Aardman Animations: Beyond Stop-motion 9781350114555, 9781350130296, 9781350130302

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Aardman Animations

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Aardman Animations Beyond Stop-motion Annabelle Honess Roe

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Annabelle Honess Roe, 2020 Annabelle Honess Roe has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Chicken Run (2000) directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park (© Collection Christophel / ArenaPAL) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-1455-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-3029-6 eBook: 978-1-3501-3030-2 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

For Vanessa and Laurie

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Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Understanding Aardman  Annabelle Honess Roe Section One  Identity and Brand 1 ‘All you do is call me, I’ll be anything you need’: Aardman Animations, Music Videos and Commercials  Malcolm Cook 2 Music, Sound and Northernness in the Wallace and Gromit Films  Joseph Darlington 3 ‘Yahoo! My last moment has come’: Peter Lord and the Literacy of Wit and Nostalgia  Paul Wells 4 From Europe to Hollywood and Back Again: Aardman and Its Studio Partners  Christopher Meir Section Two  Cultural Contexts 5 Aardman’s Early Shorts and the British Social Realist Tradition  Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib 6 A Darker Heartland: Otherness, Dysfunction and the Uncanny in Aardman’s Short Films  Jane Batkin 7 Washed Up: Animating Literary Corpses in The Pearce Sisters  Nicholas Andrew Miller 8 Wallace and Gromit and the British Fantasy Tradition  Alexander Sergeant

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Section Three  Process and Production

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9 Animation Storyboarding as Part of the Pre-Production Process: An Aardman Case Study  Paul Ward

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10 Life’s a Treat: Shaun, Timmy, Aardman and Children’s Television  Linda Simensky 11 Shaun the Sheep – Buster Keaton Reborn?  Richard Haynes

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Section Four  Surface and Performance

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12 Aardman’s Neo-Baroque: The Dual Nature of Special Effects in Aardman’s Feature Film Production  Thomas Walsh 13 Performing Authenticity through Clay in the Wallace and Gromit Films  Laura Ivins 14 Between Plasticine and Pixel: Aardman’s Digital Thumbprint  Christopher Holliday 15 Aardman! In an Entanglement with CGI!  Aylish Wood Select Bibliography Index

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List of Figures I.1 Aardman’s Annual Turnover, 2000–2017. I.2 Aardman’s feature film box office takings vs. budget. 7.1 Edna and Lol as ‘ugly man heads composited on stop-motion bodies’ (reprinted with permission, Luis Cook). 7.2 Combining 3D and 2D imagery in The Pearce Sisters (reprinted with permission, Luis Cook). 7.3 Surface and depth in The Pearce Sisters (Aardman Animations, 2007). 14.1 Arthur’s workspace emphasizes the diligence of attentive labour in Arthur Christmas (dir. Sarah Smith. Aardman Animations/ Sony Pictures Animation, 2011). 14.2 Roddy’s fall into the underground ‘London’ in Flushed Away (dir. David Bowers and Sam Fell. Aardman Animations/ DreamWorks Animation, 2006) manipulates animated perspective. 14.3 Roddy’s wardrobe brings together Aardman past and present in Flushed Away (dir. David Bowers and Sam Fell. Aardman Animations/DreamWorks Animation, 2006). 15.1 The hybrid materiality of The Pirates!: In an Adventure with Scientists! (dir. Peter Lord. Aardman Animations/Sony Pictures Animation, 2012) enables the remaking of space. 15.2 The hybrid materiality of The Pirates!: In an Adventure with Scientists! (dir. Peter Lord. Aardman Animations/Sony Pictures Animation, 2012) enables the remaking of space.

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List of Contributors Jane Batkin is Programme Leader of the BA (Hons) Animation course in the School of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln, and her teaching specialism is animation identity, culture and history. Her book Identity in Animation: A Journey into Self, Difference, Culture and the Body was published by Routledge in 2017. Joseph Darlington is Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Digital Animation with Illustration at Futureworks Media School in Manchester, UK. He completed a PhD on experimental aesthetics in 2014, and his work has been published in journals from the Cambridge Review to Comedy Studies. Malcolm Cook is Lecturer in Film at the University of Southampton. He has published a number of chapters and articles on animation, early cinema and their intermedial relationships. His book, Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. His recent and forthcoming work includes research into the use of music in Len Lye’s British films, the role of technology in defining medium specificity and the place of singalong films in early cinema. He is co-editing (with Kirsten Thompson) a book on the relationships between animation and advertising. Richard Haynes is Senior Lecturer in Animation Production at the Arts University, Bournemouth. He also works as a professional stop-motion animator. Credits include preschool television series, such as Little Robots, Fifi and the Flowertots, Rupert Bear and Postman Pat (at Cosgrove Hall Films). He is also a regular Animator at Aardman, where he has been involved with feature films, such as The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012) and Early Man (2018) and the long-running television series Shaun the Sheep. Christopher Holliday teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London, specializing in animation, film genre, international film history and contemporary digital media. He has published several book chapters and articles on animated film, including work in Animation Practice, Process & Production and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh

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University Press,  2018), and co-editor of Fantasy/Animation: Connections between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018). Annabelle Honess Roe is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Surrey. She has published on animation, documentary, British cinema and film genre in publications including Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and The Journal of British Cinema and Television. Her book Animated Documentary was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013 and won the Society for Animation Studies McLaren-Lambart Award for Best Book (2015). She is co-editor of Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Animation Studies Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018). Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib is a researcher and Assistant Professor in Animation Studies at the Animation Department of Faculty of Cinema and Theatre, Tehran Art University, Iran. Her PhD thesis (UCA Farnham, UK, 2009) was on realism in Aardman’s early short films, and her current interests include medium specificity in animation and the emerging forms and institutions of Iranian animation. Laura Ivins is an independent scholar and film critic. She received her PhD from the Indiana University, and her articles have appeared in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and The Journal of Popular Culture. Christopher Meir is a UC3M CONEX-Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Carlos III de Madrid. He has published extensively on film and television industries, including a monograph on Scottish Cinema (Scottish Cinema: Texts and Contexts), a co-edited collection on the producer (Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies) and numerous journal articles, book chapters and interviews with producers. He is currently completing a monograph on StudioCanal and its influence on the European and global film and television industries for Bloomsbury. Nicholas Andrew Miller is Associate Professor of English and Director of Film Studies at Loyola University Maryland. His areas of teaching and scholarly interest include film animation, early cinema, the intersections between modernist print and visual cultures, and twentieth-century Irish and British literature. He is currently at work on an interdisciplinary study of metamorphosis in modernist visual culture. He is the author of Modernism, Ireland, and the Erotics of Memory (Cambridge, 2002).

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Alexander Sergeant is Lecturer in Film and Media Theory at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published work on fantasy cinema and popular animation in numerous journals and edited collections. He is the co-editer of Fantasy/Animation: Connections between Media, Medium and Genres (Routledge AFI Film Reader, 2018). Linda Simensky is Head of PBS KIDS content, the public broadcaster in the United States. Before joining PBS, she was in charge of original animation for Cartoon Network, where she oversaw development and series production of The Powerpuff Girls, among others. She began her career at Nickelodeon, where she helped build the animation department and launch the popular series Rugrats, Doug and Rocko’s Modern Life. Simensky also teaches Animation History at the University of Pennsylvania. Paul Ward is Professor of Animation Studies at the Arts University Bournemouth, UK. His main research interests are in the fields of animation and documentary film and television, animation pedagogy, production cultures, communities of practice and film and media historiography. Published work includes articles for the journals Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Animation Journal and the Historical Journal for Film, Radio and Television, as well as numerous anthology essays. He is also Series Co-Editor (with Caroline Ruddell) for the book series Palgrave Animation. Thomas Walsh graduated from the European School of Classical Animation at Ballyfermot Senior College, Dublin, in 1994. He has worked professionally as a special effects artist for the Walt Disney Feature Animation Studio, contributing to feature films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997) and Tarzan (1999). He subsequently gained a PhD from the Loughborough University School of Art and Design in 2009. He is currently Senior Lecturer in animation at the Arts University Bournemouth in the UK. Paul Wells is Director of the Animation Academy at the Loughborough University. He has published widely in animation and film studies, including Understanding Animation (Routledge,  1998) and Animation, Sport and Culture (Palgrave,  2014). He is also an established writer and director for TV, film, radio and theatre and a scriptwriting consultant, based on his book Basics Animation 01: Scriptwriting (Bloomsbury, 2007), working with writers from The Simpsons and Spongebob Squarepants.

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Aylish Wood is Professor of Animation and Film Studies at the University of Kent. She has published articles in Screen, New Review of Film and Video, Journal of Film and Video, Games and Culture, Film Criticism and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her books include Technoscience in Contemporary American Film (2002); Digital Encounters (2007) and Software, Animation and the Moving Image: What’s in the Box (2014), a study of intersections between software and the production of moving images, encompassing games, animations, visual effects cinema and science visualizations.

Acknowledgements I owe a debt of gratitude to the contributors whose chapters make up this book. Their willingness to share their thoughts, knowledge and passion for Aardman has sustained throughout the book’s long gestation and their patience with the editing process and generosity with their ideas has been integral to this book’s completion. The early stages of research on this book were supported by a small grant from the British Academy and I appreciate also the access given to me at the beginning of the book’s conception by Paul Kewley and David Sproxton at Aardman. I couldn’t have completed this book without the support and sustenance of my family, in particular Nick, Vanessa and Laurie. Finally, thanks and admiration to all at Aardman for making such wonderful animation that is richly deserving of the scholarly attention I hope this book affords it.

Introduction: Understanding Aardman Annabelle Honess Roe

In  1966, two twelve-year-old boys met at the Woking Grammar School. New boy Peter, recently returned from Australia, sat beside David, and started doodling in his exercise book. A few years later, Dave and Pete began experimenting with animation on an old kitchen table, using a dustedoff wind-up Bolex camera. Via Dave’s father, who worked at the BBC, the pair’s experiments gained the attention of Patrick Dowling, the producer of Vision  On, a BBC television programme aimed at deaf children, to whom they subsequently sold a film for £25 in  1971. The film featured a goofy superhero character called Aardman, and with no better idea of what name to put on the cheque, Aardman Animations was born. Thus goes Aardman’s origins story.1 Many of us are familiar with what happens next: David Sproxton and Peter Lord move to Bristol, in the South West of England, and in  1977 create the character Morph as a foil for the presenter Tony Hart on the BBC children’s television art programme Take Hart (also produced by Dowling)2; the popularity of Morph led the BBC to give him his own television show in 1980.3 During this time, Aardman, still at this point a tiny two-man operation, receives commissions from the BBC, and later Channel 4, to make short animated films based on recorded, overheard conversations.4 Around the time they are working on the Channel 4 shorts in the mid-1980s, Sproxton and Lord ‘discover’ Nick Park at the National Film and Television School, who is struggling to finish his graduation film, A Grand Day Out, featuring two characters called Wallace and Gromit. Nick Park is brought into the fold, and works on Aardman’s films, including a short as part of the Channel 4 commission: Creature Comforts (1989). The following year that short wins the studio its first of many Academy Awards and ignites the beginning of international recognition that eventually enables the studio to produce its first feature film, Chicken Run (2000), directed by Lord and Park. Fast forward to over forty years since they banked their first cheque. During this time Aardman’s growth and success has been both significant and celebrated. Known as the ‘Rolls-Royce studio’ of the animation industry,5 they have won

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four Oscars (and been nominated for seven more)6 and countless other awards, and Chicken Run remains the most successful stop-motion animated film of all time at the international box office.7 In 2017, the company had an annual turnover of more than £30 million.8 This turnover has fluctuated since 2000 (see Figure I.1),9 but shows a general pattern of growth that reflects their expansive activities across a range of platforms, most famously in feature films and television, but also in advertising, games, interactive content and brand licensing. To support this activity, Aardman currently employs approximately 150 people at their headquarters in Bristol, in the South West of England and until recently the studio was privately owned and run by its two founders. In 2018, Lord and Sproxton handed ownership of the company to the employees,10 a move that reflected the company’s projected identity as one driven by integrity rather than by profit, an identity that belies the many smart business decisions that have enabled their longevity in the face of a fluctuating and unpredictable media industry. So, while they are for many people synonymous with Wallace and Gromit, the reality of Aardman goes far beyond the homespun, make-it-upas-you-go-along approach and cosy domesticity of that cheese-loving human– canine odd couple, and the company now has a global multimedia crossplatform reach that would have been hard to predict forty years ago. Despite their status, longevity, sustained business success and significant contribution to Britain’s national cultural identity and creative economy, there

Figure I.1  Aardman’s Annual Turnover, 2000–2017.

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is a surprising lack of academic writing on Aardman. Publications are for the most part limited to that which has been put out by the studio, including their how-to animation book Cracking Animation, two more recent retrospectives of the studio’s history and style, and various making-of books that have accompanied their productions.11 Third-party material is mostly limited to features and interviews in the trade and popular press, and Aardman has not received the sort of extended scholarly attention afforded to other contemporary, nationally significant animation companies such as Pixar or Studio Ghibli.12 This means that to date, Aardman’s self-representation – in their books, but also behind-the-scenes content found on their DVDs and, more latterly, online – and how Aardman personnel talk about the studio in interviews and other promotional material have offered the most significant means of understanding the studio and their work. While this material is useful and important in many ways, as discussed below, Aardman is long overdue the type of attention from animation studies, and film and media studies more broadly, that this volume offers. This is perhaps even more the case at this juncture. Despite the company’s financial health, their feature films have successively increasingly struggled to connect with audiences, and none of their films has managed to achieve Chicken Run’s success at the box office (see Figure I.2).13 With Sproxton and Lord stepping back from the dayto-day running of the studio Aardman is entering a new phase, and now seems an apt time to assess the creative and economic contribution Aardman has made to British animation and culture more broadly. The individually

Figure I.2  Aardman’s feature film box office takings vs. budget.

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authored chapters included in this book engage with the depth and breadth of Aardman’s work and activities in order to understand what ‘Aardman’ means, both in terms of the content it has produced and as a cultural entity that has dominated the perception of British animation for many decades, most notably between 1990 and the early 2010s. In this introduction, rather than retell the already well-documented history of the studio, I instead explore the question of what makes Aardman Aardman. For there is undeniably an ‘Aardman-ness’ that we might associate not only with their work and the people who have created it, but also with the general ethos that surrounds the studio. However, this brand singularity persists in the face of diverse activity, some of which seems at odds with the rhetoric of the homespun approach and accidental success that has surrounded the studio. In addition to their seven, to date, feature films,14 they have produced many TV series and short films. Less famously, at least to the public who know them best as the makers of Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Morph, they have made countless commercials, work that makes up a significant proportion of the company’s activity,15 as well as music videos and video games. They also actively exploit the licensing and marketing opportunities of their banner brands in order to financially capitalize on their existing creative properties  – another branch of business activity that is vital to the company’s financial stability. One way to understand Aardman, of course, is to look at the films, television programmes, commercials and other content they have made. Indeed, many chapters in this book take Aardman’s productions as their focus. However, as John Caldwell drew our attention to his 2008 book Production Culture, it is important to consider more than just the ‘on-screen stylistic tendencies’ of a studio in order to understand their cultural processes and outputs.16 I would argue that consideration of Aardman’s activities beyond their banner productions is essential to determine how ‘Aardman-ness’ is constituted. Caldwell was one of the first people to formalize the process of researching ‘behind the screens’ of the media industries by looking at ‘off-screen industrial activities’ as he calls it. This involves doing wideranging ethnographic research with film and media workers via interviews, for example, or looking at the processes and political economy of how and what media content gets made. This type of research into the industrial and practical activities involved in the creation of Aardman’s work is evident in several of the chapters in this volume. Caldwell also points to the importance of another area of investigation, an area in which these two poles of off-screen industrial and on-screen activities interact. He describes this area as viral marketing, referring to things such as the making-of specials

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found on DVD extras and EPKs (electronic press kits), to which we might more latterly add other similar material found on studios’ and distributors’ YouTube channels and social media feeds. These are the means by which a studio self-reflects on and also promotes their output and activities. In terms of understanding Aardman, this extra-textual material, or media ‘paratexts’ as Jonathan Gray has dubbed them,17 is vital to consider because it is a significant means by which they maintain a cohesive identity in the face of increasingly diversified animation practice and creative output. In what follows, I will explore Aardman’s on-screen and off-screen activity as well as the paratextual material that surrounds it in order to demonstrate that ‘Aardman-ness’ is constituted as much in how the studio talks about itself as in the work they produce or the way they produce it.

Aardman style On the surface, Aardman’s output presents a cohesive creative voice for the studio. Their stop-motion feature films Chicken Run (2000), Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012), Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) and Early Man (2018), along with the Wallace and Gromit short films18 and their Shaun the Sheep spin-off television series,19 all represent a certain idea, or ideal, of Britishness  – one that is wrapped up in a colloquial humour that gently plays on national, regional and other stereotypes: The self-effacing yet plucky grit of Ginger and her compatriots in Chicken Run, which is drawn in marked comparison to American interloper Rocky’s big ego and brash self-confidence; the eccentric propriety of the Captain and his crew in The Pirates!; the totems of northernness and parochial English life in Wallace and Gromit. These characteristics are amplified by the films’ usagainst-them narratives, which help create a sense of cohesive cultural identity, seen most recently in Early Man’s underdog prehistoric sports narrative. Central to these quintessentially Aardman stories are quirky and eccentric characters, lovable ‘losers or incompetents’ who succeed in spite of themselves.20 Aardman protagonists tend to be single-minded to a fault, but unlike a typically aspirational Hollywood character, their goal is often something charmingly unambitious: a nice piece of cheese, or success at the local vegetable competition. The exploits of Aardman characters are often madcap and reliant on steampunk-esque contraptions that elide, or even reverse in the case of Arthur Christmas, the post-industrial historical shift from the mechanical to the digital, and this is one source of the pervasive tone of nostalgia in their

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work. This is compounded by the historical looseness of the films’ narratives which are often set in a vague past that is hard to tie to any specific time period. This nostalgia is evident also in the Aardman milieu, one that features both the bucolic ‘green and pleasant land’ and ‘dark satanic mills’ of a mythic England past, seen most clearly in the Wallace and Gromit films.21 The rolling hills of Mossy Bottom farm in Shaun the Sheep, the wood-panelled interiors of imperial Britain in The Pirates! and the country pile in Were-Rabbit all evoke the iconography of a certain type of British national cinema, one often criticized for its reactionary attitude.22 While Aardman has received some backlash against its ‘cosy Britishness’, this has by no means been to the extent of the critique of the films that typify British ‘heritage’ cinema.23 Perhaps this is due to the fact that animation has typically not received the same sort of ‘serious’ criticism or enquiry afforded to live-action cinema, but also because audiences and critics alike generally love Aardman precisely for this aspect of their work, which is frequently positively described as ‘cosy’, ‘charming’ and ‘heartwarming’.24 All of Aardman’s films, shorts and TV series mentioned above convey a certain ‘Aardman-ness’ that has come to characterize the studio’s work, something that may be thought of as contributing to, but as slightly distinct from, the Aardman ‘brand’, which Andrew Spicer has suggested is constituted by Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep.25 In addition to the narrative characteristics described above, inherent to ‘Aardman-ness’ is the subtle observation of human behaviour, something that has been present in their work from the very beginning. Talking about their early Animated Conversations films Peter Lord has commented that ‘no-one else had thought of animating those little things that people often don’t even know they’re doing’.26 Askance looks, furrowed brows and attention to the action of background characters have become an Aardman signature, one that was first seen by a wide public in Nick Park’s Creature Comforts. The delight, and particularly ‘Aardman’ sensibility, in this short comes not only from the humorous juxtaposition of documentary sound recordings of real people with claymation animal puppets, but also from the little visual details: the young ‘bluebird’ standing in the background whose beak is twanged by his neighbour while their friend discusses the differences between zoo and circus animals, the terrapin who headers a beach ball that unexpectedly appears from the left of the frame while his enclosure mate speaks into the microphone, the polar bear who silently shakes his head at his younger sibling’s daft comments. Creature Comforts later spawned the Heat Electric commercials (1990–2) that would not only help make the company a household name in the UK, but also begin to cement the association of cosy warmth with the Aardman aesthetic.

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Diversity and cohesion In terms of their off-screen industrial activities, Aardman are most closely identified with claymation, a  3D stop-motion animation process. Their visually distinctive models, or puppets, are satisfyingly physically tangible and possess the ‘coat hanger’ mouths and heavy brows that have become a signature of the studio’s style. Originally made out of plasticine, a medium Lord and Sproxton started working in after becoming frustrated with their fledgling attempts in 2D drawn animation, in terms of both the production process and the final product, which they have described as ‘rather bad animation’.27 When they started working in plasticine, enjoying the spontaneity of stopmotion filmmaking,28 suddenly they were ‘doing something that nobody else was’.29 In fact, Brian Sibley has credited Aardman’s early work with catalysing a ‘renaissance in claymation’.30 The studio has remained closely identified with the handmade aesthetic and process of claymation since that time, even though their models are now more likely to be constructed from latex and silicone, with multiple replacement mouth parts and metal armatures to help maintain rigidity. However, if one explores beyond their highly visible feature films and well-known shorts, then a wide diversity of practices is revealed, much of which is not immediately identifiable as being in a typically Aardman style, either visually or tonally. In fact, this stylistic diversity has been present since Aardman’s earliest days. For example, 1989’s Lip Synch series includes four creative voices that don’t seem to have much in common. While Peter Lord and Nick Park both made claymation films, Park’s humorous Creature Comforts is distinct from Lord’s two shorts, War Story and Going Equipped, that are more ensconced in a realist tradition concerned with sociopolitical issues. Neither Ident (Richard Starzak, then Goleszowski) nor Next (Barry Purves) used recorded, documentary soundtracks, and both films are tonally and visually divergent from the shorts made by Lord and Park. Starzak’s quasi-surrealist, dystopian contribution eschews intelligible dialogue altogether.31 In Next Purves, who had already established his stop-motion credentials as an animator on Cosgrove Hall’s Wind in the Willows (1983), uses fabric puppets in a style that has more in common with his previous work than the other Lip Synch films. While films such as Steve Box’s Stage Fright (1997) are in a clearly identifiable Aardman style, in particular the character design and, even more specifically, the ‘coat hanger’ shape of their mouths, a look at the rest of Aardman’s short films made in the intervening years further undermines any sense of homogeneity in their style or tone, and many of these films feel a long way from the world of Wallace and Gromit. Shorts such as Mark

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Brierley and David Sproxton’s Owzat (1997), the studio’s first foray into computer-generated imagery (CGI) character animation, and the dark literary adaptation The Pearce Sisters (Luis Cook, 2007) do not conform to the visual aesthetic or the cosy atmosphere of the better-known work with which they are most commonly identified. The creative and stylistic heterogeneity of Aardman’s short films reflects, as much as anything else, the creative forces behind them – relatively few of their short films have been directed by the marquee names who are most readily associated with the Aardman style (Peter Lord and Nick Park, but also Steve Box and Richard Starzak). In addition, and as with many animation studios, Aardman has used shorts as a testing ground for experimenting with new techniques, styles and ideas. However, despite Aardman’s protestations that they ‘don’t think we should be defined by our most successful craft of stop-motion’,32 the true variety of Aardman’s catalogue is for the most part mitigated by the consistency of their more prominently promoted and well-known headline work. Their feature film forays beyond their signature claymation with the CGI films made under their deals with DreamWorks and Sony, Flushed Away (2006) and Arthur Christmas (2011), were short-lived. Additionally, while the progeny of some of Aardman’s lesser-known early work can be seen in some of their more unconventional output (or the ‘darkside’ as they have sometimes labelled it), such as Angry Kid (2009–16) and Rex the Runt (1998–2001),33 Aardman’s offbeat tendencies are overshadowed by their more prominent output that is consistent with their brand identity. Where Aardman have most greatly, and most successfully, diverged from their signature process and style is in their commercials and website work. This is work that is less visible or less clearly identified with the studio to the general public, but is in fact an area in which they have been highly and consistently prolific, and was what facilitated their initial expansion from a two-man operation. Between 1982 and 1985, the company only worked on one project that wasn’t a commercial (the fifteen-minute short Babylon, directed by Lord and Sproxton, broadcast on Channel 4 in 1986), and it was during this period that they expanded their animation ‘staff ’, first hiring Richard Starzak (who joined the company as Richard Goleszowski in 1983) and then Nick Park (1985). While early advertising and promotional work, such as the music video for Peter Gabriel’s hit song ‘Sledgehammer’ (1986) and the Heat Electric campaign, led on from their successful claymation shorts, their portfolio subsequently developed to include a very wide range of digital and traditional animation and filmmaking techniques such as Flash, live-action and puppeteering. More recently, Aardman has continued to diversify through exploiting the potential of online activity. As well as establishing an online and digital presence for their own

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characters and properties, for example the Shaun the Sheep – VR Movie Barn downloadable virtual-reality content and the Morph YouTube channel launched in  2014, Aardman also makes original content for online and interactive platforms  – for example,  2015’s Twit or Miss iOS and Android app based on Roald Dahl’s The Twits for publisher Penguin Random House and 2018’s well-received 11–11 Memories Retold narrative video game set during the First World War. Aardman’s commitment to production activities beyond their brand-identifiable material is indicated by fact that the studio’s ‘apps, games and interactive’ division, one of five that make up the company,34 ‘has been earmarked for sustained growth in the company’s overall strategy’.35 The conscious and strategic diversification of Aardman’s on-screen stylistic tendencies and off-screen industrial practices was in part necessitated by the changing financial landscape of television in the 1990s. While Aardman had caught their first break through commissions from British terrestrial broadcasters – the BBC and Channel  4, these broadcasters subsequently stopped funding independent animation to the extent that had allowed Aardman to first experiment with, and later establish, their animation style. Even when they were commissioning animation, television budgets had shrunk to the extent that they rarely covered the costs of production.36 This led to Aardman expanding into advertising, an activity that continues to provide the company’s ‘financial backbone’ and generates a significant part of their annual turnover.37 This diversification and the company’s core brand have, however, a mutually reinforcing relationship. Early advertising work was gained through the success of their claymation shorts, and their feature film work lends the company a certain cultural prestige that attracts clients. Similarly, while feature films are not the company’s only output, they remain at its core, both creatively and financially, in particular through maximizing the merchandising opportunities of their most popular characters.38 The company’s energetic exploitation of the licensing and franchising potential of the characters and properties most closely associated with their brand has also helped develop the perception of homogeneity among their work, despite its actual diversity.39

Aardman on Aardman In Cracking Animation Brian Sibley’s summary of the studio’s history embraces their divergent activities, yet also states that ‘even as Aardman explore new areas of entertainment, they have consistently held onto the hallmark qualities that have set them apart from other animation studios and

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first brought them international acclaim’.40 This sense of coherence in the face of disparate and diverse creative outputs and working practices is conveyed through the studio’s self-reflexive engagement with their on-screen work and off-screen practice. While Sibley does not specify in Cracking Animation what these ‘hallmark qualities’ are, we can infer from Aardman’s other selfreflexive outputs that their work is unified by a creativity integrity that means they stay true to a shared and engrained working practice and ethos that is not driven by a desire for financial gain, which in turn enables them to retain their own creative identity in any context. This is something subtly claimed in the ‘Behind the Scenes of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!’ clip available on YouTube,41 when it is pointed out that even though the film is a collaboration with the US studio Sony Pictures Animation, the film is ‘unlike anything made in Hollywood’. Aardman’s non-Hollywood sensibility is covertly self-reflected in other ways too. In ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death: How They Donut’, David Sproxton seems to imply Aardman’s lack of commercial drive when he points out that their films’ merchandising strategy, which is in fact both extensive and highly profitable, is not something that drives the creative process. This commercial disavowal is reinforced by the notion of accidental success that often underlies the studio’s self-written history as one propelled by talent, willing mutual commitment to core values and, to a certain extent, good fortune rather than a financially driven commercial strategy.42 While this was undoubtedly the case in Aardman’s very early years, this narrative belies the more strategic piloting of the company in its more recent history. Instead of commercial gain, Aardman self-presents as being driven by a commitment to a working practice that encompasses both innovation and artistry, stays true to the handmade artisanal methods of their earliest work and also echoes the inventiveness and resourcefulness that characterizes Wallace and Gromit’s escapades. Aardman’s association with the handmade has prevailed in the face of the studio’s adoption of developments in craft and technology that have made their stop-motion animation process more timeand cost-effective and, importantly, scalable to feature film production.43 In part, this synonymy of Aardman with the handmade has been perpetuated through subtle visual cues in their films and shorts, such as the addition of fingerprints to digitally produced characters or physical models made out of materials (such as silicone and latex) that no longer bear the trace of the labour of their construction and animation. In behind-the-scenes material, attention is frequently drawn to the labour involved in Aardman’s productions and how the studio consistently overcomes technical challenges to achieve their creative goals while at the same time taking pains to point out how time-consuming such processes are.

