have textured and colored feather patterns on them and feathery bottoms, but you couldn't touch them, because every time you did, they'd all squidge together. So the puppets had to be built in a special way to allow us to touch them and move them around while still keeping their structural integrity. But the important part is the face, because that's where all the acting takes place. And that's actually technically quite simple, because it's just Plasticine. There are lots of different ways of designing that, but we've kind of developed this style with the eyes right together in the middle and a big wide mouth, just because that plays well. People find that incredibly funny for some reason. Just the still image makes them laugh, so we have to go along with that. O: What are your feelings on the Internet as a pipeline for Aardman shorts? PL: We just started with it. We've got a character called that we put on Atom Films. It was almost targeted for that kind of distribution, really. We had a young guy at work named Darren Walsh who had this idea for Angry Kid, and he just wanted to do one-minute films, nothing more. That's very hard to sell for conventional TV, so we thought we'd try it on the Internet. For us, it's an interesting experiment, but the big question is, in two years, will it have paid off financially? I'm not quite sure how the money will work out. O: Are the two of you going to continue working on shorts, or is it just features from here? NP: Well, Aardman has a deal to do four more features for Dreamworks. There's one on the way we're working on right now, tentatively called The Tortoise And The Hare , and then we've got a Wallace & Gromit feature after that. So we have those features, but I still think we're always going to be quite eclectic and do different things at the same time. While Chicken Run was being made, we were still doing kids' shows and TV commercials. PL: The nice thing about shorts is that you're hoping the next great idea is going to come up that way. It's like a training ground where animators can learn to be directors and learn graphic styles and that kind of thing. Plus, in the short form, if you have a bad idea, at least it doesn't take up a lot of screen time. [Laughs.] Lip Sync. Lip Sync is a series of British shorts created by Aardman Animations it consists of 5 short films that was shown on Channel 4. Nick Park's contribution to the series was the film Creature Comforts, which later won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1990. Contents. Shorts. Creature Comforts. Creature Comforts is a 1989 short film it is part of the Lip Sync series and created by Nick Park. The film focuses on various animals in a zoo being interviewed about their living conditions these include a depressed gorilla, a Brazilian puma, a young hippopotamus and a family of polar bears. Who complain about the cold weather, poor quality and the lack of space and freedom.​ War Story. War Story is a 1989 short film it is part of the Lip Sync series and created by Aardman Animations. The film focuses on Bill Perry who relates stories about his youth, his tilted house, and adventures during World War 2 in Bristol, England during the blitz. Next is a 1990 short film it is part of the Lip Sync series and created by Aardman Animations. The film focuses William Shakespeare, without saying a word, gives a quick run through of all his plays in a very special audition. Ident. Ident is a 1990 short film it is part of the Lip Sync series and created by Aardman Animations. The film focuses on a man and a dog who resembles Rex from . Going Equipped. Going Equipped is a 1990 short film it is part of the Lip Sync series and created by Aardman Animations. The film focuses on a young man in prison is interviewed and talks about his life, how he got into prison, and what it's like doing time.