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For example, in ‘Making of the Were-Rabbit’ viewers are told of the lengths to which the studio went to create the titular character, from building and testing the wire armature to importing the fur from a specialist maker in the United States. An eight-minute extra on The Pirates! DVD details the effort and ingenuity required to create the film’s ‘bath chase sequence’ in which members of the pirate crew careen down the stairs of Darwin’s house in a bathtub – a thirty-one-frame sequence that took a week to animate, and much longer in terms of planning, set design, lighting and so on. Similarly, in ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death: How They Donut’, the intricacies of the animation process are revealed. Viewers are given insight into the stages involved, the cameras used and the challenges of rigging lighting and set dressing. The tenor of this behind-the-scenes material is that this work is technically very difficult and takes a long time but that no challenge is too great and there is no limit to Aardman’s painstaking attention to creative detail. Caldwell describes this kind of DVD industrial function as cultivating an ‘explicit consciousness of aesthetic distinction’ that in effect canonizes the primary on-screen output.44 Similarly, Jonathan Gray talks about how ‘paratextual frames’ such as these types of making-ofs ‘prove remarkably important for how they assign value to a text, situating it as a product and/or as a work of art’.45 In the case of Aardman’s making-ofs, more than situating the films in question as ‘works of art’, they are celebrating, and thus validating, the processes by which they were created, casting the animators, directors and other crew as artists united in their deep commitment to their craft and the quality of the end product – the film. It is interesting to note, therefore, the differences in the behind-thescenes and making-of material available for Aardman’s two non-stopmotion feature films, Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas, made under short-lived deals with Hollywood animation studios DreamWorks and Sony, respectively. Much of the discourse surrounding their forays into Hollywood acknowledges the difficulties of marrying Aardman’s aesthetic and sensibility with the Hollywood approach and creative processes, described as ‘culturally incompatible’.46 As such, it is no surprise that the promotional paratextual material offered on the computer-animated films’ DVDs is quite different from that accompanying Aardman’s stop-motion films. Instead of behind-the-scenes material revealing the painstaking yet fun processes of animation sustained by the camaraderie of those who work at Aardman’s Bristol headquarters, the Arthur Christmas DVD includes a rather slick ‘Un-wrapping Arthur Christmas’ featurette that focuses on the cast and the story of the film. Additional ‘progression reels’ that break down the different stages of computer-animating some of the film’s key scenes lack  the intimate insight offered into the laborious processes required to

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create Aardman’s stop-motion, a process that is characterized as a labour of love of a group of individuals for whom ‘it’s not about the money’,47 compared to the instrumentalist presentation of the computer animation process involved in making Arthur Christmas. On the Flushed Away DVD, none of the making-of material engages with the animation process, instead providing interviews with the cast and information about the film’s musical score. As such, the making-of material for Aardman’s Hollywoodled computer-animated films fails to cultivate the same sort of ‘explicit consciousness of aesthetic distinction’ that surrounds their stop-motion films. It also reflects Peter Lord’s observation of the difficulties of working with Hollywood when he says of DreamWorks that ‘their way of making films, their studio ethos, didn’t really fit with ours’,48 and helps indicate why the business partnerships with Hollywood animation studios were shortlived. It is, therefore, via paratextual material that we are prompted to read the industrial practices that fall outside the core brand activity of the Wallace and Gromit shorts and their stop-motion feature films as typifying Aardman-ness, or not. For example, the making-ofs for the Nokia promotional short films Dot (2010) and Gulp (2011) and the Swedbank commercial Under the Oak Tree (2011) manage to acknowledge the diversity of Aardman’s activities while at the same time work to characterize these activities as being undertaken, unlike the computer-animated features, in a typically Aardman way. Dot, a short made in collaboration with the University of Bristol to promote the Nokia N8 phone by making an animated film using its camera, is ‘the world’s smallest stop-motion animation’ – a one-and-a-half-minute film featuring a  9-mm titular character. The making-of is three times longer than the film itself and emphasizes the film’s production as a site where ingenuity, inventiveness and patience enable the intersection of art and technology.49 For example, attention is drawn to how the production team built a microscopic lens to attach to the camera, and each frame of the film, which was made using the replacement animation technique, required an individual model to be 3D printed and painted by hand. In The Making of Gulp (2011), a short which also used the Nokia N8 camera, this time to shoot the pixilation animation of a vast sand drawing on a beach in Wales, one of the film’s directors observes the ‘wonderful thing about this – we’re attempting something that shouldn’t really be possible’,50 thus inviting viewers to marvel at the techno-creative achievement exemplified by the film. Achieving the impossible via human labour is also an underlying theme of the behind the scenes of the Swedbank Under the Oak Tree commercial.51 The making-of makes much of how the studio

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reverted to older methods of matte painting and model making in order to achieve the client’s desired look. There is a strong sense of Aardman staying true to their creative voice and working ethos by patiently and skilfully utilizing artisanal methods that have gone out of fashion. Instead of valuing modern tenets such as efficiency and cost-effectiveness, Aardman is represented as a ‘company that favours creativity above all and actively seeks to be a place where artistic endeavour can flourish’ through its celebration of the craftspeople and highly skilled techniques required to produce quality material.52 What these making-ofs covertly suggest is that Aardman’s creative, technological and work ethic extends beyond the ‘core’ activity of their stopmotion features and shorts to their other in-house activity. And also, that these are values that are upheld by everyone who works within the company. In this way, Aardman’s self-reflexive output draws together disparate activity through suggesting it is made according to the same ethos. In addition, Aardman’s paratexts help determine what of their output they consider to be true to this ethos. By reflecting in a quite specific and unified way on their off-screen industrial practices, Aardman maintains a unified identity in the face of diverse on-screen work. However, the question remains as to whether this has now become a limiting factor for the studio. While their advertising work continues to be lucrative, audiences seem increasingly less interested in their more public-facing work – their feature films. This suggests that the ‘Aardman-ness’ that has become a hallmark for the type of work they create and the way they create it might now be more of a hindrance than a help to the company’s longevity. This is implied in the studio’s recently published anecdotal history, Aardman: An Epic Journey Taken One Frame at a Time, in which Sean Clarke, previous Head of Rights and Brand Development at the studio and the recently-named successor to Sproxton as Managing Director, emphatically states that ‘we do not want to be known just as the creators of Wallace and Gromit’.53 While acknowledging the importance of Wallace and Gromit to the company’s history, Clarke states that it ‘shouldn’t necessarily define our future’ and he seems keen to shed the ‘sense that still lingers today that we’re this quirky British company, determined to carry on with what people think of as this antiquated, labour-intensive process, making stop-motion films’.54 This perception is one that has been perpetuated by the paratexts that surround Aardman’s work, as much as by the work itself. Clarke’s words suggest that this is a perception the studio is now seeking to move beyond as it evolves in the post-Lord-and-Sproxton era. Whether or not Aardman can leave behind the characteristics and working practices that have for so long been so closely aligned with its identity and have constituted its ‘Aardman-ness’ remains to be seen.

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Beyond stop-motion film Questions of Aardman’s identity that have been addressed in this introduction are picked up and expanded upon in the book’s first section, ‘Identity and Brand’, which addresses the way Aardman has established its own brand identity and also how it has conveyed a sense of national and cultural identity in its work. Through putting Aardman’s advertising activity in the context of the developments that took place in the advertising industry and advertising theory in the 1980s and 1990s, Malcolm Cook explores how the functional qualities (clay-based animation) and non-functional attributes (handmade, intimate working practices) of Aardman’s work made them particularly well placed to capitalize on this growing area of potential income. Cook argues for the significance of Aardman’s advertising work in terms of the studio’s financial stability and that Aardman not only contributed to a sense of brand identity for its clients but also developed its own brand as a studio through its advertising work. Joseph Darlington’s chapter looks at another aspect of identity in Aardman’s work, in particular, how ideas of northernness are communicated and complicated through the use of music in the Wallace and Gromit films. Darlington argues that the commonly perceived idea that these films are ‘quintessentially’ British is complicated by their northern identity, one that is itself not straightforwardly yoked to a specific locale. This is amplified by the franchise’s use of music, which with its basis in traditional northern brass bands instrumentation and orchestration combined with the tropes of Hollywood soundtracks, compounds and complicates Wallace and Gromit’s embodiment of national and local identity. In a chapter on Aardman cofounder Peter Lord, Paul Wells explores Lord’s identity as Aardman’s Creative Director and reassesses his significance to the Aardman brand through considering Lord’s creative influences, in particularly the importance of wit and the literary origins of his comedic tendencies. Wells offers an alternative perspective on Lord’s work that counters the way Aardman’s work is typically thought of as privileging the visual. In the final chapter in this section, Chris Meir looks at the studio’s business practices and reflects on the studio’s identity via their various partnerships with the Hollywood and European studios that have funded and distributed their feature films. Meir argues that the failure of Aardman’s Hollywood partnerships and their ultimate alliance with European distributor Studiocanal is a reflection of Aardman’s search for a partner that would allow them to stay true to their core values and working practice. The four chapters in the book’s second section, ‘Cultural Contexts’, explore how Aardman’s work engages with the broader cultural traditions and contexts in which it can be placed. Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib’s chapter looks at some of Aardman’s earliest work: the animated shorts based on documentary

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recordings of overheard conversations and interviews the studio made in the  1970s and  ’80s. Hosseini-Shakib argues that these films can be situated in the tradition of British social realist filmmaking, not only through their commitment to social issues and representing real people, but also through the films’ later flights of fancy that can be considered a type of poetic realism. Jane Batkin also explores some of Aardman’s lesser-known work, which she groups under the description ‘their darker heartland’. She argues that four films, Babylon, Going Equipped, Stage Fright and The Pearce Sisters, offer an alternative to Aardman’s more cosy output through a disruption of familiarity and sense of belonging that, in the particular case of the earlier films of this group, reflects the social and political context in which they were made. Aardman’s darker side is further explored by Nicholas Miller, who provides a detailed analysis of Luis Cook’s 2007 ‘beautifully ugly’ and bleakly comic film The Pearce Sisters and its relationship to its literary source material. Here Miller argues that the film exemplifies a return to Aardman’s roots of formal experimentation through short film and while the film may feel tonally anomalous, it in fact aligns with the company’s self-confessed tradition of technical innovation and narrative craft. To bring this section to a close, Alexander Sergeant’s chapter places Aardman’s work in another tradition – that of British fantasy. In particular, Sergeant makes the case for Wallace and Gromit as a ‘fantasy franchise’ that simultaneously celebrates and lampoons British national identity in a way that is typical of the British literary fantasy tradition. The way Aardman’s productions get from idea to screen is explored in the three chapters that make up the third section, ‘Process and Production’. Paul Ward considers Aardman’s storyboarding process and places Aardman’s practice in the context of the history of storyboarding and the way storyboarding has been more recently understood. He suggests that Aardman’s process allows us to understand that storyboards are not merely ‘blueprints’ but operate in a more meaningful way to negotiate the complexities of stopmotion production. In the second chapter in this section, Linda Simensky explores Aardman’s forays into children’s television programming with Shaun the Sheep and Timmy Time and the particular challenges this format presented for Aardman’s working practices. To bring this section to a close, Richard Haynes considers his own performance in the process of animating silent character Shaun the Sheep and argues that while Shaun, as a silent ‘star’, draws much from early silent film comedians such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and as such can be thought of as a figurative character, the process of animating him requires an embodied performance by the animator. The final section of the book, ‘Surface and Performance’, explores further ideas around performance in and of Aardman’s work and also the significance of the surface and materiality of their work. Tom Walsh offers

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a phenomenological reading of the animation of stop-motion effects in Aardman’s feature films as a way of understanding how effects can convey emotional states and, as such, be considered as performance. Laura Ivins’s chapter thinks about the relationship between performance and authenticity in Aardman’s films through an examination of the materiality in the Wallace and Gromit films. In particular, Ivins argues that the visible fingerprints on Wallace, Gromit and other Aardman models ‘work performatively to construct Aardman films as authentic, personal, artistic creations’. Christopher Holliday also explores the significance of visible fingerprints on Aardman characters, but in the context of their two fully CGI features: Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas. He argues that visible fingerprints were constructed in their CGI work in order to construct a ‘compromise aesthetic’ that both exploited the potential of computer-animated filmmaking and also celebrated the ‘imperfect’, handmade aesthetic central to Aardman’s identity. Finally, Aylish Wood further explores Aardman’s negotiation between computer animation and stop-motion techniques through an examination of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Here Wood utilizes the concept of entanglement to understand the significance of how Aardman disguises the digital interventions in this film and yet, at the same time, the publicity material surrounding the film highlights the hybridity of the images. In this way, The Pirates! is a key example in understanding how Aardman has negotiated the interplay of traditional handmade craft and digital innovation in their work. Through engaging with the richness and diversity of Aardman’s work, their working practices and the discourse surrounding both these things, Aardman Animations: Beyond Stop-Motion endeavours to enrich our understanding of this most prolific and enduring of British animation studios. Managing to project a sense of tradition and innovation, intimacy and expansiveness, craft and technology, commercial savvy and accidental success, Aardman’s overriding unified identity in the face of such contradictions is part of its appeal and also what makes it so interesting to study. This book offers the first extensive exploration of the studio and their work. Given their longevity and significance, in terms of not only the British cultural industries, but also animation and media production more widely, we hope that this will be the spearhead for further scholarship on Aardman.

Notes 1

Aardman’s history is well known and widely told. See, for example, https://www.aardman.com/the-studio/history/ (accessed 12 July 2018); https://www.aardman.com/aardocs/ (accessed 12 July 2018); Andy Lane,

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Creating Creature Comforts (London: Boxtree, 2003), pp. 46–57; Aardman, Insideaard (Southwold, Suffolk: ScreenPress Books, 2000) [booklet accompanying the 2000 DVD Aardman Classics]; Peter Lord and David Sproxton, Aardman: An Epic Journey Taken One Frame at a Time (London: Simon & Schuster, 2018). 2 Morph appeared alongside Tony Hart in Take Hart from 1977 to 1983 and on Hartbeat from 1984 to 1993. He also appeared in the subsequent Children’s BBC series (not featuring Hart), SMart (1994–2009). 3 The Amazing Adventures of Morph was broadcast on BBC from 1980 to 1981. In 2013 Peter Lord launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to produce further Morph episodes, which appeared on a dedicated YouTube channel from 2014. 4 The Animated Conversations series films, which were broadcast on the BBC in 1978, include Down and Out and Confessions of a Foyer Girl. Conversation Pieces (BBC, 1983) included On Probation, Sales Pitch, Palmy Days, Early Bird and Late Edition. The later Lip Synch series which was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1989 included three films, Going Equipped, War Story and Creature Comforts that used recorded conversations. For more discussion of these films, see Hosseini-Shakib in this volume (Chapter 6). 5 Andrew Spicer, ‘“It’s Our Property and Our Passion”: Managing Creativity in a Successful Company – Aardman Animations’, in E. Bakøy, R. Puijk and A. Spicer (eds), Building Successful and Sustainable Film and Television Businesses (London: Intellect, 2017), p. 313. 6 Wins for best animated short for: Creature Comforts (1990), The Wrong Trousers (1993), A Close Shave (1995) and for best animated feature for Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2006). Nominations in best animated short category for: A Grand Day Out (1990), Adam (1992), Wat’s Pig (1996), Humdrum (1999) and A Matter of Loaf and Death (2009). Nominations in best animated feature category for The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (2013) and Shaun the Sheep Movie (2016). 7 Aardman is also responsible for two of the other top-five highest grossing stop-motion animated feature films: Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the ­Were-Rabbit (number 2) and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (number 4). The other two films are Coraline (dir. Henry Selick, 2009) at number 3 and Corpse Bride (dir. Tim Burton and Mike Johnson, 2005) at number 5. 8 Aardman Holdings Ltd, ‘Directors Report and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 December 2017’, filed with Companies House, 7 October 2018. Available at: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/ company/02672880/filing-history?page=1 (accessed 15 July 2019). 9 Company turnover and other financial information is publicly available from Aardman’s annual reports, which are filed on the Companies House website (the website of the UK’s registrar of companies). Company

18

10

11

12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Aardman Animations number: 02672880. Available at: ­https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/ company/02672880/filing-history?page=1 (last accessed 15 July 2019). In November 2018, Peter Lord and David Sproxton transferred ownership to the company’s employees, staying on as members of the newly formed Executive Board. According to Aardman, this strategy was part of Lord and Sproxton’s legacy planning to ensure the company ‘remains independent’ and true to its creative vision. See https://www.aardman.com/oscarwinning-studio-aardman-determines-its-own-future-through-employeeownership/ (accessed 10 March 2019). Cracking Animation is now in its fourth edition. More recently, Aardman published The Art of Aardman (Simon and Schuster, 2016) and Aardman: An Epic Journey Taken One Frame at a Time (Simon and Schuster, 2018) to coincide with their fortieth anniversary. Making-of books have accompanied all of their major television and film productions, including, for example, The Making of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie (Harry N. Abrams, 2000). There are some notable exceptions. For example, Marian Quigley, ‘Glocalisation versus Globalization: The Work of Nick Park and Peter Lord’, Animation Journal 10 (2002), pp. 85–95 and, more recently, Spicer, ‘It’s Our Property and Our passion’. Chicken Run made $225 million at the international box office against a $45 million budget. Their most recent offering, 2018’s Nick Park-directed Early Man, struggled to recoup its $50 million budget. Chicken Run (dir. Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000), Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (dir. Nick Park and Steve Box, 2005), Flushed Away (dir. David Bowers and Sam Fell, 2006), Arthur Christmas (dir. Sarah Smith, 2011), The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (dir. Peter Lord, 2012), Shaun the Sheep Movie (dir. Mark Burton and Richard Starzak, 2015) and Early Man (dir. Nick Park, 2018). According to their annual report, in 2017 Aardman’s UK commercials division delivered over 100 projects, the majority of which were made using stop-motion techniques. John Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 274. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010). A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), A Close Shave (1995) and A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008). Shaun the Sheep (2007–16) and Timmy Time (2009–12). Spicer, ‘It’s Our Property and Our Passion’, p. 299. The significance of the natural world in Aardman’s work was emphasized in the ‘Aardman: Art That Takes Shape’ exhibition that took place at the Art Ludique museum in Paris in the summer of 2015, which devoted a section

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of the exhibition to ‘Nature’ – ‘a common theme’ in their work. See Art Ludique, Aardman: L’art Qui Prend Forme/Art That Takes Shape [exhibition catalogue], p. 132. This exhibition has subsequently travelled to locations including the German Filmmuseum, Frankfurt (2016) and ACMI, Melbourne (2017). 22 Aardman have also been criticized for the lack of diversity, in particular in terms of race and ethnicity, in their representations of Britain. See Charles C.H. daCosta, ‘Racial Stereotyping and Selecting Positioning in ­Contemporary British Animation.’ [PhD thesis] (UCA Farnham, UK, 2007). 23 See Xan Brooks, ‘I Hate Aardman’, The Guardian, 31 January 2007. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2007/jan/31/ post6 (accessed 13 July 2018). For an analysis of the critiques of British heritage cinema, see Claire Monk, ‘The British “Heritage Film” and Its Critics’, Critical Survey 7, no. 2 (1995), pp. 116–24. 24 See, for example, Donald Clarke, ‘Fast-Moving and Cosy Charm from the Wallace and Gromit Crew’, The Irish Times, 26 January 2018. Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/fast-moving-and-cosy-charmfrom-the-wallace-and-gromit-crew-1.3365869 (accessed 13 July 2018); Charles Solomon, ‘In “Chicken Run” a Charming New Art Form Takes Shape’, Los Angeles Times, 3 July 2000. Available at: http://articles.latimes. com/2000/jul/03/entertainment/ca-47274 (accessed 10 July 2018); Scott Mendleson, ‘Review: “Shaun the Sheep” Is a Wordless Comic Gem’, Forbes.com, 4 August 2015. Available at: https://www.forbes. com/sites/scottmendelson/2015/08/04/review-shaun-the-sheep-is-awordless-comic-gem/#f40877ab3bc0 (accessed 13 July 2018); Hannah Dixon, ‘5 Steps to Making the Perfect Aardman Movie #EarlyMan’, Cineworld Blog, 10 January 2018. Available at: h ­ ttps://www.cineworld. co.uk/blog/early-man-aardman-best-movies-iflr-hannah-dixon (accessed 15 July 2018). 25 Spicer, ‘It’s Our Property and Our Passion’, p. 300. 26 Lane, Creating Creature Comforts, p. 51. 27 Ibid., p. 48. 28 David Sproxton, ‘Aardman and the Bristol Connection’, talk given for Bristol Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Bristol, 12 November 2015. 29 Lane, Creating Creature Comforts, p. 48. 30 Brian Sibley, ‘The Medium’, in P. Lord and B. Sibley (eds), Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation, Second Edition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010), p. 53. 31 It also features the first appearance of Rex the Runt, the titular character of Aardman’s later series for BBC 2 (1998 & 2001). 32 Sean Clarke, ‘Head of Rights and Development’ quoted in An Epic Journey, p. 329.

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33 The Aardboiled YouTube channel, which launched in 2017, provides a showcase for this ‘off-beat animated comedy’, as well as new work from independent animation producers. 34 The studio’s other four divisions are feature films; series, specials and shorts; advertising; and rights, branding and development. 35 Spicer, ‘It’s Our Property and Our Passion’, p. 302. 36 See ibid., p. 301. 37 Ibid., p. 302. 38 Much of which is available through the online shop, or ‘Aardstore’ on Aardman’s website: https://www.aardstore.com. Aardman also maximize their characters’ popularity for charitable causes, for example Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Appeal. https://www.grandappeal.org.uk (accessed 24 October 2019). 39 For example, the Wallace & Gromit ‘Thrill-O-Matic’ rollercoaster ride at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the UK and the Shaun the Sheep ‘mixed reality’ cinema experience launched in Shanghai in 2018. 40 Sibley, ‘The Medium’, p. 62. 41 Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLh1WuMkCPs&inde x=12&list=PLBFBA92D412B90A08 (accessed 10 July 2018). 42 See, for example, An Epic Journey. 43 See Andrea Comiskey, ‘(Stop)Motion Control: Special Effects in Contemporary Puppet Animation’, in D. North, B. Rehak and M.S. Duffy (eds), Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts (London: BFI, 2015), pp. 45–61. 44 Caldwell, Production Culture, p. 302. 45 Gray, Show Sold Separately, p. 81. Emphasis in original. 46 Tim Robey, ‘The Strained Marriage between Aardman and DreamWorks’, The Telegraph, 1 February 2007. Available at: ­https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/uknews/1541254/The-strained-marriage-between-Aardman-andDreamWorks.html (accessed 15 July 2019). 47 Sproxton and Lord quoted in An Epic Journey, p. 15. 48 Peter Lord quoted in An Epic Journey, p. 223. 49 This can currently be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iaRecV3IgiI (accessed 10 July 2018). 50 This making-of is no longer available on Aardman’s channel, but can be found elsewhere on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45IBvpd7aQ (accessed 10 July 2018). 51 Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFe3atwfgJQ (accessed 10 July 2018). 52 An Epic Journey, p. 15. 53 Clarke quoted in An Epic Journey, p. 329. 54 Ibid.

Section One

Identity and Brand

22

1

‘All you do is call me, I’ll be anything you need’: Aardman Animations, Music Videos and Commercials Malcolm Cook

Commercials, including music videos, have been vital to the formation and continued success of Aardman Animations, both economically as  a studio and conceptually as a recognizable ‘brand’.1 Characters such as Douglas the Lurpak butter man, Mr Cuprinol and the Chevron Cars are widely recognizable by viewers and have played a central role in Aardman’s development, while characters from television and film, such as Wallace and Gromit, and Shaun the Sheep, have been licensed to promote other brands. Yet Aardman’s advertising output is frequently diminished in comparison to its other work for television and cinema. One indicator of this is the prominence of Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and characters from Chicken Run (2000), alongside Angry Kid, Morph and Rex the Runt, on the covers of consecutive editions of the company’s authorized history and practical manual Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation, contrasting with the absence of any advertising work.2 Likewise, the  2015 BBC documentary A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman offered only a brief mention of this aspect of Aardman’s work, structured as a break in the main flow of the programme. However, by reassessing the importance of advertising and music videos to Aardman in the three areas of media expansion, advertising psychology and the development of Aardman’s own brand, we can understand its growth as a studio in the context of wider cultural and social developments that shaped the studio’s work and our perception of it. Animation has been intimately connected with selling and promotion throughout its history, so Aardman’s economic dependence on advertising is not unique.3 Nevertheless, the studio’s commercials in the 1980s and 1990s are the product of a specific historical moment in which both broadcasting and the advertising industry were undergoing significant changes. An expansion of broadcast television supported Aardman’s early breakthrough

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successes with television programmes and music videos. Furthermore, the dependence of new commercial channels on advertising revenue expanded the marketplace for television commercials, which Aardman was well placed to fulfil. This occurred at a time when the advertising industry was developing a new understanding of the function and operation of advertising. While concepts of ‘brand image’ had been acknowledged throughout the twentieth century, the late 1970s and 1980s saw a significant growth in the academic study of consumer psychology. This was allied with changes in the consumer goods manufacturing industries, such as conglomeration, that were heavily dependent upon advertising to differentiate their goods in a saturated market. This led to a new emphasis upon the importance of emotional and ephemeral aspects of advertising and its effects on consumers, an area in which animation, and Aardman’s work in particular, could especially contribute to building brand image and influencing consumer choices. This period in the 1980s and 1990s not only saw Aardman contribute to the creation and enhancement of other companies’ brands, but also saw it become a recognizable brand in its own right. Aardman’s brand was in part built on functional qualities such as the use of clay animation. Yet it also increasingly reflected the changing understanding of brand image within advertising and marketing by evoking non-functional attributes such as ‘the handmade, the intimate and the human’.4

‘Spread a Little Happiness’: Aardman’s early advertising Aardman may have existed in some form and spirit from the 1970s, but it only became recognized legally and, importantly, as a brand in the mid1980s when they became involved and dependent upon advertising. Several of Aardman’s early successes were indirectly the product of advertising. Both Channel 4 (launched in Britain in November 1982) and MTV (launched in the United States in August 1981) were the result of technological expansion of broadcasting, along with concomitant political and regulatory reform.5 The existence of both channels was predicated on funding from advertising, albeit in unique ways.6 In both cases, these commercial channels stimulated inventive moving image material, and especially supported animation production.7 Aardman’s Conversation Pieces (1983) and the music video for Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ (1986) were the product of this new market for innovative animation. These works also demonstrated Aardman’s astute insight into selling and persuasion. Sales Pitch, one of the Conversation Pieces, depicts a door-to-door salesman and his keen awareness of the importance of emotion in selling his product, a characteristic that would be

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central to Aardman’s later advertising. As a music video ‘Sledgehammer’ may be considered a direct form of advertising, but equally the video depicts a protagonist looking to persuade the object of their desire, encapsulated in the lyric ‘all you do is call me, I’ll be anything you need’. Aardman embraced this sentiment and took the opportunity to create a calling card for future commercial success. Both these early works brought the studio considerable attention and acclaim in industry circles, including an award for Peter Lord at 1987 MTV Video Music Awards.8 Such accolades would prove critical to attracting advertising commissions to Aardman in the following years, with the music video frequently being cited in advertising trade press.9 With Aardman having demonstrated its innovative approach in the ‘Sledgehammer’ music video and Conversation Pieces there was a clear attraction in commissioning advertising work from the studio. Furthermore, there was a straightforward economic benefit to the studio in accepting advertising commissions, as they offered an additional income stream allowing stable employment and growth of the business.10 However, this does not fully explain why Aardman’s particular form of animation should prove so successful, or why advertisers should have embraced it so wholeheartedly at this particular time. If the primary goal of advertising seems self-evident, that is to increase sales and thereby profits, the mechanisms by which this is achieved and the ways in which they can be most efficiently exploited are both ambiguous and historically contingent. Through a detailed examination of Aardman’s commercial work and an exploration of the changes in advertising theory and psychology in the  1980s we can better understand why this animation studio became entwined with advertising at this moment. One of Aardman’s earliest commissions, and one of the most influential in attracting further work, was a series of advertisements for the Danish Dairy Board, for whom they created and animated Douglas the Lurpak butter man. The first commercial ‘Scuba Diver’ was originally transmitted in February 1986.11 Like any ‘fast-moving consumer goods’ (FMCG), butter is heavily dependent upon advertising to differentiate its product from other similar offerings.12 Furthermore, pure butter has a very small number of functional qualities that can be promoted: price, salt content, origin and production methods. Aardman’s Lurpak advertising does put forward a functional argument: that other butters ‘taste much saltier than Galway Bay’ whereas Lurpak contains less salt, resulting in a creamy taste. However this rational argument for choosing Lurpak is made primarily linguistically, through the lyrics of the song, a pastiche of the 1929 musical number ‘Spread a Little Happiness’, and the onscreen tagline ‘Lurpak’d with creamy taste’. In contrast, Aardman’s animation may be understood as adding a primarily emotional appeal to the advertising. Aardman’s character animation, drawing

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on the experience of producing Morph for many years, allowed the studio to create an engaging animated spokesperson for the Lurpak brand. This in itself was not unique, even when executed with such skill, as characterbased advertising had been in practice at least since Michelin’s Bibendum had appeared in the late nineteenth century.13 The use of clay animation also allowed Aardman to make Douglas appear to be made from butter, with a pale, yellow tinge and thus imbue the very substance of the product  with character and a life of its own. Again, this is not in itself a unique or historically specific development. Animation has often been used to bring products to life and, as Esther Leslie writes, ‘animation’s animatedness can be seen as a rendition of the apparent liveliness of commodity-fetishized objects. This is why advertisers loved cartoons from the start’.14 More than these longstanding functions of animated advertising, it is the way Aardman’s use of clay animation communicated affective qualities of the product, such as the character’s ability to rapidly transform and especially the melting consistency of the butter, that engaged the consumer with a feeling for the product, rather than just information. There is little discussion in the trade press of the direct effectiveness of these advertisements, in terms of measurable changes in sales of the product. Nevertheless, the commercials were deemed to be a success, with the first entry ‘Scuba Diver’ being awarded a Silver Lion at the Cannes Advertising Awards Festival in 1986. Several profiles of the studio in the advertising trade press drew direct attention to the Lurpak advert as highly successful, whether ‘memorable’, ‘has a lot of charm’ or being ‘jovial’ and having ‘character’.15 This enthusiasm for Aardman’s work within the advertising business can be traced to changing understandings of the purpose and workings of advertising.

Consumer psychology and advertising in the 1980s Prior to the 1980s the advertising industry was dominated by a paradigm of advertising that was both product-centric and posited a rational consumer. A high-profile example of this was the work of advertising legend David Ogilvy, whose two books Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) and Ogilvy on Advertising (1983) reflected and reinforced the current thinking about how advertising worked.16 Ogilvy placed emphases on the product and its functional qualities, foregrounding factual information about the item being sold.17 While he did include ‘emotion’ as one way of making an effective television commercial, he relegated it to the bottom of his list.18 A crucial tool in justifying Ogilvy’s product-centric position was his use of empirical research about both the products and the effects of their

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advertising.19 Ironically, the growth of academic research into advertising in the 1970s, and its influence upon industry practice in the 1980s, would see a major shift away from the model Ogilvy helped establish and lay the foundations for Aardman’s entry and contribution to the field. A key indicator of that growth was the expansion of the number of journals publishing such research.20 The growth in turn resulted in research into consumer psychology, leading to an increase in empirical knowledge and appreciation of the nonrational and affective functions of advertising. The importance within advertising of emotions and the fulfilment of psychological needs was, however, not completely new to the field in the 1980s. Michael Cowan has recently identified similar concerns in Walter Ruttmann’s animated advertising from the  1930s.21 Industry discussions from the 1950s show some attention to the ‘personal and social meanings’ of advertising.22 Perhaps most famously, Vance Packard’s  1957 book The Hidden Persuaders explored the use of psychoanalysis and motivational research within advertising, becoming a bestseller through its ‘exposé’ of the manipulation of non-rational, subconscious desires, which remained a concern into the  1970s.23 The growth of academic studies of advertising arising out of the field of psychology, and the use of empirical, experimental research in the 1980s, helped dispel the simple negative light Packard had cast on the emotional and affective aspects of advertising. Furthermore, an understanding of these new theories is central to understanding the growth and function of Aardman’s contribution to animation in the  1980s. In particular, the dominant theory of this period was the Elaboration Limitation Model (ELM), proposed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo in the 1970s, which was first applied to advertising in 1983.24 The ELM relies upon a distinction between central and peripheral routes to attitude change. The central route depends upon a rational consideration of factual information, while the peripheral route depends upon simple positive or negative inferences, such as emotional response.25 Petty and Cacioppo suggest that both routes are important, and the predominance of one or the other in any situation depends upon the ‘involvement’ of the subject, or specifically the consumer in relation to advertising. In one sense the ELM simply offers a theorization of a common-sense observation: when something has immediate or significant implications we will apply considerable rational thought to it, whereas when it has no major or direct application we will allow simple or emotional cues to guide our viewpoint. Yet when applied to advertising and substantiated by rigorous, scientifically conducted experiments, as in Petty and Cacioppo’s work, this model proved hugely influential. In particular, while reinforcing the importance of productrelevant attributes in advertising, such as factual data, it also suggested

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the significance of non-functional qualities to the appeal and effectiveness of the message being delivered. The intention of this chapter is not to directly evaluate this theory or the huge volume of work that followed in refining or challenging it. Rather, its importance here is in the changing historical context, providing in the 1980s a new way of thinking about advertising that opened up a space for Aardman’s work. There is evidence within the advertising trade press of the principles of the ELM being disseminated in less structured form. For example, a 1986 article in Campaign argues for the incorporation into branding and advertising of both: [F]unctional needs, such as what the product actually does or where it is used, and psychological needs, which determine which of the consumer’s basic human demands a product meets. Brand leaders manage to integrate those needs into a single, positive statement, in that they bridge function and psychology.26

This increasing incorporation of psychological models into advertising and branding practice is evident in Aardman’s advertising and trade press discussion of it in the 1980s.

‘Creature Comforts’: The emotional appeal of Aardman’s advertising Throughout its advertising work in the  1980s Aardman can be seen to be building the peripheral, non-functional or emotional elements of the campaigns they contributed to. This is present not only in the commercials, but also in the discussion of the studio in trade press, where the principles of the psychological research discussed above were increasingly used to construct campaigns that would communicate through both central and peripheral routes and thereby reach consumers with differing levels of involvement. The campaign for Access credit cards that Aardman contributed to in  1990 is a leading example of this. As with butter, credit cards have very limited functional parameters to distinguish them from competitors: primarily interest rates and the number of outlets that accept it as payment. Nevertheless, the Access commercials would initially appear to be directed at persuasion through the central route, using rational characteristics of the card. The advertising agency commented in Campaign ‘Access has an identifiable personality as a practical tool, not a symbol’.27 The commercials are structured around the line: ‘Does you does or does you don’t take Access’,

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again using a pastiche of a popular song, alongside the use of the tagline ‘The World Does [Take Access]’. In both cases, these elements emphasize a rational argument for adopting an Access credit card: its worldwide acceptance. Yet the Campaign story also indicates that the commercials would target the peripheral route, to produce an affective, emotional engagement with consumers. An account manager stated: ‘our competitive advantage is not going to be factually based, it’s going to be emotional’,28 and this is the area that Aardman’s animation particularly contributes to. The commercials were primarily filmed as live-action footage in which male consumers are shown utilizing their credit card to purchase high-value aspirational products such as lobster in a restaurant, opera tickets while in a hotel or travel services in a hotel while abroad. Aardman contributed stop-motion animation of these purchases that was incorporated into the live-action footage. In the first commercial the lobster and a platter of fruits-de-mer come to life to sing along with the jingle in typical Aardman style, with wide, toothy grins and white glass bead eyes. In the second commercial a pair of opera glasses and white dress gloves come to life and sing, again with typical wide toothy grins. In the final commercial, both the hotel concierge’s telephone and the traveller’s luggage similarly come to life. This animation contributes nothing to the rational message described above, but rather shows the way the Access credit card can literally and metaphorically ‘bring to life’ luxury goods and an aspirational lifestyle. The commercials were again judged to be highly successful, being nominated for industry awards, and commentators declared the ‘the campaign came to life’ thanks to Aardman’s contribution.29 Perhaps the most widely recognized advertising Aardman produced in this early period, and the one that instigated the next major phase of its history, was the ‘Creature Comforts’ series for the Heat Electric brand of the Electricity Association. The adverts were inspired by Nick Park’s contribution to the Lip Synch series of films for Channel 4: the 1989 short Creature Comforts, which would go on to win the 1990 Oscar for Animated Short Film.30 The Heat Electric (and subsequent Cook Electric and Dishwash Electric) commercials achieved considerable success, winning many advertising and marketing industry awards and gaining popular attention with catchphrases such as Frank the Tortoise describing the ‘easily turn off and on-able’ heating.31 As with the earlier examples discussed, Aardman’s contribution may be understood as communicating non-functional and emotional qualities of the brand, giving a seemingly faceless product (electricity) a recognizable and appealing presence. This was directly in-line with the brief from the advertising agency GGK London, who were looking to ‘develop the emotional values of electricity as well as stress the benefits of the product’. This was a very explicit acknowledgement of the psychological

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principles that had become dominant in advertising by the late 1980s. Yet, despite its apparent success, these commercials raise a number of tensions, especially relating to Aardman’s own developing brand. Some advertising industry commentators did voice critical opinions of the Heat Electric Creature Comfort commercials, suggesting ‘the ads were too derivative’ in using pre-existing characters.32 Certainly there are reports that the commercials were not strongly associated with electricity, and there are examples within the advertising trade press of the series being wrongly attributed as ‘British Gas’ Creature Comforts’ ads.33 Clare Kitson notes that because they were frequently mistaken for gas advertisements they were subsequently edited to reinforce the electricity message.34 British Gas would later sponsor the Creature Comforts television show Aardman produced for the ITV channel, perhaps capitalizing on this confusion and appropriating the brand association. Regardless of the effectiveness of these commercials for the client brand, Heat Electric, in shifting to the use of characters created for other purposes, the ‘Creature Comfort’ commercials start to assert the Aardman studio’s distinctive authorial voice and style as the dominant feature of its work at the expense of the brand being promoted. It may even be argued the brand the ‘Creature Comforts’ commercials most effectively promoted was Aardman itself. The Oscar win for Creature Comforts (and subsequent win in 1993 for The Wrong Trousers) marked an important development in the studio’s brand recognition in moving beyond the advertising industry and raising the general public’s awareness of its work.

The Aardman brand Alongside contributing to the advertising of other companies’ brands, through the 1980s and 1990s Aardman was also becoming a brand in its own right. Prior to  1983, and the Conversation Pieces films for Channel 4, Aardman cannot be considered to have existed as a brand in any sense.35 There was, however, sufficient awareness for the studio to win work on the Lurpak butter account and produce the Peter Gabriel ‘Sledgehammer’ video, both of which appeared in the first half of 1986, and the combined impact of them resulted in a clear shift in awareness within industry circles.36 Coinciding with the incorporation of the Aardman Animations Limited company, trade press references became more frequent and discernible brand qualities started to become attached to the company, at this stage restricted to the context of the advertising industry. In this initial phase of Aardman’s development as a brand we can see a tension or negotiation between functional aspects of its work and

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the increasing attempt to articulate its brand in less tangible terms, in the light of the new models of advertising that they were working within and had allowed the studio entry into the field. In particular, during this period the studio’s brand was centred on questions of technique and innovation. From the earliest incorporation and publicity of the Aardman name there was a tension evident in the brand between the functional association of its work with stop-motion animation, and especially clay or plasticine animation, and the more indeterminate idea of technical innovation, allied with a personal, artisanal method. Following the success of the Conversation Pieces films and the video for Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’, the period between 1986 and the early 1990s saw Aardman’s brand centred on technique and technology. Both of those works were deemed to be pioneering in their use of stop-motion animation. Entertainment trade paper The Stage described the Channel 4 shows as ‘innovative’ and ‘unconventional’ while music paper Billboard described the ‘Sledgehammer’ video as ‘a groundbreaking video causing those interested to sit up and take notice’.37 At this stage Aardman’s predominant use of stop-motion animation was congruent with the values of innovation and the handmade. This discourse continued in advertising trade press discussions of Aardman’s television commercials. Trade press descriptions of the Lurpak advertisements discussed earlier explicitly highlighted the use of vegetable oil sprayed onto the models to achieve a shiny quality, and how the spreading, melting butter effect was achieved ‘by softening the wax with a hairdryer’.38 These techniques are simultaneously innovative and domestically mundane, characteristics that Aardman would foreground in later work. A  1988 Duracell ad is described as ‘ingenious’ by trade paper Creative Review, a quality that is attributed to the techniques Dave Sproxton explains for creating spider webs: ‘we made all the cobwebs ourselves – some out of nylon and some out of stringy glue’.39 Here Sproxton is again promoting the brand values of Aardman, allying technical innovation with homespun inventiveness. A similar account is given for another 1988 advert, for Hamlet cigars. Discussion of Aardman’s contribution initially dwells on the use of a lubricant normally associated with sexual intercourse in its production (‘the KY Gel, in case you were wondering, will look like unshed tears on film’).40 Such methods led Dave Sproxton to comment later in the article ‘We’re pretty low-tech on the whole’, yet he then emphasizes the use of ‘a little black box’ that adjusts the camera and lights to allow the creation of a chequerboard matte at the same time as the stop-motion animation.41 The combination of technical innovation and artisanal simplicity is thus further evident in this discussion of the Hamlet commercials.

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These discourses are present in other discussions in this period, such as the use of an animated hand constructed from ‘latex with a metal ball-andsocket jointed armature’ that Nick Park praises over a plasticine equivalent for an advertisement for French crisp brand Isseo.42 Likewise, the washed out vintage look for another crisp advertisement in  1990, in this case for KP Discos, was achieved by ‘fluke’ as ‘the wrong speed film was accidentally loaded into the camera and the result was exactly what was wanted’.43 The association of Aardman with the innovative techniques showcased in the ‘Sledgehammer’ video influenced the use of a pixilation technique in a 1987 advertisement for PG Tips tea bags.44 In this first period of its branding, which was limited to the advertising industry, Aardman was able to simultaneously sell its work in practical terms, becoming the ‘go to’ production company for stop-motion animation, while also projecting the values of innovation and simplicity. Even at this stage tensions arose in combining these functional and non-functional attributes and their potential contradiction. Innovation only remains fresh when it is not repeated, yet the success of its earlier work, especially ‘Sledgehammer’, meant that the studio was frequently asked simply to repeat the same formula. As early as January  1987 a profile of the studio noted, ‘Aardman has had to turn down quite a few agency scripts which were basically copies of the [Sledgehammer] promo’.45 Later in  1987 Aardman producer Sarah Mullock, referring to an advertisement for Trimspoon, stated, ‘after you’ve broken barriers, as we did on Sledgehammer, you don’t want to stay in one place’.46 Despite Mullock’s claims, Aardman did make a number of commercials that were largely derivative of its most famous work, including one for the NutraSweet sugar substitute Trimspoon. This advertisement uses fruit to create an animated singing head strongly reminiscent of the Giuseppe Arcimboldo sequence of the ‘Sledgehammer’ video. Perhaps the only truly original aspect of this commercial was the ironic synergy between the brand, an artificially manufactured copy of a natural product, and the advert, a mechanical retreading of an earlier creative idea: both product and ad are a pastiche of what is really desired. We can see in Aardman’s early brand strong parallels with the way products were being marketed in the advertisements Aardman were producing for external clients, and the psychological model being adopted in them. There was clearly good economic sense in Aardman offering rational, functional brand characteristics, such as the direct association with stop-motion animation, that delivered what advertising agencies were looking for at this time. Although advertising agencies are not individuals, we could nevertheless understand this as a rational appeal through a ‘central route’ for persuasion. This could even extend to reusing creative ideas and

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standardizing its work, not least because if Aardman didn’t do it, someone else would simply copy its work, or ex-employees would start their own animation studios producing work indistinguishable from Aardman’s own.47 Yet, like an actor being typecast, such a position threatened to curtail the studio’s long-term ambitions. In particular, the advertisers and advertising agencies’ real need could be understood not as a functional need for stop-motion animation, but rather the emotional need for innovation or ‘creativity’, a buzz word within the advertising industry, and thus a way for Aardman to win work through a ‘peripheral route’.48 Viewed in this light, the immediate commercial success of Creature Comforts, discussed earlier, masked a narrowing of the Aardman brand, and especially the foregrounding of functional qualities over conceptual ones. In directly reusing the creative material from Nick Park’s Lip Synch film for the electricity advertisements, the studio allowed its association with stopmotion clay animation to dominate over its reputation as innovative. The success of Creature Comforts after 1989 also marks the point at which the Aardman brand began to be recognized widely outside of trade circles, be it advertising, or film and television. The Oscar and other awards Creature Comforts won, along with the subsequent awards for The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, in one sense mark a public recognition of the innovation seen in these films and undoubtedly helped attract further advertising work to the studio.49 Yet that public critical acclaim also marked an increasing understanding of its work through the ‘central route’ as Nick Park’s style of clay animation became synonymous with Aardman in popular imagination, while non-functional values the studio was associated with, such as innovation, were marginalized.

Conclusion Advertising has been central to establishing Aardman economically. In practical terms ‘the workload has helped Aardman equip its studio and it’s given the shop the financial wherewithal to develop its feature films’, as Dave Sproxton stated in  1991.50 The new ways of thinking about advertising that arose from academia in the 1980s were also reflected in the studio’s own brand, which communicated both functional and emotional qualities. The importance of advertising to Aardman in economic, artistic and branding terms continued into the 1990s. As a number of chapters in this collection indicate, the Aardman brand became further nuanced by popular success with characters, such as Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, and its feature film work. As Aardman became a household name,

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the tension between the practical identification of the studio with clay animation and the conceptual association with innovation became bound up with other characteristics such as its Britishness, humour and adoption of new technologies. Just as the brands the studio helped advertise became globalized, so Aardman also increasingly operated in the global economy. This is most recently evident in the purchase of a majority stake in New York advertising animation company Nathan Love in 2015. The press release for this purchase states it ‘further establishes the company’s commitment to its advertising business’, with ‘building a new business in New York for American agencies’ at the heart of the decision.51 Whereas other companies who benefitted from a growth in advertising in the 1980s, most prominently Pixar, have since abandoned this field of activity, it remains at the core of Aardman Animations. A greater recognition of this not only provides greater insight into Aardman and its films than has previously been allowed, but also points towards the importance of a more wide-ranging reconsideration of the relationship between animation and advertising.

Notes 1

2

3 4

For the purposes of this chapter, music videos are considered to be a sub-category of advertising, as implied by description of them as ‘promo films’ or ‘promo videos’, especially in the 1980s when Aardman were becoming established. Melody Maker, 24 September 1983, p. 5; Melody Maker, 17 October 1981, p. 21. See also Goodwin on the ‘essentially promotional rhetoric of the music video clip’, in Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. xviii. The main body of this book does acknowledge Aardman’s work in advertising, albeit as peripheral to other work. Peter Lord and Brian Sibley, Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998); Peter Lord and Brian Sibley, Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation, Revised Edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004); Peter Lord and Brian Sibley, Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation, Third Edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010); Peter Lord and Brian Sibley, Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation, Fourth Edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015). Malcolm Cook, ‘Advertising and Public Service Films’, in Nichola Dobson, et al. (eds), The Animation Studies Reader ed. Nichola Dobson et al. (London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 157–167). Peter Lord, ‘On the Creative Floor: Aardman Animations’, Campaign, 9 March 2012, p. 25.

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‘Broadcasting Act’ (UK 1981), pp. 13–14; Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture, p. xvii, pp. 29–30. 6 John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty, p. 152; Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture, p. xvi and p. 38. 7 Clare Kitson, British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor (London: Parliament Hill, 2008); K.J. Donnelly, ‘Experimental Music Video and Television’, in L. Mulvey and J. Sexton (eds), Experimental British Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 166–79. The launch of an Animators Consortium in New York featuring experimental animators such as Robert Breer, George Griffin and Susan Pitt, which was directly targeted at the production of music videos, is a further indication of this interaction. Billboard, 20 September 1986, p. 56. 8 The Stage and Television Today, 10 November 1983, p. 19; Variety, 16 September 1987, p. 107. 9 Creative Review, 1 January 1987, p. 13, p. 44; Creative Review, 1 June 1987, p. 11; Broadcast, 11 September 1987, p. 25. 10 Adweek, 1 April 1991, p. 4. 11 Campaign, 31 March 1986, p. 12. 12 ‘Fast-Moving Consumer Goods’, in J. Law (ed.), A Dictionary of Business and Management (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 240. 13 See, for instance, the many earlier examples in Warren Dotz and Masud Husain, Meet Mr Product: The Graphic Art of the Advertising Character, vol. 1 (San Rafael, CA: Insight Editions, 2015). 14 Esther Leslie, ‘Animation and History’, in K. Beckman (ed.), Animating Film Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 34. 15 Creative Review, 1 January 1987, p. 44; Creative Review, 31 March 1986, p. 12; Campaign, 20 November, 1987. 16 David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Athaneum, 1963); David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (London: Pan Books, 1983). Ogilvy is often offered as one model for the character Don Draper in the US television show Mad Men (Lionsgate Television/AMC, 2007–15). 17 Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, p. 11, p. 18. 18 Ibid., p. 109. 19 Ibid., pp. 158–66. 20 Kyongseok Kim et al., ‘Trends in Advertising Research: A Longitudinal Analysis of Leading Advertising, Marketing, and Communication Journals, 1980 to 2010’, Journal of Advertising 43, no. 3 (2014), p. 298; James A. Muncy and Jacqueline K. Eastman, ‘The Journal of Advertising: TwentyFive Years and Beyond’, Journal of Advertising 27, no. 4 (1998), pp. 1–8; Tony L. Henthorne, Michael S. Latour, and Tina Loraas, ‘Publication Productivity in the Three Leading U.S. Advertising Journals: 1989 through 1996’, Journal of Advertising 27, no. 2, pp. 53–63; John B. Ford 5

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and Altaf Merchant, ‘A Ten-Year ­Retrospective of Advertising Research Productivity, 1997–2006’, Journal of Advertising 37, no. 3 (2008), pp. 69–94; Laura Yale and Mary C. Gilly, ‘Trends in Advertising Research: A Look at the Content of Marketing-Oriented Journals from 1976 to 1985’, Journal of Advertising 17, no. 1 (1988), pp. 12–22. 21 Michael Cowan, ‘Absolute Advertising: Walter Ruttmann and the Weimar Advertising Film’, Cinema Journal 52, no. 4 (2013), pp. 49–73. 22 Sidney Levy, ‘Symbols for Sale’, Harvard Business Review 37, no. 4 (1959), p. 119; Irving S. White, ‘The Functions of Advertising in Our Culture’, The Journal of Marketing 24, no. 1 (1959), pp. 117–24. 23 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957); Ivan L. Preston, The Great American Blowup: Puffery in Advertising and Selling (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975). 24 Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo, Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change (New York: Springer, 1986); Richard E. Petty, John T. Cacioppo, and David Schumann, ‘Central and Peripheral Routes to Advertising Effectiveness: The Moderating Role of Involvement’, Journal of Consumer Research 10, no. 2 (1983), pp. 135–46. 25 Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann, ‘Central and Peripheral Routes to Advertising Effectiveness: The Moderating Role of Involvement’, pp. 135–6. 26 Gerry Alcock, ‘New Product Development: Blinkered Thinking That Could Abort the Next Big New Brand’, Campaign, 2 May 1986. Available at: https://www.nexis.com/results/enhdocview. do?docLinkInd=true&ersKey=23_T27388860684&format=GNBFI&startD ocNo=0&resultsUrlKey=0_T27388860693&backKey=20_T27388860694&c si=235906&docNo=1 (accessed 10 April 2018). 27 Campaign, 8 December 1989, p. 52. 28 Ibid. 29 Marketing Week, 4 May 1990, p. 53. 30 Campaign, 29 March 1991, p. 3. 31 Marketing Week, 19 April 1991, p. 38. 32 Ibid. 33 Campaign, 16 November 2007, 46. 34 Kitson, British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, p. 111. 35 Advertising and music trade papers such as Campaign and Billboard contain no identifiable references to the Aardman name prior to 1986. Film industry press offer only very brief mentions of Aardman: Variety, 13 January 1982, p. 192; The Stage and Television Today, 10 November 1983, p. 19. 36 Melody Maker, 12 April 1986, p. 4; Creative Review, 31 March 1986, p. 12. 37 The Stage and Television Today, 10 November 1983, p. 19; Billboard, 27 December 1986, p. Y-53. 38 Campaign, 1 April 1990, p. 8. 39 Creative Review, 2 June 1988, p. 10.

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40 Creative Review, 1 February 1988, p. 41. 41 Ibid. 42 Creative Review, 1 February 1990, p. 9. 43 Ibid., p. 11. 44 Creative Review, 1 January 1987, p. 13. 45 Ibid., p. 44. 46 Creative Review, 2 June 1987, p. 11. 47 Marketing, 25 April 1996, p. 7. 48 On creativity as a buzz word, see a two-page article by Peter Lord titled ‘On the Creative Floor: Aardman Animations’ aimed at the advertising industry in Campaign, 9 March 2012, pp. 24–5. 49 Adweek, 1 April 1991, p. 4. 50 Ibid. 51 Aardman Animations, ‘Aardman and Nathan Love Announce the Creation Of ‘Aardman Nathan Love’ [Press Release], 22 September 2015. Available at: http://www.aardman.com/aardman-and-nathan-love-announce-thecreation-of-aardman-nathan-love/ (accessed 9 April 2018).

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Music, Sound and Northernness in the Wallace and Gromit Films Joseph Darlington

Introduction: Wallace and Gromit and the ‘glocal’ It has often been remarked that Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit stand for something quintessentially British, with an emphasis on ‘quintessential’. Nick Park himself describes them as ‘so quintessentially British … I don’t think [they] could have come from anywhere else’, while Stephen Cavalier,1 in his World History of Animation, celebrates the survival of the duo’s ‘quintessentially British charm’ even after they broke Hollywood.2 Beyond the UK, Icon magazine has suggested that Wallace and Gromit have done ‘more to improve the image of the English world-wide than any officially appointed ambassadors’,3 while at home they have starred in adverts promoting such British institutions as the National Trust, Visit England, the Proms and the Royal Diamond Jubilee of  2012. There is certainly something very British about the franchise, that is undeniable, but – writing as a Lancastrian – I find it fascinating that Wallace and Gromit’s particular brand of Britishness is also on some level ‘quintessential’ because much of what is characterized as ‘British’ in these judgements is more clearly identifiable as a regional aspect of Britishness, that being ‘the Northern’. Wallace and Gromit’s music and sound in particular, which will be the main focus of this chapter, draws from the instrumentation of Northern brass bands, and the theme tune has become a classic of marching bands across the North. The tapestries of nostalgic Northern sound accompanying Wallace and Gromit foreground its regional specificity. Northern identity is at once English and other. It marks its territories through an ever-shifting arrangement of high-spirited antagonisms. Wallace and Gromit might drink tea, or rather ‘tay’, but they certainly wouldn’t take it the same way as Southerners would their ‘tii’. They would even drop their Lancastrian brand, PG Tips, to form a brief marketing alliance with Yorkshire Tea, their rivals across the Pennines, before restoring the county

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rivalry as Gromit throws a bomb at the Yorkshire border in A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008). Perhaps there is nothing more British than these shifting allegiances. Aardman is, after all, based in the South West, a region even less visible than the North West in the national discourse. Marian Quigley has made a convincing case for Aardman’s geographical and cultural particularity being its strongest asset internationally. The process she describes as ‘glocalisation involve[s] the generation of wider audiences for previously marginalised and/or localised media forms’.4 The local has a global appeal, especially when contrasted with globalized culture which has come to represent an anonymous homogeneity. White and Mundy have described how ‘the work of Nick Park contains comedic elements which work at a variety of levels’ in terms of maturity,5 but the same could be said of its geographic specificity. The origins of A Grand Day Out (1989) contain this range. Nick Park, born in Preston and raised in Lancashire, took these experiences with him to university at Sheffield Hallam, Yorkshire, where he ‘sketched out [the initial] ideas’.6 It took Park moving to the southeast of England, to the National Film and Television School just outside London, to see these ideas honed into a saleable form, and a further move to Aardman in Bristol to see them come to fruition. In terms of authorship, the Wallace and Gromit films are not therefore simply Lancastrian, or even Northern, but an amalgamation of perspectives on Northernness both national and, by the later films, international. This chapter engages with those questions – what is Lancastrian here? What Northern? What British? What international? – which are embedded in the lasting appeal of Wallace and Gromit. On the one side, there is the tradition of British film in which ‘dialect speakers […] are presented as simple, likeable and authentic people with a pronounced sense of humour’.7 This is true of our plasticine protagonists and would locate them as descendants of comedians like George Formby or Lee Mack. On the other side is the insular Northern comedy identified by Nuttall and Carmichael wherein audiences ‘will not only respond to a figure who admits common fallibility but will also hack down mercilessly anyone who pretends to greater sophistication’.8 The triumph of our homely heroes over their various evil nemeses, always depicted as intellectually superior (to Wallace if not Gromit), is equally satisfying on this account, placing them in the comedic vicinity of stand-up comedians Les Dawson or Peter Kay. Ultimately, we laugh at Wallace in an affectionate way. On a local level, it is a laugh of recognition; from a universal perspective, there is a pleasure of surprise, and a sympathy for the underdog.9 It is in pursuit of Wallace and Gromit’s animated Lancastrianism that this chapter engages with the music and sound of the films and, most iconically, the Wallace and Gromit theme tune. James Weirzbicki has argued that ‘few

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films demonstrate […] their maker’s sonic style because very few filmmakers, past or present, have a sonic style’.10 I contend that Nick Park’s work with composer Julian Nott and the Aardman sound team represents a distinct sonic style to the same extent that his work with the animation and design teams represents a distinct visual style. Both of these interconnect, playing with signifiers of Lancastrian identity past and present in immersive ways. In order to explore these ideas, this chapter begins by engaging with the films’ music and sound in relation to geographical space, moving on to consider the brass band instrumentation in dialogue with the North’s industrial past, and finally the particularly Lancastrian symbolism of Wallace’s inventions. The chapter ends by asking whether Nick Park’s North is nostalgic or inventive, a memory of the past or a promise for the future.

Tunes, toons and towns In order to understand the distinct sonic style of the Wallace and Gromit films, it is important to first grasp the particular nature of film music, and film music for animation specifically. Peter Larsen describes film music as ‘functional music’ whose determinants lie outside of the music itself.11 As such, both the structural progression of the music and its sonic landscapes are determined by ‘structural resemblance’ either to the images themselves or to the wider sets of associations upon which those images also draw. This ‘structural resemblance’, simply put, is what makes sounds and music suitable for a film. They are structured so as to resemble what is on screen and generate meaning without diverging from the film’s visual language. The Wrong Trousers (1993) demonstrates both types of structural resemblance: music that suits the action directly and music which draws upon wider generic expectations for its effects. For example, the visual iconography of the penguin’s surreptitious scheming heavily draws upon the visual language of the Hitchcockian suspense film, a visual style suitably mirrored in the music, with a prevalence of diminished sevenths and minor thirds creating a suspended quality within the notation (albeit with an emphasis on brass over strings to reflect the instrumentation in the rest of the film). Meanwhile, the chase scene shuns the typical rhythms of chase music or runaway train music, preferring a more upbeat, major-oriented comic timing incorporating inversions on the main theme with dramatic Hollywood strings and jazzy sevenths. Here the music is arguably contrapuntal to the images, but retains a harmonious structural resemblance to the world of Wallace and Gromit more broadly through its association with music hall and the English farce. Julian Nott, the composer, has described the chase

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scene as ‘out and out comedy music’ but in terms of what type of comedy he is referring to the music clearly suggests a silent era-style piano-led type of comedy,12 or that associated with music hall.13 Claudia Gorbman argues that music’s relation to film is at once defined by a ‘freedom from the explicitness of language or photographic image’ and a requirement to provide ‘expressive values easily comprehended by listeners’.14 In The Wrong Trousers train chase scene the music is free to play in a comedic rather than tension-building mode but only because we, as an audience, immediately and intuitively read this divergence as reflective of the silly situations which provide the climax to a typical farce. The correspondence of image and music is also impacted by the production workflow. In Lord and Sibley’s ‘how-to’ book, Cracking Animation, Julian Nott speaks only in general terms about his process: ‘in animated films the music may be needed first if the film is dependent on a song […] In more story-led films, I prefer to come in at the end when the editing is finished and I can write music to the pictures.’15 We can presume therefore that Aardman, at least during the late 1990s, routinely scheduled music as a post-production process. In Daniel Goldmark’s book on Hollywood animation music, however, a clear case is made for the typical workflow incorporating a musician from the start, with musical composition being ‘integral to the construction of cartoons’.16 Chuck Jones famously incorporated musicality even down to the timing between key poses. Arguably, the extent of music’s incorporation into the animating process goes a long way to determining how ‘toony’ the final effect is.17 With Aardman working in a straight-ahead style, privileging ‘strength and simplicity, directness and energy’,18 ultimately appearing less choreographed as a result, the choice to leave musical composition until the end results in a more live-action-style approach. The music and sound of Wallace and Gromit is still within the range of animation, but it is on the more realist end of that range.19 It is exaggerated, but not toony. The physical setting of the Wallace and Gromit films is accompanied by sonic signification and the sonic landscape is constructed through Julian Nott’s musical cues. These cues relate to Larsen’s ‘structural resemblances’ in that they draw upon generic expectations fostered by comedy music in order to cue the on-screen action. The sound effects and foley compiled under the direction of editor Helen Gerrard contribute to this resemblance in a more direct manner – sounds introduced to accompany images of sound-making actions such as footsteps – and the performances of the actors themselves contribute to a vocal performance that resembles the character’s written characterization. All of these elements combine to immerse the audience in Wallace and Gromit’s world, geography and all. Importantly, the creation of music, sound and voice takes place at considerable distances and times

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within the Aardman workflow, placing increased emphasis on Nick Park’s directorial vision as a means of bringing the elements together. Whether Park considers Wallace and Gromit to be quintessentially English or inhabitants of a particular Northern town can therefore impact the entire direction of the sonic landscape here. But where are Wallace and Gromit from? Where do they live? If we are looking for a certain place, then both A Grand Day Out and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) make explicit reference to Wigan. A Grand Day Out goes as far as showing letters falling onto the doormat listing an address, 62 West Wallaby Street, whereas Were-Rabbit is subtler, displaying a Wigan A–Z street map in the duo’s glove compartment. Anyone travelling to Wigan in search of the film’s settings, however, will be disappointed. Not only because there is no Wallaby Street in Wigan, West or otherwise, but also due to a distinct lack of any locations resembling those of the films. Wigan, like most late-twentieth-century Northern towns, is a melange of architectural styles from redbrick Victorian through 1960s modernism to contemporary glass and steel. Wallace and Gromit, by contrast, live in a red brick semidetached house typical of a slightly old-fashioned suburbia. Their house grows large enough to accommodate a working mill in A Matter of Loaf and Death and small enough to border on terraced houses in The Wrong Trousers. A Close Shave (1995) is the most unusual mix, incorporating both rural farmland and a square typical of small Northern villages where Wendolene Ramsbottom’s shop is located (it could in fact be the town Ramsbottom), while also featuring the tightly packed, terraced houses and huge looming mills typical of a city like Preston (the industrial centre from which Gromit’s mechanical antagonist takes his name). Tottington Hall, despite being named after a leafy Manchester suburb, draws on a Downton Abbey style of rural idyll perhaps more typical of Derbyshire than Lancashire. The films’ settings are in the service of the story, but it is clear that each film integrates a certain geographic hybridity connecting rural and urban Norths. The chapter will return the question of Park’s vision and its associated nostalgia later but for now what is important here is a sense of unspecific particularity. There is no specific location referred to in the settings of Wallace and Gromit but we are undoubtedly within a particular milieu. Place, as geography tells us, is not just a matter of spaces but societies. The signification of place through sound is therefore as much about the personality of place as it is about physical location. In terms of structural resemblances, the first order of these relate to sound effects implied to emanate from the diegetic world of the film, while the second are musical resemblances. In terms of the first order of diegetical structural resemblance, Michael Chion describes this as ‘territory sounds’ which surround a listener

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and embed them in place,20 while Alain Corbin’s theory of ‘auditory markers’ places sounds themselves at the centre of place with space exiting in relation to them, place being an ‘enclosed space structured by the sound emanating from its centre’.21 Whether it is the listener or the sound at the centre of place, our relation to sound has a clear role in defining how we relate to the environment with which we are presented. The sound of feet on cobblestones, especially in The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, places us straight into the North described in Orwell’s opening to The Road to Wigan Pier: ‘the first sound in the morning was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street. Earlier than that, I suppose, there were factory whistles’.22 The ‘sensory environment of the city’ which Michael Bull associates with the sound of ‘recent technological developments’ is instead signified here with the noise of the industrial revolution.23 The sound of Wallace’s machinery is pneumatic in nature, it tells of cogwheels, gears, steam, traction belts and the turning of heavy metal parts slick with grease. It is distinctly not contemporary, but the celebration of noise once associated with a ‘descent into [industrial] hell’ now in the service of the small,24 the local and the suburban. The quintessential auditory marker for the Wallace and Gromit films is perhaps then the sound of techno trousers stomping hydraulically down a redbrick street with an old-fashioned metal dustbin clanging about on top of them. The music too cements us firmly in place. Considering the second order of structural resemblances, those connected not by direct mimesis but generic association, Wallace and Gromit can be heard inhabiting a place defined by the popular music of bygone generations. There is, of course, the everpresent sound of brass – the significance of which shall be returned to later – but characters and moments also have their musical sense of place. When the robot in A Grand Day Out dreams of skiing we hear the theme tune played in a gypsy jazz style of the sort normally providing cinematic accompaniment to English daydreams of French holidays. Feathers McGraw, the penguin in The Wrong Trousers, plays records late into the night featuring the kinds of organ music typical of the Northern ‘club scene’, the organ always slightly out of tempo with the backing band.25 Meanwhile, Gromit’s classical music, from Bach to ‘Poochini’ ends up in the bin. Narrative moments often draw on musical reference points, from the music hall comedy of the train chase mentioned earlier to Gromit’s aerial antics in A Close Shave accompanied by stirring wartime strings. These musical reference points act individually as intertextual signifiers but also, considered collectively, take on the ‘mutual implication’ described by Claudia Gorbman wherein music not only accompanies events on screen but expands the limits of the cinematic world through both diegetic and non-diegetic musical range.26 The range of

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music in the Wallace and Gromit films presents to us a musical place. Richard Hoggart, studying the working-class North of his childhood, described in The Uses of Literacy how ‘groups still sing some of the songs their grandparents sang. They do not sing any from before then’.27 Sociologist Steve Hanson confirms that ‘around fifty years’ is the average span of this living cultural memory.28 Wallace and Gromit’s music (other than the classical) seems to reach from the early  1970s of ‘Puppy Love’ back to movie soundtracks of the  1940s and  1950s, giving them a similar historical breadth of reference between two and three generations. It also places them outside our own time as an audience, giving them the musical taste of the average grandparent at time of first release in the 1990s. Park has commented upon how he always thinks of Wallace as ‘much older than me’, regardless of their increasingly similar ages, and the historical musical range of Wallace’s taste fit with this.29 Wallace’s musical place is not only Northern, but a North in which Parks’s grandfather would have lived.

Brass bands and self-help The Wallace and Gromit theme tune is one so beloved as to have been proposed as the official theme tune of England football supporters (to replace the theme from The Great Escape) and inspired the  2012 Musical Marvels event in which Wallace and Gromit compered the BBC Proms.30 The tune is instantly recognizable: a stirring, triumphant march which blends martial fifes with jazzier clarinets and underneath it all the bold brass of tuba and horn. It has enough recognizable elements that individual motifs can be used to interlace the whole film score – as happens in Curse of the WereRabbit and A Grand Day Out – or it can be withheld, as in A Close Shave, to lead the audience joyously into the ending credits. As with the Wallace and Gromit films overall, the theme tune has become quintessentially British while retaining a solid seam of Northernness at its core – in this case, the tradition of brass bands. The theme tune as it appears in the films is not at any point played with standard brass band instrumentation (twenty-three brass players and between two and four percussion players), rather it incorporates the key musical signifiers of brass bands into a variation of ensembles from a seemingly custom arrangement of players in A Grand Day Out to a full orchestra by A Matter of Loaf and Death. The tempo is regular throughout and, being in a straight 4:4 metre, echoes the sound of marching feet.31 The tuba bassline is a staple of colliery band marches. The foregrounding of brass brings attention directly to the musical inspiration being drawn upon, but

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in subtler ways the fusion of martial, largely classical passages with more lyrical and jazzy passages also mimics the Northern brass band sound. As with Hoggart’s description of popular songs spanning three generations of musical memory, band repertoires were also ‘borrowed from other sources – the concert hall, the theatre, film music, tunes from the charts’ with medleys of tunes or ‘fantasias’ aimed at providing entertainment for young and old alike.32 There is a tremendous community focus in the brass band repertoire which aims to represent the current tastes of listeners and players alike. It is at once popular and aspirational, a fusion of elements normally associated with distinct high and low musical cultures. The community focus of the brass band is a product of its history. It is the same history which explains the form’s popularity as one overwhelmingly associated with the North. Where English rural areas had folk bands, mostly comprising ‘reed, wind and string instruments’,33 the Scots had their pipers and the Welsh their male voice choirs, the workers of the North gravitated to brass. Bands typically emerged in the large-scale industry which dominated the North in the Victorian era. Brass bands were modelled on military marching bands and, as Barrie Perrins describes, were usually formed through ‘sponsorship by factory owners, some of whom appreciated the cultural benefits bands could give, also the means to unite workers’.34 The majority of brass bands were therefore associated with mills or collieries, with large-scale philanthropic groups like the Salvation Army also creating bands towards the end of the nineteenth century. There is something about the weight of brass that fits with the exclusively masculine worker’s band, and a pleasure to be had in loud noise puncturing the already deafening surroundings of the factory or mine. Roland Barthes describes in ‘Musica Practica’ the ‘two musics: the music one listens to, the music one plays’, these being ‘two totally different arts’ with their own aesthetic attractions and rewards.35 The community which formed around a brass band historically, and still does to a lesser extent today, is undoubtedly the latter of these, but it is the kind of ‘playerly’ music which nevertheless aims at a communal rather than individual expression. There is a classed element to the brass band which is also particular to the conditions of the industrial revolution wherein cities like Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield became the ‘workshop of the world’. Money was made at an astonishing rate and works like Engel’s The Condition of the Working Class in England describe the unprecedented level of social damage this caused to the poorest in society.36 There was, nevertheless, always a strong core of motivated workers who strove to maintain their dignity even in harsh conditions and would struggle to improve themselves in the face of everincreasing class enmity. The brass band was a magnet for these individuals,

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often consisting of workers unskilled, skilled and clerical whose positions were determined not by employment status but musical ability.37 Perrins describes the emotional rewards this form of self-improvement offered: Discipline, team spirit, development of self-expression and personal confidence are among the benefits of playing in a band […] we find friendship and happiness in making music together, plus an awareness of unity and achievement which is satisfying in a world where a sense of values is often confusing.38

To a familiar ear the sound of a brass band is therefore simultaneously classed and unclassed. It is the music of industrial workers that reflects a desire to transcend material constraints and achieve at the highest levels of cultural distinction. In his oral history of brass bands Arthur R. Taylor quotes a tuba player, Howard Snell, who talks of the pleasures of playing outside of Britain. ‘People abroad come to brass bands with a totally unprejudiced view,’ he says, ‘they don’t have the English clichés written into their minds’.39 The international success of the ‘Theme from a Grand Day Out’, to give the tune its proper title, in many ways echoes this view. The music itself is appealing regardless of historical context. However, to again echo Marian Quigley’s ‘glocalisation’ argument, I would argue that this universal appeal is attributable to the particularity of the tune’s origins and reference points. It is not simply nostalgic but authentic. It is also tremendously suitable, not only on account of the films’ Northern settings, but in particular regarding Wallace’s status as an inventor. The history of brass bands is so wedded to the development of industrial society in the North that its particular sonic eccentricities undoubtedly owe a debt to rapid technological advancements in heavy machinery, coal and steam. Wallace, an inventor, and an upwardly mobile one at that, is exactly the type of mechanically minded entrepreneur whose self-improvement was fostered in the brass band and rewarded through his innovations. The transition from rural to urban living which took place during the nineteenth century was particularly dramatic in the North. Lancashire, the setting of the Wallace and Gromit movies, went from a provincial county to one of the largest manufacturing centres in the world in the space of two or three generations. These changes demanded a new type of person, the kind fostered by the brass bands – the entrepreneurial individual. Samuel Smiles’s 1859 manual, Self-Help, was a paean to this new individual who saw the squalor of the new cities and rather than sink into despair, sought out opportunities.40 ‘The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the

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individual,’ he wrote, adding that it also ‘constituted the true source of national vigour and strength’.41 Raymond Williams notes how this new individualistic spirit was emphasized in literature of the era in ‘the conventional figure of the orphan, or the child exposed to loss of fortune’.42 The orphan, unencumbered by family and tradition, represents the spiritual state of industrial man. The occupation of the successful, self-made man, for the same reasons, is that of the inventor. In this sense, we can see in Wallace an incarnation of earlier Lancastrian inventor characters. Elisabeth Gaskell’s industrial epic Mary Barton, for example, sees only one family escape the confines of the working class, doing so through the father’s inventions. Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge symbolizes the displacement of rural tradition through the arrival of Scottish businessman Farfrae, trained in the North. In Hard Times, Dickens presents Bounderby as a parody of the self-made inventor, only for it to be discovered he is not as ‘self-made’ as he claims. Entreprenurial invention was enabled by the Patents Law Amendment Act of 1852, and it is no coincidence that the same UK Patent Office commissioned Wallace and Gromit to market a rejuvenated patenting process in 2009. In the advert, ‘A World of Cracking Ideas,’ Wallace encourages the British people to ‘get your thinking caps on and you could be a famous inventor, like me!’. Wallace’s prolific inventing casts him as a one-man industrial revolution. He exudes all the homely qualities of brass band tunes while also representing a savant-like virtuosity typical of a disciplined ‘self-helper’. It is no wonder that Wallace would encourage people to make use of the patent system if we consider his rise through the class system over the years. In A Grand Day Out, Wallace is merely a hobbyist tinkering in his basement. His trip to the moon is devised as something to do during the ‘long bank holiday’, suggesting that he works for someone else during the week. By the time we see him again in The Wrong Trousers, he is self-employed, having both a main business and a side project in A Close Shave. In the final short film, A Matter of Loaf and Death, Wallace has risen from humble beginnings and is now a mill owner (albeit of the wind variety). In Curse of the WereRabbit, he even flirts with aristocracy, the aspiration of all ‘new money’ being to marry into an aristocratic family. They may appear to go wrong all the time, but Wallace’s inventions have nevertheless provided a decent living for a man of his presumably humble origins. It is for this reason that we might consider a satirical reading of Wallace’s inventions to be missing the point; rather, they act in the same manner as the music and sound by foregrounding industrial-era crankery in a warm-hearted, nostalgic way. Paul Wells, analysing the series as a satire on modernism, describes the ‘autonomous gag’ in The Wrong Trousers as ‘ultimately about humankind’s precarious hold upon the space it inhabits

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and the control it assumes it has over the natural order’.43 This interpretation draws upon a line of machine-related humour which goes back to Chaplin’s Modern Times and Rube Goldberg’s elaborate engines and ultimately reflects Bergson’s theory of laughter: ‘it is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency’, he argues, ‘its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the individual to the whole’.44 Bergson saw humour’s role as anti-individualist, a way for society to puncture the pretentions of those who travel too far from established patterns. The man caught up in the malfunctioning machine has received his comedic justice for preferring machines to people. By contrast, the machines of Wallace and Gromit are funny because of their self-made individuality. They transform the imagery of the industrial revolution into something homely and familiar, metal turned in the direction of music. ‘Wallace’s wonderful, riveted moon rocket has all the comforts of home,’ Sproxton and Lord write, ‘including – uniquely in the annals of space exploration – curtains and wallpaper’.45 The various inventions, each dutifully suffixed ‘-O-Matic’, are celebrations of Wallace’s savant-like ingenuity regarding all things mechanical. Nick Park himself has attributed Wallace’s penchant for invention to his own father who ‘used to work in the shed making things all the time’.46 The inventions, like the use of brass instrumentation and Wallace’s many Lancastrian turns of phrase, are part of the warm-hearted nostalgia for a Northern past which gives these films their charm. They also both draw upon a tradition of self-improvement embodied in the camaraderie of the brass bands and the individual innovator working to improve industrial processes. Both are forms of creative, individualistic self-expression which ultimately benefits the broader community and society overall. The climactic moments of The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and A Matter of Loaf and Death are all arranged around the functioning and malfunctioning of Wallace’s inventions. At these points, the pneumatic industrial sounds of pistons and steam valves synchronize with the rising action of the soundtrack; the alignment of diegetic sound and non-diegetic musical accompaniment heightens the action, the machines appearing to become rhythmical, musical agents themselves. These moments break from the more realist soundscapes typical of the rest of the film, suddenly filling the scene with the abundance of personality typical of more ‘toony’ styles. If there is satirical intention behind Wallace’s inventions, it is a generous satire and one which aims at creating sympathy for the underdog rather than punishing transgression in a Bergsonian manner. Wallace and Gromit’s characters are so rounded that they permit an audience to simultaneously laugh at them and with them, just as they can both inhabit thoroughly

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mundane lives and undertake whacky adventures. As we saw with their sound design, they are a hybrid of realism and exaggeration in which one aspect relies on the other. Ultimately, they reveal a nostalgia for the machine which draws on Northern responses to industrialization. Just as the sound of brass represents a collective pride in the face of the dehumanizing machine, so Wallace rehumanizes his machines by introducing to them his own eccentricities and foibles.

Conclusion In conclusion, we can return to the ‘quintessentially British’ quality of Wallace and Gromit in both its particular particularity – its Northernness – and, through Quigley’s theory of ‘glocalisation’, its universal particularity, the eccentricities of the local which anyone can identify with, regardless of their own geography. The same dialectical qualities of glocalization can be found in each of the elements discussed in this chapter. Settings are neither urban nor rural but evoke a ‘local’ spanning both. Music is neither typical Hollywood nor a traditional brass band but pursues its own logic which draws on both. Sound is a hybrid of realism and toon; stories are a hybrid of the mundane and the spectacular. Overall, we are left with a result which is perfectly rounded, self-encapsulated and is connected to the world while being entirely comprehensible and enjoyable on its own. If nostalgia is the process by which objective memory is rounded into subjective narrative, then perhaps this ‘glocalisation’, finding the universal in the particular, is the same process. Musically, the world of the Wallace and Gromit films draws inspiration from Northern sources, but its sonic landscape is a uniquely Aardman creation.

Notes 1 2 3

Visit England, ‘Wallace & Gromit – Holidays at Home – Making of ’ [YouTube video] (3 May 2013). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qpuGAbdlyYU (accessed 4 April 2018). Stephen Cavalier, The World History of Animation (London: Aurum, 2011), p. 354. ‘Wallace and Gromit Nominations’, Icons: A Portrait of England (7 June 2009). Available at: ­https://web.archive.org/web/20090101211807/ http://www.icons.org.uk/nom/nominations/wallacegromit (accessed 10 April 2018).

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Marian Quigley, ‘Glocalisation vs Globalisation: The Work of Nick Park and Peter Lord’ [2002], in M. Furniss (ed.), Animation – Art and Industry (London: John Libbey, 2009), p. 60. 5 Glyn White and John Mundy, Laughing Matters (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 164. 6 Peter Lord and Brian Sibley, Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3D Animation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), p. 171. 7 Christoph Schubert, ‘Identity and Dialects in the North of England’, in C. Ehland (ed.), Thinking Northern (New York: Rodopi, 2007). 8 Jeff Nuttall and Rodick Carmichael, Common Factors/Vulgar Factions (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 34. 9 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious [1905], James Strachey (trans.) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), p. 43. 10 James Weirzbicki, ‘Sonic Style in Cinema’, in J. Weirzbicki (ed.), Music, Sound and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 3. 11 Peter Larsen, Film Music (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), p. 41. 12 Richard Mears (dir.), A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman, BBC (2015). Available at: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80144358 (accessed 10 April 2018). 13 Silent films were often packaged with sheet music specific to the film, although often pianists chose to improvise over comedies using standard ragtime chord structures as the provided music was often equally as generic. 14 Claudia Gorbman, ‘Why Music? The Sound Film and Its Spectator’, in K. Dickinson (ed.), Movie Music: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 39. 15 Lord and Sibley, Cracking Animation, p. 183. 16 Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 4. 17 Looney Tunes is a clear example of the ‘toony’ effect taken to its fullest: animation is paced to the music and sound effects accompany action to the extent that the characters onscreen take on the transformative possibilities of musical entities. 18 Peter Lord quoted in James Clarke, Animated Films (London: Virgin Books, 2004), p. 111. 19 Goldmark, Tunes for Toons. 20 Michael Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Claudia Gorbman (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 75. 21 Alain Corbin, ‘The Auditory Markers of the Village’, in M. Bull and L. Black (eds), The Auditory Culture Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 187. 22 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 3. 23 Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 74.

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24 Stephan Kohl, ‘The “North” of “England”: A Paradox?’, in C. Ehland (ed.), Thinking Northern (New York: Rodopi, 2007), p. 100. 25 For those unfamiliar with the Northern club scene, Peter Kay’s series Phoenix Nights (2001) provides a typical, if more modern depiction of its tropes. The club’s band Les Alanos, comprising a drummer and organ player, specializes in covers of popular songs played in polka rhythm, as did bands such as Bernard Manning’s at the Embassy Club. 26 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: BFI Press, 1987), p. 15. 27 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin, 1952), p. 158. 28 Steve Hanson, Small Towns, Austere Times (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), p. 30. 29 Mears (dir.), A Grand Night In. 30 Aardman Animations, ‘Musical Marvels at the Proms’, Wallace and Gromit Website. Available at: http://www.wallaceandgromit.com/history (accessed 4 April 2018). 31 A Matter of Loaf and Death features the theme tune in a faster tempo. No reason has been given for this but it may be in order to squeeze extra seconds into the film. As the move to features demonstrated, the half-hour television slot was perhaps no longer enough to contain Park’s chosen narrative. 32 Barrie Perrins, Brass Band Digest (Baldock: Egon, 1984), p. 3 and p. 6. 33 Christopher Weir, Village and Town Bands (Aylesbury: Shire Publications, 1981), p. 7. 34 Perrins, Brass Band Digest, p. 9. 35 Roland Barthes, ‘Musica Practica’, Image, Music, Text, S. Heath (trans.) (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 149. 36 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London: Penguin Classics, 2009). 37 Arthur R. Taylor, Brass Bands (London: Granada, 1979), p. 207. 38 Perrins, Brass Band Digest, p. 13. 39 Arthur R. Taylor, Labour and Love: An Oral History of the Brass Band Movement (London: Elm Tree Books, 1983), p. 248. 40 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help [1859] (London: John Murray, 1969), p. 16. 41 Ibid., p. 35. 42 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 85. 43 Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 163. 44 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, C. Brereton and F. Rothwell (trans.) (London: Wildside Press, 2008), p. 84. 45 David Sproxton and Peter Lord, The Art of Aardman (London: Simon and Schuster, 2016), p. 91. 46 Aardman Animations, ‘20 Questions with Nick Park’, [YouTube video] (4 November 2009). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jwp0oEoJM (accessed 4 April 2018).

3

‘Yahoo! My last moment has come’: Peter Lord and the Literacy of Wit and Nostalgia Paul Wells

There is a framed panel from an old comic that takes pride of place in Peter Lord’s office in the plush depths of Aardman’s headquarters in Bristol, in the South West of England. The panel depicts a rampant hippopotamus butting a keeper into the air as the man cries out, ‘Yahoo! My last moment has come’. It is too alluring as a symbolic touchstone not to use as the starting place to explore Lord’s identity as an artist and filmmaker. In this initial catalyst alone, I wish to begin a considerable revisionism, or at the very least, the suggestion of an alternative perspective on Lord, whose usual narrative has been synonymous with the story of Aardman itself. This is constantly recounted in most interviews – joining up with his geek companion, David Sproxton, and making low-rent table-top animation that was quickly embraced by the BBC in Vision On in the early 1970s; recruiting Nick Park, and later, Richard Goleszowski and Barry Purves, for the Lip Synch series; the slow but sure expansion of the studio, following the successes of their animated documentary shorts and the Creature Comforts television campaigns; Park’s rise as the company’s go-to award-winning auteur; the success of the feature films; building a Pixar-styled new studio; the Christmas Day success of A Matter of Loaf and Death and so on. While this tells us much about Lord’s often self-effacing role in the creation and development of Aardman, it does not reveal Lord himself, nor his authorial identity as a creative director. To this end, it is useful to start, for example, with the fact that Lord undertook an English degree at the University of York, graduating in 1976. To paraphrase master writer and director, Billy Wilder, then, when answering the charge that European émigrés in Hollywood were too forward because they naturalized the idea that the director would write, he replied that what was most significant was that they could read.1 I have been fortunate to know and work with Lord on a number of occasions at festivals and on making-of documentaries, and over a number of years it has become clear that Lord is a much more complex figure than

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his public persona sometimes allows. There has always been a disjunction between  his presence as an avuncular CEO, essentially ‘fronting’ the studio’s activities in public engagements; his playful performance as a sometimes-bumbling English eccentric; and his powerful and influential roles as practitioner, businessman and leader. The panel in Lord’s office – an image from British comic The Dandy – suggests a different sensibility, and says something about the agency and currencies of Lord’s work. The mad surrealism of a charging hippo coupled with the man’s gleeful acceptance of his demise points up not merely Lord’s absurdist sense of humour, but also his existential outlook, and his tacit acceptance of a darker state of affairs in the human condition. While he shares Nick Park’s nostalgia for a 1950s’ ‘Englandthat-never-was’ unencumbered by social, cultural and economic reality, Lord’s perspective demonstrates an altogether more literary and philosophically grounded awareness. Lord’s love of the word ‘brute’ as a description for the hippo, for example – part of a ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ vocabulary, in which he maintains expressions like ‘crikey’, or phrases like, ‘Hmm, these are brainy questions’ – affords the view that it is important to understand that it is indeed, Lord’s love for language which offers significant clues about his outlook. George Orwell wrote about such language in his essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ and described its milieu in these terms: ‘in general they are the clean-fun, knock about type of story, with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging masters, fights, canings, football, cricket and food’, adding ‘sex is completely taboo, especially in the form in which it actually arises in public schools. Occasionally, girls enter into the stories and rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the spirit of clean fun’.2 This general outlook and tone – simply one of ‘clean fun’ – underpins the Lord oeuvre, expressed in similar matters of theme and detail, but also in the construction of worlds that speak to, and test, both the strengths and limitations of animation, and to the parameters of the material world as he understands it, interprets it and sees fit to let it in. For Lord, this is about the combination of his literary sensibility, his interest in history and his desire to embrace animation as a tool of expression in the service of broadly philosophic principles and ideas. Although virtually all critical accounts of animation rightly concentrate on its techniques and its primarily visual storytelling or abstract expression, the role of language in the interface between image and text is less addressed.3 Lord’s literary background and interests, though, provide some pertinent pointers to how this becomes important in his own work, most notably through the influence of Laurence Sterne and Samuel Beckett, popular forms like ‘the comic’, and in the pantomimic films of French comic actor and director, Jacques Tati. The ambiguities, limits and attractions of ‘language’,

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are, in fact, intrinsic to Lord’s approach and are instrumental in the ways Lord mediates the studio, the development and direction of his films, and the nature of the animation he creates. This is informed by different language forms, idioms and genres that underpin the narrative structures, aesthetics and approaches to performance and representation Lord employs, an engagement which, unlike Nick Park, who embraces a more image-based approach often related to traditional film genres,4 draws upon other modes of visual and textual formalism. This key concept will be addressed throughout the following discussion.

The life and opinions of Peter Lord Lord has often referred to Aardman’s projects as reflecting a ‘Whizzer and Chips England’ of playful eccentricity and whimsical observation. In many senses, this starts with Lord’s own naïve understanding of English as a subject for academic study, seeing it merely as the most suitable subject by which he could enjoy a university education – an idea that had seemingly been embedded in his upbringing, and from which, in his mind, ‘something, as yet undetermined, would somehow emerge’.5 Lord ultimately recognized that he did not embrace literary texts for the analysis of their themes and meanings, but rather for how they made him feel, and essentially how they also located him in a specific context or period. For him, history and language are extremely important. He notes, ‘I love authentic voices from the past; I love letters and diaries, although they are quite hard to read, but the appeal is at the level of the particular, the personal, the intimate, the detail, stories about country vicars’. This sense of the episodic, short narrative, with some level of appealing detail, drawn from a past occurrence or memory was to fundamentally inform Lord’s approach to animation. It should be stressed immediately that though this model is, of course, correspondent to the idea of the accumulation of ‘spot gags’, which Lord readily employs in his shorts and features, it is also a site in which other micro-narratives are taking place, suggestive of broader themes and ideas.6 Lord’s ‘gags’ are rarely localized, and for their own sake, but are connected to literary perspectives that have particular relationship, for example, to aspects of the short story, or the theatrical scene. Lord shared his time at York with novelist and screenwriter Anthony  Horowitz, novelist and journalist Linda Grant, and publisher Anthony Forbes Watson, among others, developing his own eclectic tastes, alighting on picaresque novels like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and particularly, Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

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as particular favourites. The connection with Sterne also has some other resonances that are helpful to introduce here: Sterne was a parson in York before he became a writer of some celebrity when his novel was published, in which he appears in a veiled self-portrait as Parson Yorick. The connection to York is purely coincidental, but the theological dimension is pertinent to Lord. Although it has always been assumed that the most influential role that both the parents of Lord, and his creative partner, David Sproxton, had in their careers was in facilitating an introduction to producers at the BBC, it is perhaps something far more ongoing and significant – Sproxton’s father is a vicar and made religious programmes for the BBC, and Lord’s father trained to be one, before giving it up to pursue another career. He notes, however, ‘we have at home a family tree, made by my uncle, and there are dozens of vicars all over Sussex; they are all my ancestors’. Although neither makes this explicit in their work or public identity, ‘Dave is more explicitly socialist, but for me it’s the desire for goodness, kindness, not brightly coloured virtues really, but honesty, and that you can see that coming through in the film; you have to trust that the filmmaker is doing what they want to do’. It is clear that Christian values – care, compassion, collaboration and belief-underpin Lord’s characters and narratives, not only in the sense of how they represent them, but also in how they imbue the Aardman brand. The second aspect that can be drawn from the influence of Sterne is that he was clearly working in a tradition out of Rabelais, and texts like Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This tradition embodied the idea of ‘learn-ed wit’, a certain intellectually driven playfulness, that was often satiric or philosophical in kind, and used the vehicle of literary forms to parody the limits of those very forms as texts by which to in some way logically apprehend, order and cogently narrativize existence.7 This approach allows a maximum degree of flexibility, one that simultaneously allows for the free flow of ideas and invention, and constantly revises the parameters of the form. Lord readily recognizes and employs Sterne’s method in animation – on the one hand, constantly foregrounding the relationship between the creator, the form and its reception, and on the other, providing diary or letter-like episodes (or, alternatively, micro-narratives), on associative subjects. In Sterne’s case, for example, building a bridge, the significance of noses, futility, sleep, words like ‘Zounds’ and the value of breeches.8 In Lord’s case, shiny cutlasses, ham, girls with ginger beards, Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, fish dressed up in a hat and Blue Peter badges in just one illustrative but typical scene: the Captain’s introduction of his crew in The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012). It is not hard to see how Sterne’s episodic narratives, full of digression, and self-conscious ‘story-making’ functioning as a joke in itself, have influenced Lord’s style and approach. Further literary, formalist and

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conceptual practices that inform Lord’s work will be addressed throughout this discussion as they serve to define his evolving identity. At this juncture, it is significant to note, though, that Lord has adopted many significant roles in his long career with Aardman, which may be usefully understood in four key aspects that broadly correspond with the chronological trajectory of his professional life: first, the documentary pioneer of the early films; second, the experimental filmmaker of his shorts; third, the performer-storyteller of his features; and finally, his polyglot identity as the embodiment of the Aardman brand. By implication, I wish to suggest here, that Lord’s liberal arts sensibility, and its grounding in literary storytelling and Christian values, serves to place him within the characters and contexts of the narratives that follow. This may at first sight seem an obvious observation, but within the context of animation as a practice, animation is usually understood as an authored form in the independent sector, and a studio-styled outcome in mainstream markets – shorts are named to their creators: Leaf, Švankmajer, Quinn, Norstein and so on, while features are defined by their house signature: Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, LAIKA. Although collaboration is readily acknowledged in both arenas, and core relationships between producers, directors, artists and writers, are sometimes privileged, the director–actor partnership that often characterizes distinctive live-action achievements is rarely identified in animation. For all the partnerships that define cinema – Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, Michael Curtiz and Errol Flynn, to name but a few – rarely are animation directors directly identified with their lead actors, the characters. The private and quite shy Nick Park, for example, is not viewed through Wallace and Gromit, except in the sense that they reference his father to some extent, and ‘Northern’ culture, but don’t in essence, reveal him in the ways that the celebrated cinema partnerships noted above do. This is a particularly interesting phenomenon as animators are actors,9 so a director–actor relationship is potentially an elision of the roles, and a direct embodiment of the tension between directorial intention and the capacity for the actor – in this case a plasticine or high-tech puppet – to express key themes and ideas. In many cases in mainstream cinema, the director and actor are well known, and potentially celebrities, already highly mediated and promoted in the public sphere. Rarely are animation directors ‘stars’ in this way, and although Tim Burton, Matt Groening and Park, for example, may be accorded this status in relation to their animation work and public presence, Lord affords a particular opportunity to match his public persona as the ‘voice’ of the Aardman studio, to his performative identity within the four aspects of his career cited above. As Lord admits, ‘I am in the characters quite markedly – the waters are muddied by the work being

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done by different animators, but I try to imbue their work with my gesture, the smile, the way of moving, helping them to register the right choices, and they end up as self-portraits.’

The documentary pioneer Lord’s early career was inextricably bound up with his working partner, Dave Sproxton, whose home life was characterized by his father’s interests in theology, philosophy and crafts. Sproxton’s house was full of machines and technology, and this drove his love for making things and taking up photography. This led to an engagement with ‘low rent’ table-top animation practice, where Lord’s more artistic sensibility found purchase, influenced in its turn by his mother’s occupation as an art teacher. Lord and Sproxton’s amateur dabblings were very much in the spirit of a hobby and part of a cultural outlook for boys which was informed by gaining practical and technical skills and applying such skills to good purpose. I wish to situate this early work then within the conventions of ‘invention’. As Paul Carter notes, ‘the condition of invention – the state of being that allows a state of  becoming to emerge – is a perception, or recognition, of the ambiguity of appearances. Invention begins when what signifies exceeds its signification – when what means one thing, or conventionally functions in one role, discloses other possibilities’.10 This is a crucial element in understanding how three-dimensional clay animation works, in the sense that Lord’s process is literally one in which his manipulation of the material itself becomes a ‘state of becoming’, until the clay takes shape or recognizable form, and offers the potential for configuration or signification. Although Morph is a human figure of sorts, he is just as much a clay model, a humanoid representation defined in the first instance only by his head, eyes, occasional raised eyebrows, nose, mouth, arms, legs and torso, and their correspondence to a minimal presentation of human identity. There is recognition of a human form here, that is augmented by the perception of the figure as someone that behaves and performs, but an ambiguity of appearance is maintained by the idea that Morph can return to a piece of clay in various sizes that appears to enable him to transport himself through objects, materials, space and time. In the early Morph films Vision On and later Take Hart, then, and indeed, across the whole series of vignettes, to the present day, Morph, his companion, Chas, and the other clay puppets, are both characters, and phenomenological experiments in the mobility and representational construction of clay animation. This is a fundamental principle in maintaining the relationship between the materiality of the form and Lord’s authorial intervention across his career.

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As such, Lord shows himself as an acute observer of behavioural nuances that define human expression, and the kinds of motion that specifically define the characteristics of 3D animation as a form. This is important in that 3D stopmotion animation enjoyed a particular tradition in Britain, largely established through the work of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin at Smallfilms, and Ivor Wood, at Filmfair,11 which Lord and Sproxton established in children’s programming beyond preschool audiences. As Lord recalls, ‘Dave and I were lucky to meet Ivor Wood – he made lots of things like The Magic Roundabout, The Herbs and the original Paddingtons. He introduced us to a few people in the industry. Mainly, though, he taught us that animation was simple. You did not have to make it complicated for it to be magical’. This singular point is significant in that Lord recognized that it would be simple and distinctive in its own right to present human beings and experience as realistically as possible through the medium of animation, as the process and outcome itself would place human conduct into the kind of rhetorical relief that enabled it to be perceived and understood afresh. As Carter again remarks: [T]he act of according value to matter is not simply a precondition of your art […] it is a philosophical attitude or ethos. Material thinking – what happens when matter stands in between the collaborators supplying the discursive situation of their work – is a different method of constructing the world in which we live […] the making process always issues from, and folds back into social relation.12

Lord and Sproxton’s Animated Conversations: Down and Out (1977), Animated Conversations: Confessions of a Foyer Girl (1978) and the Conversation Pieces (1983): Sales Pitch, On Probation, Palmy Days, Late Edition and Early Bird then become clear examples of the way in which matter is mediated through what Alan Rosenthal calls ‘the documentary conscience’, and links to ‘the function of the documentary … to clarify choices, interpret history and promote human understanding’.13 Lord’s literary and historical concerns, coupled with a liberal moralist stance, underpin the ‘fly-on-thewall’ clay-animated interpretations of real human interactions in these films, and as such, privilege a particular way of presenting the human condition.14 These early films also anticipate Lord’s later outlook about the nature of storytelling and story development. His more literary instincts tend to privilege a different approach from the dominant Hollywood model, and indeed, from that preferred by Park; in the first instance, eschewing the formulaic character-centred approach with a defined narrative arc in which goals are attained and lessons are learned; in the second, resisting too great a use of verbal and visual puns. Lord suggests, ‘I tend to build a narrative around

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how people behave, or some of the truisms or the silly things that people say or do. I think you should find what the story is trying to say, or what it might mean, rather than imposing a meaning on it you might want to reveal’. Lord seeks to avoid what he sees as the overt attempt at ‘moral education’ in the Hollywood model, and rather ensure that discourses about morality are imbued in accessible plots. This largely makes Lord’s narratives situational and event led, and these early films privilege the minutiae of a situation and the ‘event’ of an exchange between the people involved. Such a model of ‘documentary’ uses the actuality of sound recording matched to the mediation of material forms that demonstrably represents selective intervention. Lord insists upon a point of focus that may have otherwise gone unobserved or not specifically ‘listened’ to in traditional documentary  recording. In this, he uses animation to shift the idea of  documentary representation from the filter of the observational lens to the associative suggestion in ‘state of becoming’ in the material construction of the image noted earlier. A pivotal moment in Lord’s career in this regard therefore becomes the two films made in the late  1980s, War Story (1989) and Going Equipped (1990), which represent the maturation of his documentary sensibility,15 and the emergence of the ways in which the observational visualization which underpins it plays out in more overtly comic form in War Story in particular. The wartime recollections of Bill Perry in War Story, for example, are used to develop visual jokes – Perry’s house ‘on the slant’, which renders everything rolling downhill; the playful sentience of Perry’s pet dog in which the dog pretends to be an air raid warden; the surprise noise of a coal delivery being mistaken for a bomb going off, the seeming presence of Hitler in Perry’s bedroom; and the painful cramming of Perry’s family in the coal bunker. Again, this situational comedy is drawn from Lord’s interest in silent comedians like Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, not merely in creating ‘funny’ situations, but also in linking this out to ‘the social relation’, and most particularly, a Beckettian universe in which everything, however bleak or potentially threatening, is rendered as absurd. Lord’s parents introduced him to Tati through Mon Oncle (1958), leading him to conclude, ‘I love Tati’s persona, slightly distant, slightly awkward, a man constantly surprised by life  – following the logic of cutting the wrong branch, then ending up trimming the whole hedge’. This model of the ‘clueless hero’ is a fundamental presence in Lord’s work, and a key cipher for his engagement with more formalist models of invention that use the distinctive parameters of the language of animation to address the folly of human existence. Tati’s sophistication in using ‘low’ comic slapstick for ‘high’ conceptual purpose was an important influence on the making of Adam (1992), in that Lord was frustrated that animation festivals had often rejected the invention

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of Morph, for example, as merely children’s entertainment and not comic art. Lord notes, ‘Adam was merely Morph with genitals’, and a deliberately ‘adult’ attempt to show how animation can respond to a big question like ‘what is the point of existence?’ but also get that ‘feeling out loud laughter that the great silent comedians could provoke’. Sculpted from clay, Adam is placed atop the earth by ‘the hand of god’, or equally, of course, ‘the hand of the animator’, and at first, believes himself to be a dog (mere ‘animal’?), and uncertain of his role and purpose, literally slipping off the edge of the planet, before recovering, and imagining himself as an entertainer. Then, Robinson Crusoe-style, he marches around the planet and discovers that he constantly comes back to the place he started. Such walking and waiting is the central motif of many Samuel Beckett plays, most notably, Waiting for Godot (1953), in which the main protagonists – Vladimir and Estragon – find there is no purpose to existence and their wait for meaning and affect is pointless. Hit by the clay he has hurled in fury at his maker and seemingly abandoned by his animator god to an empty planet, Adam ponders upon and prepares for the possible arrival of a female companion, only to be coupled with a penguin. His embrace of the creature at the end of the film is a final irony about the absurdity of his position, and the general sense of laughable folly in his attempts to find purpose and fulfilment. Lord’s ‘documentary conscience’ moves on then from representing the social relation to interpreting its philosophic consequences, something he pursues further in this attention to more experimental work, both in the short form and his feature development.

The experimental filmmaker Lord’s work as a filmmaker is intrinsically bound up with the ways in which he configures narrative and following on from Adam his interests in storytelling become increasingly formalist. He is opposed to a number of the more mechanistic approaches to story development advocated by much of the established scriptwriting literature, preferring to evolve story in events that emerge from core conceptual principles. Lord suggests, ‘you constantly hold bits of it up to the light, looking or feeling for a pattern; you have a herd of ideas searching for the best possible shape; I see writing as a puzzle like solitaire’. Mobilizing these ‘pieces’ into an engaging story is achieved by seeking to match form with content, and is about the co-exploration of the visual potential facilitated by animation, how theatrical performance and motion choreography is imbued with ‘narrative’, and how ideas and concepts themselves may be conceived as a story point. These approaches were drawn from Lord’s commitment to both look outside the insularity of the Aardman studio to learn

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from animation styles in the independent sector, and outside film culture, for narrative form and content more rooted in the ‘real world’. Yuri Norstein’s The Overcoat (unfinished) was an influence on Going Equipped in its pacing and attention to the visual depiction of consciousness and memory, while Paul Driessen’s formalist experiments with screen space in films like On The Land, At Sea And In the Air (1980) and The End of the World in Four Seasons (1995), informed Lord’s split-screen narrative in Wat’s Pig (1996). The parallel lives of brothers separated as babies are shown as the two are drawn back together with the onset of war. One boy is saved by a pig and lives as a peasant, while the other boy lives as a prince; the former later taking his frightened brother’s place in battle, and preferred by those who formerly served the privileged prince. Lord seamlessly and gently points up issues of class, power, and equality, and ultimately plays out his central and prevailing theme that friendship, affection and human warmth can triumph over the adversity and challenge that might compromise it. Lord’s texts thus speak of their moral position through the formalist metaphors that drive plot and narrative. Adam is in effect a visual metaphor; Wat’s Pig a moral fable; Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park,  2000), the studio’s first full-length feature, in being ‘The Great Escape with chickens’ is essentially the mobilization of the prisoner of war film as a metaphoric vehicle to tell a morally driven story set in a battery farm. For Lord, though, as well as a challenge in relation to the film’s length and narrative, it was a formative process in changing the logistics of the studio and the ways in which a feature is made not by several people, but by several hundred people, that changed his view of practice. As Lord explains: [T]he leap to industrial scale production was huge; I did not know about the story reel then; we did not have enough animators; I had done animatics by drawing them all myself; but feature length, we had a constantly changing script, thousands of drawings, and a daily public showing to convince everyone of what we were doing and that it would work.

This shift echoed the industrial model, pioneered at the Disney studio in the 1930s, and which is essentially the same in the major American studios in the contemporary era. Lord is resistant to some of its processes though, particularly the idea of the ‘story blitz’ conducted by multiple writers, which underpins what he calls a ‘Frankenstein’s monster of a movie on the wall’, which is the starting place for future editorial intervention and story development. Lord’s altogether more intimate authorial process, working with a small team of comedy writers once the core treatment and storyboard

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has been developed, effectively refines the ‘world’ of the film, but crucially moves to a more formally scripted stage earlier in order that verbal and linguistic gags can play as much a part in the story – and chiefly, in the dialogue – as the visual sequences. The differences in style and tone between Lord and Park as co-directors could be reconciled by dividing scenes that privileged their approaches, each preparing animators with a particular performance direction, Park often drawing from genre examples in other films and visual sources, Lord through his own theatrical performance and focus on language.16 Lord explained of his work on Chicken Run: ‘every single stage of the movement is an experiment, or even an adventure, because you have this idea of where you’re heading, but no certainty of getting there’.17 This idea of the ‘experimental’ remains bound up with the ways in which technique facilitates the story event. The fascination with Heath Robinson/ Rube Goldberg’s machines is normally a playful aspect of Park’s comic outlook, but Lord’s influence is clear here in the greater absurdist threat of the pie-making machine and the overall infrastructure of the prison-like farm in general. The idea of a ‘contraption’ is transformed into a monstrous ‘mechanism’, and altogether more dystopian in the style of Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The more utopian aspects of the film were influenced by David E. Levine’s 2003 short story ‘The Story of the Golden Eagle’, in which an eagle’s egg finds its way into a chicken’s nest, and although the eagle only knows himself as a chicken, and that chickens cannot fly, he eventually confirms his desire and ambition to succeed by flying, and finding his true identity. The narrative was also informed by Orwell’s allegorical novella, Animal Farm (1946), a metaphorical rumination on the Russian Revolution, in which the idea of uprising and resistance is a central theme. The writers, Briton Jack Rosenthal and American Karey Kilpatrick, worked with Lord and Park to secure what Lord calls ‘an animated British POW movie, with chickens, made in Bristol, but with the full Hollywood treatment’. In essence, by the end of Chicken Run, Lord had established and advanced all the formative credentials of his personal and professional identity at the studio by ensuring that Aardman preserved its brand as a British 3D stop-motion animation studio, advanced its standing as an international producer, and rooted its outcomes in the core literary, historical and ethical considerations Lord has always embodied.

The performer-storyteller With the rise of Disney Pixar and DreamWorks SKG in the United States, and working through the benefits, tensions and complexities of collaborating with DreamWorks SKG and later Sony Animation, Lord reconciled the

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identity of the studio. He encouraged a plurality of work and approaches, but insisted upon 3D stop-motion puppet animation, augmented by digital applications as its core practice. As Lord notes: I am still a bit old fashioned really. I like the CGI films, of course, they look great and they are getting cleverer and cleverer, but I think somewhere the audience knows it’s just noughts and ones in the computer. It probably goes back to our childhood when we play with toys, and people see something of that in our puppets. The sense of fun and ingenuity in playing. The audience knows it is not real, but they believe in it completely. Something hand-crafted and cared about, like people care about their toys.

Lord’s playfulness is inherently related to the kinds of literary wit noted earlier, and his desire to extend the material worlds of his narratives. Deploying computer-generated imagery (CGI) alongside puppet animation in The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! enabled the construction of a larger-scale world in which the environments play as important a role as characters. The sea, the inns and pubs of a foggy London, and the pirate ship extend the cinematic sense of the narrative, and permit a greater degree of fantasy (chiefly, the Pirate Captain’s) and spectacle (numerous action sequences, most notably, the chase in Charles Darwin’s quasi-gothic mansion). Crucially, however, although Lord wanted to embrace this bigger landscape, it remained important to maintain an objectivity outside of the visual sequences the animation could facilitate, and the attractions of the ‘pirate’ story, to facilitate a witty engagement with Lord’s prevailing themes. These concerned the tensions between the value of creativity and art within the dominant cultures of the market, the impact of science and technology, and the social values of personal ambition and success. Working with the writer of the original The Pirates! book series (2004–12), Gideon Defoe, Lord properly realized his approach to writing: The Americans adapt stories, but as Dave [Sproxton] says, they just work from a kernel of an idea and build on it, like Shrek, which was just a thirty odd page picture book really, or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which is mainly pictures, too. And The Lorax; there is just so much fleshing out to do, that I am less interested in that. You may as well start from your own story or visual ideas, like Nick [Park] does, or use a more developed story. I have a copy of Pirates somewhere with loads of underlines, and notes of all the funny bits that made me laugh out loud, and really what I wanted to do, was rather than adapt the story,

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I wanted to adapt the world. Animation is really good for that, you can do the funny, and you can make a world that people can get involved in. The Pirates! had a sort of cult readership, so I didn’t feel I had to appease lots of already invested readers, and that if we did it right, and involved Gideon, they would recognize and enjoy his world. There are so many great ideas, and it is so funny, it was so good to do.

In Lord’s world, Jane Austen can share a pub with the Elephant Man, and be in the thrall of ‘clueless hero’ and raconteur, the Pirate Captain. The Captain, who is both intrinsically foolish and a fundamental believer in his own superiority, is being duped by the naturalist and biologist, Charles Darwin, who plans to steal the Captain’s pet dodo bird. Lord gently mocks the monarchy, key cultural institutions like the Royal Society, and the classconscious societal constructs that encourage self-absorbed ambition and social climbing. Once more, though, this is in a knowing tone that apes ‘The Boys’ Weeklies’: Darwin’s craving for scientific knowledge and status is couched within the discourse of wanting a girlfriend – ‘we’ve all done silly things to impress girls’, says the Captain; Queen Victoria’s paranoid hatred of pirates is described as ‘beard envy’ or caused ‘by being bitten by a pirate as a child’ in a parody of psychoanalytic jargon, while the Captain’s sacrifice of everything to win the ‘Pirate of the Year’ is constantly understated or made the subject of hyperbole as ‘not a total success’ or ‘terrifically idiotic’. Much of the humour of the film beyond its action sequences is couched in such literary rhetoric – the wit emerges from the knowledge the film and the audience shares about the formalized registers of expression and representation in cultural institutions. More traditional representations of pirates and piracy, as well as the social institutions of the Victorian era are replaced by a range of modern English ‘types’ playing out class identities and (mainly) ritualized formations of masculine identity. The Pirate Captain, like Morph, like Adam, like the peasant prince, is a reflection of Lord, at once ambitious, playful, engaging with challenges, but consistently without cynicism, and a knowing amusement about the absurdity of experience. As Lord remarks: I like characters who are a bit clueless really, but likeable. We are all a bit clueless, aren’t we? We have a view of ourselves that is probably very different from the way other people see us. You can dramatise that in a story, and it has got so much comedy, and sometimes pathos in that situation, like with the Pirate Captain, or even, Rocky.

Lord’s ‘performance’ through the characters ensures that the technical aspects of timing and delivery are on point, but crucially operates as the

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connecting agency that involves the audience and prompts the feeling of empathy. For all the appeal and absurdity of the Captain, the most important element that the audience takes away is that he nearly loses the love and loyalty of his crew because of his own selfish motives. Although this is not the ‘moral education’ of the Hollywood model, it is the implied assertion of the importance of human bonding, community and collaboration, in the face of all the supposed attractions and rewards of money, power and status. It is also the key aspect of Lord’s self-portrait.

The polyglot If Nick Park’s characters and films have become synonymous with Aardman in public discourse, it is Lord’s identity that has become synonymous with Aardman as a studio and a brand, and in relation to the overall narrative that Lord has essentially become the author of in his public appearances. Although I have argued here that this has obscured his status as a filmmaker with highly particular approaches and preoccupations, it is also true that his public persona (which is much more established than Park’s, who normally only appears to promote his films) in relation to the studio also helps to contextualize his practices as a polyglot role-player within the company. In many public forums, Lord usually cites the creation and maintenance of the studio itself as his greatest achievement, not least because it is now represented by a high-quality and long-standing body of work, the sustained employment of many artists and collaborators, studio buildings and estates, and an increasingly diverse portfolio in social and cultural presence. This has also necessitated Lord finding his place within his own larger narrative, and defining certain aspects of his practice as definitive in not merely in his own outlook, but in the ethos of the studio itself. For example, he notes: I didn’t like the expression ‘family film’. I thought it meant that we just cared about getting the biggest audience possible. I’m a bit ashamed of that, now. Because now I know that our films can be enjoyed by the whole family – grandparents, parents and kids can go together and all enjoy it. That is just marvellous thing, a great thing.

This realization properly speaks to the wide generational appeal of the studio’s work, and as such, its signature style, but equally, it shows that a highly significant model of success has been achieved allied to creative, aesthetic and ethical integrity, and most importantly, with a high degree of humility:

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Self-deprecating is one thing I do, because I am English, which you have to do. As I say I am not particularly academic, and I don’t do ‘facts’, but holding a movie together, and the studio together, is a major psychological and emotional task; it is a hell of a thing to do, because you are responsible, and the constant demands require that you are resilient.

In the figures of Morph, Adam, Rocky, the peasant prince and the Pirate Captain, Lord has demonstrated the ‘invention’ that characterizes his approach to animation, to storytelling, to practice and in embodying the moral and ethical enquiry that promotes kindness and compassion in  the process of self-realization. These characters become responsible and resilient in evidencing their fortitude and good humour in the light of life’s challenges. Lord’s polyglot public persona is therefore yet another reflection of his capacity for performance and wit in the context of the modern absurd.

Conclusion: The nostalgic modernist Peter Lord is one of the most respected figures in the animation community and is revered as the voice of Britain’s leading animation studio, bringing its history and achievement to the popular audience worldwide. Hiding in plain sight between his success as an animator, director, producer and CEO of Aardman is an unsung auteur, whose particular and playful address of humankind’s foibles and hubris is inhabited by an affectionate gaze aligned to a literary formalism that privileges a singular English wit. Lord’s narratives work on a number of levels, combining his natural invention in regard to the materiality of working in 3D animation, and his high regard for, and knowledge about, the mechanisms that define ‘wit’ – the comic tension between overstatement and understatement, the use of hyperbole, and the deployment of bathos. These approaches all reflect an intention to empathize with human folly rather than be critical of it, and to value humanity and its inherent goodness, rather than see the worst in humankind. This is a very important position in a contemporary world that is often viewed as in a state of deep conflict, economic uncertainty, environmental decay and apocalyptic doom. Arguably, Lord might be accused of ignoring or sidelining these issues, but even if this were so, it would be because he is concerned with engaging with a ‘bigger picture’, one that implies that it is vital not to give up on humanity and its capacity to live through love and compassion. Ultimately, it may be that Lord’s key imperative is not to resist ‘modernity’ but the kind of modernity that is not allied to the highest respect for, and preservation of, human values and emotions – human values and emotions present in the

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literary texts and historical resources Lord so admires, embodies and plays out in all his roles and identities. I am reminded therefore of the Pirate Captain’s response when asked to name three elements to gain entry at the  Royal Society’s ‘Scientist of the Year’ Awards. He says, ‘gold, ham, and the tears of a mermaid’, an apt metaphor for Lord’s preoccupations – ‘gold’, the privileging of the most precious things; ‘ham’, the playing out of a knowing yet universal humour; and ‘the tears of a mermaid’, that ‘impossible-to-properly-know-orpossess’ quality that defines beauty and emotion. It is this triumvirate that embodies Peter Lord and the significance of his work, both in animation, and for the communities he works with, and for.

Notes By coincidence, Lord’s favourite film is Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959). 2 George Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (1939) in G. Orwell (ed.), Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 1957), pp. 179–80. 3 Scholar and animator Miriam Harris explored this issue in her PhD thesis: ‘Words & Images That Move: The relationship between text and drawing in the animated film and graphic novel’, University of Auckland, 2011. 4 Park largely develops visual scenarios and comic sketches which serve as the vehicle by which to work with screenwriter Bob Baker, for example, to develop a screenplay. 5 All information and quotes from Peter Lord throughout this chapter have been drawn from three formal interviews, and a number of informal discussions, shared with Lord since meeting him at Zagreb International Animation Festival in 2002. These include a guest lecture at Loughborough University (2006); sponsorship meetings for the John Grace Memorial Conference (2007); Festival events at Utrecht (2009) Portland (2010), Teplice (2012) and Bradford (2014); script development and documentary production (2012/14); and studio visits (2014/15). 6 See Paul Wells, ‘Boards, Beats, Binaries and Bricolage: Approaches to the Animated Script’, in J. Nelmes (ed.), Analysing the Screenplay (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 89–105. 7 See Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: NYRB Classics, 2001 [1621]). 8 See Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (London: Penguin, 1967 [1759–67]). 9 See, for example, Ed Hooks, Acting for Animators (London: Routledge, 2011) 10 Paul Carter, ‘Interest: The Ethics of Invention’, in E. Barrett and B. Bolt (eds), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), p. 15. 1

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11 See: Rachel Moseley, Hand-Made Television: Stop-Frame Animation for Children in Britain, 1961–1974 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Jonny Trunk (ed.), The Art of Smallfilms (London: Four Corners Books, 2014). 12 Carter, ‘Interest: The Ethics of Invention’, p. 19. 13 Alan Rosenthal, The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 1. 14 For further discussion of these early short films see Chapter 5 (HosseiniShakib) in this volume. 15 See Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 109–11. 16 See Kevin H. Martin, ‘Poultry in Motion’, Cinefex 82 (July 2000), pp. 118–31. 17 Lord quoted in Brian Sibley, Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie (London: Boxtree Books, 2000), p. 26.

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From Europe to Hollywood and Back Again: Aardman and Its Studio Partners Christopher Meir

Amongst the many understudied aspects of film producers – as Aardman has been since the making of Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000) – are their commercial relationships with important partners such as financiers and distributors. This is true of studies of Aardman and this has created gaps in our understanding of the company’s work in feature films. These gaps pertain to the company’s ability to create works that reflect its artistic sensibilities while also being profitable enough to make the ventures worthwhile for the company and its partners – in other words, its independence and its sustainability as a film producing company. Features are after all very capital and labour intensive and, as such, Aardman’s work in this area has demanded collaboration with larger organizations. This has meant working with film distributors: companies that provide access to global markets as well as production finance, but who also require varying degrees of control over the projects which they buy and sell. This chapter will seek to explore the relationships between Aardman and its financiers/distributors for its six feature film projects released between 2000 and 2018. Besides providing a long overdue discussion of this vital aspect of Aardman’s business practice, closely analysing the company’s dealings with DreamWorks, Sony and Studiocanal will shed new light on Aardman’s ability to function effectively in the difficult world of film production where global markets present great opportunities but also significant financial and creative risks. As Aardman is far from being the only British producer to have faced the predicaments described below relating to maintaining its independence while accessing global markets and working with larger, stronger partners, the chapter will conclude with some discussion of how their experiences can illuminate our larger understanding of global British cinema. As we will see, the dynamics between Britain, Hollywood and Europe are currently shifting in what could be fundamental ways and Aardman’s trajectory as a film producer might be able to help us imagine an outward-facing British cinema that is not beholden to the American market.

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Working with DreamWorks: Americanizing Aardman Aardman’s move into feature films began in the mid-1990s and would eventually bring them into partnership with the American studio DreamWorks.1 Chicken Run began its life under the aegis of Aardman’s partnership with the French firm Pathé and their UK-based subsidiary Allied Films. It was Allied Films who financed the two-year development of Chicken Run into a project well-defined enough to pitch to Hollywood studios. With the developed project in hand, Aardman and Allied struck a coproduction accord with DreamWorks in 1997 for the production and global distribution of Chicken Run. The deal stipulated that Pathé would handle European distribution for the film while DreamWorks would hold sales and distribution rights for the rest of world, including the North American market, the single most lucrative territory in the world. Not only did this ‘greenlight’ the production of Aardman’s first feature, but it also initiated the creative and commercial relationship that would dominate Aardman’s first decade of feature production as DreamWorks and Aardman would go on to sign a five-picture production deal. DreamWorks SKG was launched in  1994 as a collaboration between three veritable titans of the American entertainment industries: celebrated director Steven Spielberg, long-time Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen. At the outset, the company presented itself as something of a latter-day United Artists, a collective of sorts run by creative talents, and therefore champions of creativity, while still having access to the production and distribution resources of the otherwise ruthlessly corporate Hollywood studio system. It was in this context that Aardman made Chicken Run, and the film was developed under conditions closely akin to those of European/British independent cinema, at a far remove from Hollywood studio pressures. There was, however, still some pressure from DreamWorks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, a notorious micromanager of the animated films under his supervision. While no one at Aardman publicly complained about Katzenberg’s involvement in the project, there were a number of thinly veiled comments in the publicity interviews that accompanied the release of the film. For instance, an interview with Nick Park and Peter Lord in The Irish Times: Park says the important thing with the DreamWorks deal is that it gives Aardman autonomy within what he calls the studio’s ‘benign embrace’. ‘They’ve kept at arm’s length’, he says, ‘but they’ve also been very helpful, in that Jeffrey Katzenberg has been flying over in his private jet from Burbank to Bristol to offer help and advice’.

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And not interfere? Park: ‘No, he’s pushing us to make it better, but he definitely wants our sort of film’. Lord: ‘He’s not saying he wants another Toy Story, but there’s a little tension in there, as there would naturally be’.2

How much this ‘little tension’ affected the film will perhaps never be public knowledge, but whatever disagreements there may have been, the film did not suffer in any obvious way because of them. Instead it was received very well by audiences and critics around the world, and it remains Aardman’s most successful feature film in terms of box office gross. Perhaps more importantly, the film felt true to the Aardman sensibility that had already become apparent in the company’s work in television and short films up to this point. After this promising start to the partnership with DreamWorks, the US studio began to change its ethos, and these changes had a knock-on effect with its relationship with Aardman. By the time the pact between the companies ended in 2007, with only two of the five intended pictures having been completed (and one of Aardman’s ideas eventually becoming the DWA produced hit film The Croods [Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders,  2013]), DreamWorks’ position in Hollywood had shifted. By the early 2000s, despite Oscars for films such as American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) and Gladiator (Ridley Scott,  2000), under increasing pressure to optimize profitability, the company had internally adopted the more normative corporate studio mentality found at other Hollywood studios. Among the factors driving this change were heavy losses on some films, which diminished profits on the Oscar-winning pictures. Significantly, many of the money-losing projects came from the animation studio, where expensive flops such as Sinbad (Patrick Gilmore and Tim Johnson,  2003) dragged on the company as a whole.3 Although the animation division also boasted a lucrative franchise in the Shrek series (2001–10), the unpredictability of its commercial fortunes ultimately led to the separation of the animation and live-action divisions. In 2004 the company spun-off DreamWorks Animation (DWA) as a publicly traded production company, after which both Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Nick Park and Steve Box, 2005) and Flushed Away (David Bowers and Sam Fell, 2006) were released. Despite the initial success of Chicken Run, problems began to arise in the Aardman–DreamWorks relationship in 2001 when Aardman received the greenlight to make The Tortoise and the Hare, a film based on the eponymous Aesop fable and budgeted at $40 million. Soon after production started, it was halted, script doctors were brought in and production staff were made redundant.4 Although initially Aardman told the trade press that the delays

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were temporary and that the film would be delivered on time, The Tortoise and the Hare never reached the finish line. Publicly, no one was willing to assign blame for the project collapsing and David Sproxton has said that the problem was found only in the story reel stage of pre-production and the decision to halt production was mutual.5 Nevertheless, rumours in the trade press and elsewhere have attributed it to a ‘butting of heads’ between the two companies.6 The impasse in the making of The Tortoise and the Hare was perhaps a sign of things to come for Aardman and their work with DreamWorks, although these were not outwardly apparent in the artistic outcomes of Aardman’s next project for the studio. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was well received by critics and the American film-making establishment (it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature) and embraced by audiences abroad, particularly in the UK but also continental Europe, Australia and much of Latin America. The film blended Aardman’s eccentricities to masterful effect, creating a work that is funny, entertaining and very much rooted in the cultural milieu of provincial England that the company had worked in for so long and so successfully with the Wallace and Gromit shorts. However, there is some indication that this success occurred in spite of, rather than because of, the Aardman–DreamWorks partnership, and there are accounts of Nick Park prohibiting DWA from making any creative ‘suggestions’ regarding the making of the film.7 It was thus in relative artistic independence, not necessarily creative harmony between the two studios, that Aardman was able to create its most critically successful film to date. Even with plaudits coming in from around the world, there was one constituency that did not embrace Wallace and Gromit: the American audience. The film ‘only’ made $56 million at the US box office (compared to $107 million for Chicken Run),8 and this, despite the film’s international gross of $136 million, would prove to be a major problem for the newly christened DreamWorks Animation. Were-Rabbit was budgeted at $45  million and given the considerable costs of marketing family fare in the United States, likely cost somewhere close to that figure to promote. When one makes the standard assumptions about distribution costs being about equal to the production budget and factoring in the percentage of the box office that goes to the exhibitors (typically about 50 per cent),9 it is clear that DWA would be losing money on the film on the theatrical run. This is a common situation for most films during the theatrical phase of their release, but ancillary revenues from DVD sales, for example, also proved disappointing. In the end, despite the Oscar, the now public company DWA announced it would take a total loss of $29 million on the film, due to lower than expected ticket and home video sales in the United States.10

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Internally, due to these losses on Wallace and Gromit, the pressure was on DWA to cancel its pact with Aardman,11 but the two companies pressed ahead with their next project Flushed Away. This time more creative control was ceded to DreamWorks by virtue of the production being shifted away from Bristol to DWA’s computer-generated imagery (CGI) laboratories in California.12 The results would prove to be artistically disappointing and financially disastrous. The costs on the production of the film – which included the CGI animation process and also the all-star voice cast, featuring Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet – spiralled to somewhere in the range of $140  million.13 Additionally, there was still the cost of marketing and distributing the film. In terms of box office revenue, the film came nowhere near the amount needed to recoup these costs – grossing $178  million worldwide – and DWA was ultimately forced to book another loss on an Aardman film, this time in the region of $109 million.14 A loss of this magnitude represented a low point for Aardman in commercial terms, but Flushed Away was also an artistic nadir for the company. Very little of the characteristic Aardman sense of humour is present in the film and nor is the animation style particularly distinct or interesting, with the company eschewing its signature stop-motion techniques for CGI. On both of these fronts, the film is actually much closer to the script and animation house styles of DWA, which have been often derided by critics as bland and predictable. In terms of national identity and cultural representation, the film moved away considerably from Aardman’s favoured settings of bucolic, eccentric rural England to a touristic view of Britain, in which the landmarks of central London are transposed to the film’s subterranean milieu. Such a setting may have been easier for American audiences to recognize as British – after all there was Big Ben! – but it also robbed the film of the source of much of Aardman’s artistic distinctiveness. DWA may have seen these changes to the typical Aardman style – moving the film closer to the DWA/Katzenberg house style (and reportedly with a great deal of input from DWA themselves)15 – as necessary to appeal to American audiences, but the end result was that the film had little appeal to anyone. In short, this was a case study of an American studio forcing too many compromises on a British production company and the film suffered for these attempts to please an audience that it was just not in synch with. Acknowledging the steep losses on Flushed Away, and without the consolation of the critical esteem that had come with other Aardman releases, Katzenberg announced the end of DWA’s pact with the company. Aardman for their part claimed – and continues to claim – that the working relationship between the two companies was fatally impaired by DWA becoming a public company16 and that the personal relationships and mutual

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artistic respect between those involved remained strong. The decision to go public made DWA change its business model to one focused on predictable (in both commercial and artistic senses) franchises such as Shrek and Kung Fu Panda (2008–16). These changes, and the dependence on the American market that DWA’s business model hinged on, ultimately made it impossible to work with a company like Aardman, whose films generated the bulk of their revenues outside of the United States and which never looked likely to generate box office grosses on the scale that DWA needed to turn a profit.

Globalizing Aardman: Working with Sony Aardman thus looked for a new distribution partner and in  2007 signed an exclusive deal with Sony, a company which was in need of family-oriented content in order to compete with the other Hollywood majors. Sony is also a company with a much more global footprint than DWA in terms of direct distribution territories and among the Hollywood majors the company has a reputation for being particularly adept at marketing and distribution in international markets. For Aardman, which had consistently been more popular outside of the United States, this made Sony appear a better fit as a studio partner. Announcing the deal in the trade press, Sproxton said, ‘We’re Europeans with a European sensibility. Our films have played better in the UK and Europe than they have in the States,’17 and Sony too saw these as the key markets for the films. But despite the rhetorical emphasis placed on Europeanness by Aardman executives, their counterparts at Sony were indicating ambitions for larger global audiences, saying things like ‘Aardman Features [sic] is enormously popular all over the world,’18 and this sentiment would be followed by an apparent disparity in the expectations the two companies had for Arthur Christmas, with Sony anticipating broad-based global success rather than aiming it primarily at the European markets. One trade industry report, for example, quoted Arthur Christmas director Sarah Smith as saying: The great thing that [Sony executives] said to Aardman is they would be happy to make smaller-scale films that would be primarily for a European market […] I think that’s primarily what they expected Aardman to offer, but when they heard (our pitch for “Arthur Christmas”), they went, “Wait a minute, this is a big idea. This is going to work ‘round the whole world!”’ 19

Sony ultimately only greenlit two features from the Aardman slate: Arthur Christmas and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012). The strategic global commercial ambitions that Sony held for these features,

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rather than the more European-facing plans that were mooted initially, is perhaps indicated by their settings as the films’ British characters transcend their geographic origins by traversing the planet and the high seas, respectively. The films’ budgets are also telling with Arthur Christmas coming in at $100 million and The Pirates!, which included CGI details, registering the highest budget of the firm’s stop-motion films at about $55  million. Reminiscent of Hollywood’s animation practices but with a clear emphasis on British stars, both films also featured celebrity voice casts, including Hugh Grant and Salma Hayek in The Pirates!, and Jim Broadbent and James McAvoy in Arthur. Ultimately, neither film was a commercial success, at least not enough to justify their budgets. The Pirates! grossed $123 million which, when one adds marketing and distribution expenses to its production budget, likely meant the studio lost money or at best broke even on home video sales. With its much bigger budget, Arthur Christmas needed to do considerably better than its global box office gross of $146 million to come close to breaking even.20 It was thus perhaps not a surprise when Sony let the deal with Aardman expire in 2012, leaving the production company to once again seek a new distribution partner. However, while the films made with Sony were commercial failures, this does not tell the whole story. Both films were critically well received, particularly in the UK, and The Pirates! was nominated for an Oscar. Moreover, both were novel in artistic terms and owed these distinctions to a relative lack of interference from Sony, who according to Sproxton were less involved than DWA in creative matters, even if they weren’t wholly hands off.21 The Pirates! in particular was true to Aardman’s unique comic sensibility with its particularly idiosyncratic humour. The pace at which the jokes come, their edgy, even at times off-colour, content and the eccentricity of a children’s film featuring Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria as villains, implies that Aardman was given a certain amount of creative freedom. Arthur Christmas, which is on the surface more conventional than The Pirates!, still features a decidedly non-Hollywood plot that takes a critique of Santa Claus’s corporatized supply chain as its point of departure. Instead of artistic interference, which seems to have been the case with DWA and Aardman, one can perhaps look to a different type of industrial pressure to explain the commercial failings of Aardman’s films for Sony. Both were released during major holiday seasons (Thanksgiving/early parts of the Christmas season in the case of Arthur, Easter in the case of The Pirates!) into crowded marketplaces, where the competition for children’s media is acutely intense. This ill timing on Sony’s part can be seen as a product of its own corporate agenda. A dispatch in Variety from 2010 suggested that Aardman was rushed into releasing Arthur Christmas in  2011 by a Sony  that was

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chastened by failures in its animation division such as Surf ’s Up (Ash Brannon and Chris Buck, 2007) and that ‘desperately needed fresh content’.22 Sproxton has said there was no alteration to the original completion date set by the two companies, but does concede that the film’s release – for which Aardman was not responsible – was badly timed given the competition and was necessitated by Sony’s corporate needs to simply release a film during that period, in part for the sake of its quarterly financial reports.23 It is telling in this regard that in the years following its disappointing theatrical run, the film’s reputation has grown and it has been a perennial favourite during the holiday season for broadcasters in the UK especially, while streaming services such as Netflix have also made the film available to audiences. The ways in which the film continues to be discovered by audiences long after its cinema run suggests that the film needed more exposure than was granted by Sony’s release in such a crowded market. This long-term cultural resonance contrasts sharply with Sony’s short-term, hurried thinking and lack of appreciation for the markets to which Aardman’s sensibilities naturally speak. Put simply, the bungled release of Arthur Christmas is yet another reminder of the incompatibility of the producer and distributor.

The search for a European partner Given the film’s theme of losing the wonder of Christmas under a regime that favours corporate efficiency and risk management, Arthur Christmas makes a poetically emblematic film for why the relationship between Aardman and its Hollywood partner was not sustainable.24 After the partnership with Sony ran its course, Aardman was determined to return to its roots and to find a financing and distribution partner in Europe and after unsuccessfully approaching their former partner Pathé,25 Aardman ultimately found a new backer in Studiocanal. The two companies soon after struck a deal to make Shaun the Sheep Movie, a film that had first been pitched to, and turned down by, Sony.26 Thus began a new chapter in Aardman’s work in features. Studiocanal’s emergence as a major player in the global film industry was itself circuitous and marked by several unsuccessful attempts at working with Hollywood. These attempts included being forced by parent company Vivendi into a merger with Universal Studios that ended with the French company teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in 2002. Studiocanal survived this period and later re-emerged as a global force in the mid-2000s by methodically acquiring distribution operations in the UK (2006), Germany (2008), and Australia and New Zealand (2012). With these territories as well as its French operations and a network to sell its films to distributors

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outside of its territories, the company began fully financing Englishlanguage feature film production in the late 2000s. With an investment in the Belgian animation company NWave in  2010, the company signalled its intention to get into the family entertainment segment of the market, a direction that would ultimately lead them to finance and release Paddington (Paul King, 2014) and Paddington 2 (Paul King, 2017). As part of this larger strategy, the company also looked to Aardman as an important potential partner. Possessing a confederation of distribution territories and a sales network that sells to distributors in other territories has created a business model for Studiocanal that is significantly different from Aardman’s previous partners. It is also one that takes advantage of the growing value of non-US markets to make films with mid-range (20–80 million Euro) budgets.27 Crucially, this business model avoids direct dependence on the US market. Studiocanal sells the US rights to its films to distributors there and has thus far avoided forming or acquiring a subsidiary to handle its products in that territory. While this means that they lose out on potential revenues from what is still the biggest single national market in the world, they also avoid the risks that come with spending on marketing and distribution costs in America, which are proportionally much higher than those in Europe. Such a business model meant that Aardman’s films would have to be produced for lower budgets than those funded under their Hollywood partnerships, but it also meant that pleasing the American market would not be a creative priority. It also removed the ‘global pressures’ that came with Sony’s particular distribution strategy. The home market would now be European countries, Australia and New Zealand, markets that Aardman felt much more comfortable addressing.28 A film version of Aardman’s highly successful children’s television series Shaun the Sheep was an ideal first collaboration because not only was Studiocanal in the market for British-themed family fare but also, being a very conservative company in commercial terms, they were interested in films with pre-existing audiences.29 Conveniently, it was also a project that did not require a great deal of development funding from Studiocanal – the character designs and sets already existed from the TV show and the script required relatively little development.30 This meant that the film would move quickly – for an Aardman feature at least – from announcement in April  2013 to release in February  2015. Costs were also kept low by the film’s lack of a voice cast, avoiding A-list actor salaries and the lengthy, and therefore expensive, process of adding voices to stop-motion animation.31 In addition, this helped keep distribution costs down as the film would not have to be dubbed for each linguistic market.

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For Aardman, the Studiocanal deal was attractive because it meant a partner with a global reach, but more focused on the European market. It also meant working with a partner with a European sensibility, according to David Sproxton, and this translated into little creative interference from the studio during the making of the film,32 a degree of independence that  the company had not seen during its Hollywood misadventures. In the end, Shaun the Sheep Movie was made for a reported budget of under $25 million,33 by some distance the least-expensive Aardman feature to date. The film was also Aardman’s lowest grossing feature, making $106 million internationally, well short of the $123 million that The Pirates! – the next lowest-grossing film made by the company – made in what was a disappointing run in theatres for Sony. Shaun had an especially difficult time in the American market. A distribution deal was signed for the territory only after its debut in the UK and its roll out across the Studiocanal network, when Aardman brokered a deal with US ‘mini-major’ Lionsgate.34 Lionsgate released the film late in the summer season, long after the release of family-friendly box office juggernauts Inside/Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen,  2015) and Minions (Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin, 2015) and despite this lack of serious competition, the film had a weak opening and only grossed $19 million in total in the United States, far below the performances of previous Aardman films. Despite these seeming challenges, the overall box office performance allowed Shaun to turn a profit on its global theatrical release,35 and the film has since spawned a sequel that will be financed and distributed by Studiocanal. This seeming paradox of the lowest amount of box office revenue possibly making for the most profitable of Aardman’s films was significant as it meant that the partnership with Studiocanal might offer the most sustainable basis for Aardman’s feature-film-making future. It is also one that seems to allow Aardman the greatest degree of artistic freedom of any of its distribution partnerships to date. This meant that Aardman was free to return to their favoured setting and cultural milieu and to extend the Wallace and Gromit universe (the character of Shaun originated in the short film A Close Shave [Nick Park, 1995]). The fact that Sony had turned down the film indicates that it was simply not possible to produce the film while working with Hollywood, let alone its sequel, which, at the time of writing, is in production and scheduled for release in 2019. Besides the Shaun sequel, Studiocanal and Aardman also partnered on Nick Park’s return to feature filmmaking for the  2018 release Early Man, his first film since Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. While this means that the Studiocanal relationship led to the return of Aardman’s most accomplished auteur director, somewhat worrisome for the outside

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observer is the issue of economic sustainability. Early Man, unlike Shaun, does not have an in-built audience, and the main marketing hook besides Park’s return is the film’s plot about the invention of football. Additionally, the film’s reported budgeted at $50 million, was over twice what Shaun cost.36 Although by Studiocanal’s standards, this is well within their  80  million Euro framework and the BFI is providing some additional funding, it looks increasingly unlikely that a profit can be made on an Aardman production of this scale. The film’s poor performance thus far at the US box office (at the time of writing, under $9 million, compared to $19 million for Shaun) and the relative underperformance in the UK (currently at about $15 million after nearly six weeks on release, heading towards what would be by far the lowest Aardman gross in its home market), would seem to indicate that  the film will end up generating even less in revenue than Shaun. This could of course change as the film continues its global rollout, but if the box office returns for Early Man do not improve this could prove the sternest test yet of Aardman’s sustainability as a feature film producer on the global stage.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to illuminate the business practices behind Aardman’s feature work, a project that necessarily meant exploring the industrial contexts surrounding the financing and distribution of the six feature films that the company made between 2000 and 2018 and the one slated for release in 2019. As discussed at the outset of the chapter, commercial relationships are of extreme importance to the work of the producer and by examining them more closely in the case of a company like Aardman, the chapter has sought to provide fresh insights into questions of artistic independence and economic sustainability, ones that are at the heart of producer studies. At the level of political economy, the biggest threat to filmmakers in Britain and Europe has long been the power of American companies and the related temptation to appeal primarily to the American market. As we have seen, Aardman has had to deal with both of these problems throughout their career as for the first fifteen years of their work in features only American companies were willing and/or able to finance and distribute their works on the scale required. Engaging with the American studio system may have created some of Aardman’s most distinctive works, but it also meant artistic compromises and ultimately unrealistic expectations and unsustainable filmmaking. Getting back to Aardman’s distinctive voice as filmmakers meant finding a European partner and they found this in Studiocanal, and Shaun

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the Sheep Movie was in many ways a return to form for the company, with critical acclaim and sustainable commercial success. For the time being, this has all the hallmarks of a fruitful, symbiotic relationship between two European companies.37 This has implications for scholars of British cinema as the nation’s industry has long been seen as one situated metaphorically (and geographically) between Hollywood and Europe. Conventional wisdom within scholarly and industrial circles is that economic survival and success would necessarily – if lamentably – come only from partnering with Hollywood. The early success that Aardman had with Studiocanal, combined with similar successful British–European collaborations in recent years – including the partnerships of Working Title Films and Heyday Films with Studiocanal and that between auteur Ken Loach and French studio Wild Bunch, for example – show that opportunities for continental collaboration are increasingly attractive to British filmmakers. For scholars of European cinema, these partnerships and the journey that Aardman took to arrive at Studiocanal’s doors should also be a reminder that understanding creativity on the continent must necessarily mean understanding the role that commercial concerns play in shaping the careers and output of filmmakers. Long thought of as the land of the Romantic figure of the auteur director, what this chapter suggests is that we can learn a great deal more about producers like Aardman if we also remember that even European artistic practice is embedded within larger industrial and corporate contexts.

Notes

1

2 3

This article grows out of a larger research project which has received funding from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement nº 600371, el Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (­COFUND2014-51509) el Ministerio de Educación, cultura y Deporte (CEI-15–17) and Banco Santander. Although technically a production company, DreamWorks had a preferential distribution arrangement at the time with Hollywood major Universal Studios. As part of this deal, DreamWorks also oversaw the marketing campaigns for their films. Stuart Husband, ‘Nobody Here but Us Chickens’, The Irish Times, 24 June 2000. Available at: h ­ ttp://www.irishtimes.com/news/nobody-herebut-us-chickens-1.285808 (accessed 15 December 2015). Nicole Laporte, The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies and a Company Called DreamWorks (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), pp. 349–61.

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5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

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Patrick Frater, ‘Aardman’s The Tortoise vs. The Hare Back on Track’, Screen Daily, 8 August 2001. Available at: http://www.screendaily. com/aardmans-tortoise-vs-hare-back-on-track/406529.article (accessed 15 December 2015). David Sproxton, Interview with Andrew Spicer, Steve Presence and Christopher Meir, 10 November 2015, Bristol, UK. Stuart Kemp, ‘DWA-Aardman Deal Flushed’, The Hollywood Reporter, 31 January 2007. Available at: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ dwa-aardman-deal-flushed-129100 (accessed 15 December 2015). Nicole Laporte says that, after the experience of working with Katzenberg on Chicken Run, Nick Park stipulated that there be no input on the film from either Katzenberg or other DWA executives on the film. Laporte, The Men Who Would Be King, p. 388. David Sproxton has denied this was the case, saying that Park welcomed Katzenberg’s input, including his suggestion to have Hans Zimmer score the film. David Sproxton, email exchange with Andrew Spicer and Christopher Meir, 10–15 January 2016. All box office statistics, unless otherwise noted, are taken from Boxofficemojo.com (accessed 15 December 2015). Both the distribution budget and exhibitors’ cut assumptions are taken from Jeffrey C. Ulin, The Business of Media Distribution (Los Angeles, CA: Focal Press, 2014), p. 109. DreamWorks Animation, 2006 Annual Report. Corporate Press Release, p. 50. Kemp, ‘DWA-Aardman Deal Flushed’. Adam Dawtrey, ‘Aardman Awakes from Dream’, Variety, 5 April 2007. Available at: http://variety.com/2007/voices/columns/aardman-awakesfrom-dream-1117962633/ (accessed 15 December 2015). Exact dollar amounts for the film’s budget vary, with IMDB and Boxofficmojo.com saying it cost $149 million to produce and several news outlets reporting it cost $143 million. Following the lead of reporting in the trade press (e.g. Dawtrey, ‘Aardman Awakes’), I will simply leave the figure as somewhere in the $140 million range. DreamWorks Animation, ‘2006 Annual Report’, p. 31. Peter Debruge, ‘Quality, Quantity = No Certainty’, Variety, 6 November 2006. Available at: http://variety.com/2006/film/awards/ quality-quantity-no-certainty-1117954109/ (accessed 15 December 2015). Sproxton, Interview with Andrew Spicer, Steve Presence and Christopher Meir. Dawtrey, ‘Aardman Awakes from Dream’. Sony CEO Michael Lynton quoted in Dawtrey, ‘Aardman Awakes from Dream’. Peter Debruge, ‘Aardman Charts New Course with Sony’, Variety, 10 December 2010. Available at: http://variety.com/2010/film/news/aardmancharts-new-course-with-sony-1118029221/(accessed 15 December 2015). The estimation of Sony’s profits, or lack thereof, on these films cannot be verified in the way that DWA losses on other films were because Sony did

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28 29

30

31 32 33

34

35

Aardman Animations not report on the profitability of these individual films. These are therefore my own assumptions based on standard industry models drawn from Ulin 2014, p. 109. Sproxton, Interview with Andrew Spicer, Steve Presence and Christopher Meir. Debruge, ‘Aardman Charts New Course with Sony’. Sproxton, Email exchange with Andrew Spicer and Christopher Meir. For the sake of clarity, it is important to reiterate that The Pirates! was the last Aardman film released under the Sony pact. Sproxton, Interview with Andrew Spicer, Steve Presence and Christopher Meir. Sproxton, Email exchange with Andrew Spicer and Christopher Meir. For more on Studiocanal’s business model and how it corresponds to shifts in the global film and television industries, see Christopher Meir, ‘Studiocanal and the Changing Industrial Landscape of European Cinema and Television’, Media Industries iii, no. 1 (2016), pp. 49–63. Sproxton, Interview with Andrew Spicer, Steve Presence and Christopher Meir. The same formula was at work, for instance, in one of the company’s breakthrough live-action films, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Thomas Alfredson, 2011), which was the subject of a famous 1970s TV series starring Alec Guinness. Wendy Mitchell, ‘Set Report: Shaun the Sheep the Movie’, Screen International, 4 November 2014. Available at: http://www.screendaily.com/features/ set-report-shaun-the-sheep-the-movie/5079341.article?blocktitle=SETREPORT&contentID=43109 (accessed 15 December 2015). Sproxton, Interview with Andrew Spicer, Steve Presence and Christopher Meir. Sproxton, Interview with Andrew Spicer, Steve Presence and Christopher Meir. See also Mark Burton, Interview with Andrew Spicer and Steve Presence, 11 November 2015, Bristol, UK. John Hopewell, ‘Legend, Shaun Smash Benchmarks for StudioCanal’, Variety, 14 September 2015. Available at: http://variety.com/2015/film/news/ legend-shaun-smash-benchmarks-as-studiocanal-universal-music-groupexplore-synergies-exclusive-1201592926/ (accessed 15 December 2015). Sproxton, Interview with Andrew Spicer, Steve Presence and Christopher Meir. In calling Lionsgate a ‘mini-major’, I am referring to the fact that the company has achieved vertical integration of production, distribution and retail sales of their products through a television network they own (Starz). ‘Mini’ refers to the fact that this integration has not been achieved on the international level comparable to the Hollywood majors. Sproxton, Interview with Andrew Spicer, Steve Presence and Christopher Meir.

From Europe to Hollywood and Back Again 36 John Hopewell, ‘Aardman, Studiocanal Set Early 2018 Release Dates for Early Man’, Variety, 8 January 2016. Available at: http://variety.com/2016/ film/news/aardman-studiocanal-set-early-2018-release-dates-for-earlyman-1201675068/ (accessed 15 December 2015). 37 Albeit one that may prove to be threatened by Early Man’s relative lack of box office success.

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Section Two

Cultural Contexts

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5

Aardman’s Early Shorts and the British Social Realist Tradition Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib

This chapter deals with the short films made by the studio’s co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton during the early phase of Aardman Animations’ history, spanning from 1978 to 1989. The films they made during this period, which can be thought of as the studio’s ‘pre-Nick Park phase’, can be seen as belonging to an almost disremembered history that is not well known to contemporary viewers familiar with their more recent, popular output such as the Wallace and Gromit films and Shaun the Sheep. During this early phase Aardman produced ten films as part of three series – Animated Conversations (1978), Conversation Pieces (1983) and Lip Synch (1989)1 – which combined stop-motion plasticine animation with documentary soundtracks of overhead conversations or recorded interviews. This approach to animation concluded with Park’s arrival in 1983 and his gradual influence on the creative direction of the studio. Park’s impact is manifest in the last few films of this period, especially his Oscar-winning short Creature Comforts (1989). The films of this period represent a formative and productive phase in Aardman’s history. They also have specific qualities and characteristics that make them very different from both their early TV series such as The Amazing Adventures of Morph (1980/1), and the work they would later become most closely associated with – the Wallace and Gromit series and their stopmotion feature films such as Chicken Run (Nick Park and Peter Lord, 2000) and Shaun the Sheep Movie (Richard Starzak, 2015). These are indeed quite strange films in their own right, often serious in tone with an unprecedented penchant for realistic yet animated renditions of ordinary people, events and actions, emulating the documentary form, with a thematic focus on social issues. This chapter will explore how a predominantly social and at times political undertone informs all of the films produced during this phase, and will argue that, unusually for animation, they form part of a wider cultural discourse of British social realism. The late 1970s and 1980s neo-Liberalist Thatcher era in Britain was one of cultural activity stirred by rage, resentment

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and criticism towards the conservative social and political atmosphere. As Samantha Lay observes, ‘the social and political context proved to be a spur to many working in the arts, and the early to mid-1980s saw general shift to more left-field politics, and if not completely socially committed, at least socially aware’.2 The Aardman films discussed in this chapter present an example of such social comment and commitment. This period of Aardman’s animation production took place within what Van Norris has termed the ‘Second Wave’ of British animation. This wave, which Norris suggests took place between 1979 and 1996, favoured ‘auteurdriven, politicised, independent’3 work and was facilitated by the changing media landscape in the UK in the early  1980s. After its launch in  1982, Channel 4 emerged as a significant supporter, commissioner and broadcaster of individualistic, experimental and marginal voices and forms, including animation. This, along with funding from other leftist, anti-Thatcherite institutions such as the Arts Council, helped to elevate the cultural status of animation from children’s entertainment and comedy cartoons. Clare Kitson notes that the channel was founded on the fundamentally unconventional ideas – espoused by Anthony Smith, the then director of the British Film Institute and Jeremy Isaacs, the future Chief Executive of Channel 4 – about a ‘minority TV’ that was neither aiming for a huge audience, nor subject to the usual compulsory TV scheduling slot lengths. The desire was to cater for tastes and needs not provided for by the other three channels. Isaacs in particular had a revolutionary attitude in his desire to create an alternative form of television with programmes that represented the diversity of Britain’s multicultural society and challenged the cultural and social status quo.4 Kitson, who was Commissioning Editor for Animation at Channel 4 from  1989 to  1999, describes how the very marginality of short and experimental animation as the minority ‘other’ to live-action film, as well as the limitless visual potential of animation made Isaacs insist on having animation as part of the broadcast schedule. In 1981 Isaacs was introduced to David Sproxton at the Cambridge Animation Festival and, after later viewing Conversation Pieces, he commissioned Aardman to make a similar series in plasticine and based on real-life conversations for the launch of Channel 4 the following year.5 Unattuned to the lengthy timescales of stop-motion animation production, Isaacs enthusiastically asked for ten films. Sproxton and Lord, who at this point still comprised the sum total of the Aardman staff, talked this down to five shorts which were broadcast on the channel’s first anniversary in 1983. Andy Darley has placed the Aardman films made in this period, in particular Aardman’s Down and Out (1978: Animated Conversations) and On Probation (1983: Conversation Pieces) as part of a strand of ‘non-fiction

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animation’ within experimental, individualist animation of the  1980s. He suggests that this strand represents and comments on ‘feminist, socialist and anarchist perspectives’ and minority groups of the 1980s and early 1990s.6 For Darley, the legacy of British live-action cinema with keywords such as ‘documentary’, ‘realism’, ‘independence’ and ‘modernism’ is the main influence on the animations in question, rather than any tradition of British cartoon or mainstream animation.7 As such, the films discussed in this chapter may be described as ‘Social Realist Texts’, a term Samantha Lay uses to describe British cinema’s ‘enduring relationship with social realism’.8 Lay, like many others, contends that two key historical moments in British cinema – the 1930s Griersonian Documentary movement and, in the 1950s and  1960s, Free Cinema and the subsequent British New Wave – and the subsequent televisual ‘British Kitchen Sink Drama’ conjoin many practices and preoccupations with social realism. In general, Lay suggests that a social realist text accommodates some or all of these tendencies: 1. Independent, low-budget, directed towards the art house and/or video and television market, and stand in contrast to classical Hollywood realist cinema.9 2. Involve ‘social extension’, a term borrowed from Raymond Williams, meaning that they ‘tend to extend the range of characters and topics to include marginal or previously under-represented groups and issues in society’.10 3. Politically motivated or at least politically conscious.11 4. Reformist, educational or socially purposive in some way: ‘the choice of issues and the prevalence of certain themes is bound up with a mission or a message’.12 5. Show a ‘slice of life’ as it was or is, particularly in the British context.13 6. Favour ‘content over style’, hence the terms Brit-Grit and ‘kitchen sink’ drama, particularly in a British context.14 7. Use an observational style of filmmaking, ‘which tends to produce distance between text and spectator’.15 Although Lay’s broad definition of the social realist text does not encompass animation, the common characteristics of social realist cinema she identifies may be applied to Aardman’s early films. The films were commissioned by the BBC and Channel  4 as low-budget content for non-commercial broadcasting. Their content concerns mainly the representation of marginal characters: ordinary working-class people, the elderly, an ex-convict, amongst others, in either problem contexts or ordinary, everyday situations

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and challenges. A few have explicit or implicit political undertones, and many are ‘slice of life’ films. In terms of style and aesthetics, they mainly adopt the ‘gritty’ tone familiar from the ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of British realist film, albeit in an animated version. In depicting typical events and characters in social contexts through clay puppet animation, and taking their lead from their documentary soundtracks, these Aardman films emphasize their content in a way similar to social realist film and, in most cases, avoid the spectacular effects of both mainstream live-action cinema and animation. As such, I argue that they can be considered as social realist texts that convey a serious statement about the social and political conditions of the time they were made. Furthermore, in common with social realist cinema, these films are strongly connected to the documentary tradition. The look and structure of the films, although varying from film to film, mimic the style of observational or interview documentaries and the films retain a direct link with reality through their documentary soundtracks. In addition to mimicking the appearance of documentaries, the films treat the content of the factual soundtrack in ways to make social comment and address social problems of the real world as documented by the sound. There is, however, variation in the films’ realist, observational style of stop-motion animation. The factual content on which the films are based is by varying degrees represented as it might have happened in the real world or imaginatively altered through fictional and at times comic interpretations of the events being relayed. This varies from the more straightforwardly realist rendering of characters in contexts familiar from British social realism, that lip-synch the recorded conversations in On Probation and Down and Out, to films such as Sales Pitch and Late Edition that also use an observational style of filming, but are more light-hearted in subject and tone. In other films, cartoon conventions begin to encroach on the observational documentary style, for example the fictional scenarios and events that are absent from the soundtrack in films such as Palmy Days and Early Bird. In some other later films, such as War Story, the visual jokes that encroach into the memories of a Second World War veteran push the film’s logic into the cartoon world. Ultimately, in Creature Comforts, visual realism is abandoned and the interviewees are represented as talking animals. As television began to dominate in the  1970s, social realist film found new forms, dimensions and implications, including soap operas and lighthearted documentaries that have more entertainment-based formats and engage with their social content in a less serious or political way.16 This change of direction, and the impact of television, becomes evident in Aardman’s later films of this period that move away from the more serious engagement with social criticism of the earliest films and opt instead for a more comic or

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parodic encounter with everyday situations. These later films engage with the more banal aspects of social life, adopting the documentary techniques seen in televisual formats, such as the interviews and vox pops in War Story and Creature Comforts.

Claymation as observational documentary In Down and Out, the story of an old man asking for a free meal at a Salvation Army Hostel is narrated via realistic clay puppets in an approximately realistic setting and utilizes shot-reverse-shot and other conventions of continuity editing. The ‘observational’ camera stays indifferent to and removed from an everyday life event as it unfolds. The animation avoids any stylistic exaggeration or other codes that might connect it to a cartoon tradition. The documentary sound is evidential of the reality of the situation, and the film as a whole comes across as a genuine attempt to remediate a troublesome dialogue in which a poor man who is singled out for his cunning yet painful attempt to convince the Salvation Army officer of his entitlement to a free meal.17 A similar approach is seen in On Probation, which reconstructs a meeting between a group of ex-offenders and their probation officers. In a similar way to Down and Out, this film observes one man’s discomfort as he makes his case, in vain, for a leave of absence from a group meeting. The animated observational style functions to unfold the event, paying particular attention to the body language of the characters in the scene. Sales Pitch presents a less hostile world, in which an elderly couple chat with a polite door-to-door salesman from whom they have no intention of buying. This film displays an attention to banal detail – some of which is extraneous to the main narrative, such as the nosy neighbour peering down from an upstairs window and the dog snoozing in the shade of a wall – that helps create a nostalgia for the British setting of a bygone era and the gentle social courtesies played out by the characters. These three films have a common theme of public rejection: the homeless man denied his meal ticket; the ex-convict refused leave to visit his brother, the salesman failing to secure a new customer. In this way, the films are all subtle tales of disappointment and humiliation. They also function as ‘social extension’ in the vein of social realism through their documentary-style representation of slices of lives of those that were rarely shown on screen. The tribulations of human existence also underscore Late Edition, in which the overheard conversations of the people working in a magazine office become the backdrop for the imagined travails of a writer trying to finish an article for the next edition. While the film remains a close simulation

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of a live-action observational documentary, Aardman introduce a character and story thread that was not necessarily present in the real-life scenario the film represents. The film also uses establishing and concluding shots and a fictionalized passage of time during which the writer struggles with his piece late into the night. The conversations of the editorial staff discussing the order of the headlines are marginalized in comparison to the story of the writer. Here Aardman begin to challenge the idea of ‘voice’ as the key representative of people and their ideas and suggest that those who speak little or who have no voice or are not heard are just as significant as those who are more vocal. In addition, Late Edition draws attention to a trait present in all of the films: the tension between the aesthetic copying of documentaries in claymation and the soundtracks that use recordings of real people, either in the form of ‘eavesdropped’ conversations or interviews recorded specifically for the film. In Down and Out and On Probation, for example, our attention is drawn to the way these two things, animated imagery and documentary sound, which are of a different order, are added together. The dialectic between the two is not one of immersion or transparent realism. Instead, the films create a reflexive effect that draws attention to the films’ liminal status between documentary and fiction. The films also invite reflexivity in a different way that begins to become apparent in the three examples examined so far, in particular, in Late Edition, where the implication is that the story being told is of equal significance to how it is told in visual terms. As we will see, in other films from this period, the juxtaposition of documentary sound and animated visuals is reinforced by visual embellishments that stray beyond simply reconstructing the scene of the soundtracks’ recording. This reflexivity contributes to the films’ social commentary in a way that both depends and expands upon the conventions of British social realism.

From fictional banality to cartoon vox pops A gradual change from documentary conventions towards more fictional representations based on the documentary audio recordings can be identified in two films from the second series made by Aardman: Conversation Pieces. In Early Bird, the sounds of a morning radio programme are accompanied by surreal images of a claymation DJ waking up in the studio and performing his morning ablutions while on air. The filmmakers’ visual engagement with the soundtrack often has nothing to do with what might have happened in the studio, and is full of surreal events and amusing flights of fancy. The DJ is shown getting up from a built-in bed hidden in the wall of the studio,

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brushing his teeth and preparing a hearty cooked breakfast while he reads the headlines, plays music and engages in the usual banal banter of an early morning local radio show. At the end of his show, the DJ hands the mic over to a parrot as he leaves the studio. As such, the film adopts a fantastical approach and does not directly function as social commentary via social extension in the way that the earlier films did. Palmy Days goes even further in fictionalizing its soundtrack of a group of pensioners chatting over afternoon tea, accompanied by images suggesting that they are shipwrecked on a desert island. The raggedly clad friends are seen nibbling on seaweed and fish in a ramshackle cabin. This bears no relation to the dialogue that is heard on the soundtrack, in which they share their previous, mostly banal, holiday and travel experiences.18 There are many surreal moments or imaginary elements within the story’s apparently seamless narrative, which in formal terms is being ‘observed’ by the camera. In this way, the ‘real’ voices of the chattering group become a means for creative play with imagery in a similar way to Early Bird. Whilst not participating in the overt social commentary of the earlier films, Palmy Days presents a gentle critique of British social niceties, as well as a subtle celebration of British grit and determination, through the absurd scenario of the shipwrecked group adhering to the social conventions of afternoon tea despite their circumstances. Such playful and fictional approaches become more fully realized in Creature Comforts, the short Nick Park made for the Conversation Pieces series, which parodies vox pop interviews, that staple of television broadcasting, through the pairing of animated zoo animals with documentary recordings of real people talking about both their own living conditions and those of animals living in captivity. This turns the film into a comedy in which the reality of the voices heard is juxtaposed with the animated animals to which they are attributed. This is at times poignant, such as when a jaguar cooped in a cinder block enclosure talks longingly about how there is more space to live in Brazil. At other times, the short uses animation for purely comedic ends, such as when a bird twangs the beak of another bird while their friend, voiced by a child, talks in the foreground. Yet, the film still owes much to the traditions of British social realism because it astutely uses the recorded voices in conjunction with the often-playful animation to reveal the attitudes of the British pubic in all their everyday ordinariness. Similar to Palmy Days and Early Bird, Creature Comforts is a light-hearted and at times bittersweet social commentary on British society. Honess Roe (2013) has usefully observed the importance of the relationship between the voices of real people and their animated realizations in animated documentaries. She adopts Steven Connor’s term

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‘vocalic bodies’ to argue that in films such as the Conversation Pieces, these are not animated characters with added voices. Rather, these are anonymous voices given bodies and identities by the artistic observation and rendition of human (or, in the case of Creature Comforts, animal) movements and action.19 As such, in these Aardman films the animation not only remediates the content of the conversation, but also offers an additional subtle observation of human emotions and character through the close attention to detail in animating the face, facial expressions, lip-synching and body language. As such, the figuration of the characters and their gestures transmit something of the reality of the mostly social yet also deeply personal human condition. It may be argued that the realistic animation in these films with all its subtle renditions of facial expression penetrates the surface level of what is represented and connects to a deeper reality, through seeming at the same time both very familiar and close to home and reflexively distinct from reality. This tendency is apparent in all of the films being discussed in this chapter, but is particularly prevalent in the films that juxtapose the documentary soundtracks with animated scenes that riff off the recorded conversations in flights of fancy that are fantastical yet still presented in the style of observational documentary.

Collaged and paratextual narrative In Confessions of a Foyer Girl (1978), Going Equipped and War Story (both  1989) the homogenous aesthetics and seamless narrative of the examples discussed earlier are replaced by a structure that intersperses imagery of a different order into the scenes of clay animation. This extradiegetic imagery, which is diverse across the three films, serves to represent characters’ memories and trains of thought. Although this technique may seem to separate the films from the real-world scenarios recorded on the soundtrack, in fact, similarly to the flights of fancy discussed in the previous section, the juxtaposition of the live-action footage with the animated visuals and documentary sound contributes to the films’ social commentary. Confessions of a Foyer Girl portrays the mundane conversation of two women working in the foyer of a cinema. It is the first Aardman film made with pre-recorded documentary sound, and although the muffled and at times unintelligible voices of the two women clearly suggest a real-life, overheard conversation, the visuals are not represented in a straightforwardly documentary style. Instead, the images of the women are interspersed with archival, live-action material that connects only loosely with the characters’ dialogue and includes examples of spatial metamorphosis. At one point,

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while the main character talks of how exhausted she is from work, the foyer setting behind her is replaced by live-action footage of British industry, familiar from the British documentary and social realist films discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Later, when she talks of wanting to return home quickly after finishing work, the scene cuts to live-action footage of a car screeching at high speed around an urban landscape. The transformation of the main animated setting to other live-action spaces disrupts the ‘seamless’ realism of the narrative and its spatiotemporal continuity as the unity of space is interrupted by the intervention of live-action fragments. These live-action sections are not historical evidence and are not integrated into the ‘main’ body of the film’s clay animation. They are also only tangentially linked to the women’s words and at times reflect only a loose train of thought based on the conversation, such as when a discussion of beauty face masks is followed by a live-action montage of various faces, from a figure wearing a monstrous papier-mâché mask to an image of Mount Rushmore. Furthermore, the opening titles and accompanying theme music, whose bold typography and funky tones are reminiscent of exploitation cinema, create a paradox when set against the non-fictional setting and grainy visuals subsequently presented to the viewer. The tone suggested by the film’s provocative and sensationalist title is in stark opposition to its actual content. The majority of Confessions conforms to the mundane ‘slice of life’ subject matter peculiar to the tradition of British social realism and contrary to the  expectations set up by the title, not many confessions are made. However, the ‘formalist’ approach of mixing clay animation and grainy live-action footage and the contrast between the film’s opening and closing titles and theme music and the film’s content, along with the aesthetic and spatial disorientation of its collage of visual imagery provides a reflection on the realities that are hidden from view and disguised behind the mundane nature of everyday life. The superficiality of an actress represented in a comic, cartoonish way on a poster in the cinema lobby is counterposed by the ‘realness’ of the foyer girls, despite the fact that they are clay models. In terms of visual aesthetic, War Story also mixes different categories of imagery; in this case an interview represented in present time and flashbacks. The old man who is the subject of the film is initially shown against a simple black background, speaking in a strong Bristol accent to an off-screen, unheard interviewer. This short scene fades into an animated reconstruction of the old man’s work at the Bristol Aeroplane Company (BAC) during the War. The gently ironic and exaggerated take on the man’s memories is established from the outset. In an early scene, he is seen ‘sleepwalking’ home, eyes closed and dragging his body in a caricatured, rhythmic way. Over the scene, his voice describes his tired return from a night shift.

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He opens the front door, tramples both the dog waiting expectantly at the door for his master’s return and his gas-mask-wearing wife, who is scrubbing the stairs. The film continues in this pattern with the interview scenes that represent a neutral depiction of this familiar documentary set-up intercut with a whimsically comic account of the past. In this way, the film provides a counterpoint to the usual reverence with which war veterans’ memories are represented – an attitude that is underscored, in a similar way to Confessions of a Foyer Girl, by the contrast between the film’s opening and closing music and credits, which evoke the triumphant, epic style of a typical, bombastic war film. Aardman’s War Story, however, has none of the ingredients of a typical war story and instead of the exciting exploits of a celluloid hero presents the relatively mundane recollections of an ordinary man. This may be read in an ironic way: as the film gently poking fun at the typical aggrandizement that surrounds the Second World War in British culture by placing undue emphasis on the ordinary and unheroic. Yet, at the same time, the film may also be read as an indirect social commentary through highlighting the everyday challenges of living during wartime. The man’s final remarks about taking cover from air raids in the coal cellar comment on the discomfort of the situation, but in an uncomplaining way that demonstrates that most typical traditional British trait of keeping calm and carrying on: ‘… and I tell you, it weren’t no fun and games to be sat on coal … “it’s agony, Ivy,” I said, “agony, Ivy”’. Initially, Going Equipped might seem to be a straightforward claymation animated version of a talking head interview – a man sits at a table and describes his past, intercut with flashbacks to his childhood and later time in prison that are realized in dark, grainy footage. This flashback material is of indeterminate provenance occupying a liminal position between live-action, animation and abstract imagery. Paul Wells has noted that the ‘ordinariness’ with which the ex-convict is portrayed contrasts with the mythologized and sometimes glamorized version of villains in both conventional fictional live-action and animation.20 In this way, the film, and its subject, has much in common with the types of British social realism discussed at the outset of this chapter.21 Yet, it moves beyond directly mimicking the aesthetic of the documentary interview through the use of both the dramatic effects in the interview scene and the visually untethered flashbacks. The interview takes place at night, in a room lit only by the street lamps whose light seeps into the room through an unshaded window. The empty setting bereft of all objects seems neither connected with the man nor a typical interview space; it is large with almost no furniture except for the desk and chair the man is using. Furthermore, he is frequently shown in long shots, distant from the camera and framed by the setting to emphasize the largeness and

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emptiness of the space he occupies. Unlike conventional interviews that use a ‘dead’ background for their setting, the interview space in Going Equipped is a dynamically ‘animated’ place where things happen and information is communicated through spatial interactions. For instance, the visual effects of approaching cars’ headlights and rain on the window, which at times casts shadows on the man’s face, are repeated throughout the film. The intermittent light source from the passing cars suddenly and sporadically floods the halflit interior with dazzling light, washing out the man’s face and other objects in the room, creating dynamic and dramatic shadows and extremes of light and dark. This dramatized, animated space, can be read as representative of the man’s state of mind. Links can be made between the film’s ‘poetic’ use of space and what Andrew Higson (1996) identifies as poetic realism in the British New Wave films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz,  1960) and A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson,  1961). In his essay ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’ (1996), Higson observes how the deployment of urban landscapes and townscapes of the industrial North where these films were set adds to the ‘documentary realism’ of the narrative, while simultaneously producing a romanticized, poetic effect.22 Higson sees a tension between these two factors, which eventually elevates place to ‘a metaphor for the state of the mind of the character’23 He thinks many of these landscape shots in particular and the “ordinariness” or gloominess of these films’ atmosphere in general may also be seen as a pleasure to the eye, as spectacle, creating a series of tensions: ‘between the drabness of the settings (hence the “kitchen sink”) and their “poetic” quality’, between ‘documentary realism’ and ‘romantic atmosphere’, and between social problem and pleasurable spectacle.24 What distinguishes these ‘quality’ British films from Hollywood narrative films, then, is a claim of ‘surface realism’ – a loyal depiction of ‘visual and aural surfaces of “the British way of life”’ that involves a ‘fetishisation of certain iconographic details’.25 Yet, these films are also committed to a realism of social content that Higson calls ‘moral realism’, by which he means an incorporation of and commitment to a ‘particular set of social problems and solutions, a particular social formation’.26 In drawing attention to such poetic realism as an implicitly romanticized and spectacular effect within a type of cinema that prioritizes content over form, Higson divides discourses of poetic realism from documentary realism. Thus, ‘documentary realism’, which was ‘assigned to the more prosaic renderings of surface realism and moral realism’,27 is defined in opposition to poetic realism that ‘in fact transcends ordinariness, which makes the ordinary strange, beautiful – poetic’.28 Aesthetics therefore find a new position

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within the social realist text, which in turn makes way for a more personal vision and reflection by the artist. Hence, such a strand of realism results from an inevitable tension ‘between the sociological and the aesthetic, the moral and the poetic’.29 Higson’s conceptualization of poetic realism provides a productive context in which to consider Aardman’s early short films. While their observational style works as a shortcut to their ‘documentary-ness’,30 the unpretentious, simple and non-glossy settings and characters in everyday situations evoke a poetic realism in the tradition of British social realism as described by Higson. Going Equipped can be seen as implementing such ‘poetic’ features through  its focus on spatial qualities. The miserable, bleak space of the interview scene transcends to a spectacle and a pleasurable visual experience whilst the dark and empty room becomes a metaphor for the man’s loneliness and helpless life. In addition, the flashback memories in the film, both of his messy childhood home and criminal adulthood in prison, convey an atmosphere of claustrophobia, coldness and gloom. This is a world of old objects and rough material, of clutter and mess. The man recalls prison in the same manner as his childhood, revealing a preoccupation with the detail of things, textures, sounds and smells, mainly linked to specific ‘places’ as fetishized, intensified paratextual images of ugliness, murkiness and claustrophobia that extend and make visible the man’s experience. Such poetic realism is evident in other films from this period that as a whole can be said to make the ordinary strange and, in their own way, create a spectacle of the everyday through its reconstruction and reimagination in claymation.

Conclusion In a period extending more than a decade that coincided with a very specific historical era in British history, politics and media, Aardman evolved from an experimental, low-tech and low-budget animation studio to an established institution that would become a national icon of British animation. The films of this formative period are characterized by a preoccupation with realistic style of clay animation, an allusion to social themes and a gradual transformation from serious work that copied the look of live-action observational documentaries to comical parodies of such genres as well as moving from eavesdropped dialogues to controlled interviews. These films can also be seen as studies of British society and identity through their close observations and animated representations of British social interactions and individual mannerism. Thus, the films offer a close simulation of typical British subjects in situations that are sometimes banal and sometimes

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troubled, portrayed through minute detailing of facial and body language performed for a stop-motion camera. In this, it may be suggested, an era of Britishness is ‘recorded’, ‘inscribed’ or indeed documented. Yet, these films also represent a period of trial and error for Aardman. This early phase may be seen as a demonstration of Peter Lord and David Sproxton’s concern with social reality, before they moved to more fictional and conventional formats that nevertheless remain highly British in tone  and style. These artistic endeavours remain as evidence of a period of experimentation in British TV animation, a period in which Aardman inscribed and documented some of the main concerns and passions of British people of the 1980s as well their mannerism, ways of life, language and behaviour. As such, the films in their own way function as a sort of animated ethnographic document of Britain from the late  1970s to the late 1980s. With the gradual move from realism towards reflexive modernism, the films also reveal a gradual shift from live-action influences towards cartoon conventions. Lay defines British social realism of the 1980s as prototypically hybrid: ‘with a disparate range of directors, each with distinctive styles and ways of representing “life as it is,” working in film and television, making documentaries and fiction films, in feature length and short forms’.31 The Aardman films discussed in this chapter are hybrids that rely on formats of live-action filmmaking and subject matters that were deeply rooted in British culture at the time of their making. Further, they use animation as a vehicle to show parallel lines of information with space becoming a paratextual device of reflection in Confessions of a Foyer Girl, War Story and Going Equipped. The silent events depicted in the imagery without equivalent in the soundtrack, the voiceless characters that are given the main role, and the metaphorical mindscapes of the characters mean that these films transcend from the simple copying of live-action social realist films to multifaceted structures that find a style and genre of their own. Hence, besides the nostalgic impulses, and whether serious or comic in tone, they are ‘poetic’ films that reflect upon ordinary people and unimportant events that nevertheless were directly linked to the realities of British life in the 1980s.

Notes 1

Animated Conversations (1978) include Confessions of a Foyer Girl and Down and Out. Conversation Pieces (1983) include On Probation, Sales Pitch, Palmy Days, Early Bird and Late Edition.

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Lip Synch (1989) includes Next, Ident, Going Equipped, Creature Comforts and War Story. Next (dir. Barry Purves) and Ident (dir. Richard Goleszowski, 1990), along with the other short Aardman produced during this period, Babylon (dir. Peter Lord and David Sproxton, 1986), do not combine documentary sound and animation and as such fall outside the scope of this chapter. 2 Samantha Lay, British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 82. 3 Van Norris, British Television Animation 1997–2010: Drawing Comic Tradition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 29. 4 Clare Kitson, British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 20 and 21. 5 Ibid., p. 27. 6 Andrew Darley, ‘History and the British Non-Fiction Animation’, conference paper given at 14th annual Society for Animation Studies Conference, Glendale, California, 26–29 September 2002. 7 Ibid. 8 Lay, British Social Realism, pp. 1–2. 9 Ibid., p. 8. 10 Ibid., p. 9. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 13. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 22. 16 Samantha Lay observes that after the 1960s filmmakers of the Free Cinema and New Wave who continued to make social realist films, including Ken Loach, gradually and inevitably changed direction towards newer formats, making films for television instead, which entailed making film for a different kind of audience. By the 1990s fewer and fewer of these kinds of film were being made for the cinema. See Lay, British Social Realism, p. 101. 17 In fact, this scenario was chosen because it was the only usable material the animators captured when they went to record at the Salvation Army centre that day. See Andy Lane, Creating Creature Comforts (London: Boxtree, 2003), p. 49. 18 The decision to ‘let the design of the animation pull against the dialogue’ came about through Sproxton and Lord’s concern that the conversation ‘lacked any interest at all’. Lane, Creating Creature Comforts, p. 52. 19 Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 78. 20 Paul Wells, ‘The Beautiful Village and the True Village’, in P. Wells (ed.), Art & Animation (London: Academy Group, 1997), p. 110. 21 The subject of Going Equipped recalls the male protagonists of the British New Wave films of the 1950s: petty thieves and rebellious youngsters with

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a poor ­working-class background and a neglected childhood who are depicted as ordinary men whose lives are worth examining. 22 Andrew Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’, Screen 24, no. 4–5 (July 1984), p. 3. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 4. 28 Ibid., p. 5 (emphasis in original) 29 Ibid., 6. 30 Paul Ward, Documentary: The Margins of Reality (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 4. 31 Lay, British Social Realism, p. 89.

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A Darker Heartland: Otherness, Dysfunction and the Uncanny in Aardman’s Short Films Jane Batkin

Home and belonging are familiar themes within Aardman’s animated films, with Peter Lord announcing that Wallace and Gromit remain their ‘heartland’.1 Here, individual identity is embedded in nostalgic national culture to form stories of hope and achievement of the everyman within an Aardman universe with which audiences have become comfortably familiar. However, a number of the studio’s animated short films, with their themes of Otherness, isolation and dysfunction, offer a startlingly dark juxtaposition to the warm, homely worlds of Wallace and Gromit and Creature Comforts (Nick Park, 1989). Early shorts Babylon (Peter Lord and David Sproxton, 1986) and Going Equipped (Peter Lord, 1990) depict apocalyptic fears and recollections of a life of crime. This darker oeuvre was later revisited with Steve Box’s Stage Fright in  1997 and Luis Cook’s award-winning short The Pearce Sisters, a dysfunctional story of fish and men gutting, in  2007. These worlds reveal a nightmarish underbelly to Aardman’s more recognizable heartland. This chapter will explore these less familiar films and their surreal terrains of Otherness and isolation, where Aardman’s familiar nostalgia is contested and themes of difference, dysfunction and violence pervade the narratives. Where the familiar shifts and is forced aside, a space opens up for the Other to replace it. Lifeless objects brought into motion and often jerky movements mean that the ‘evocation of the uncanny’ inherent to animation is seen most typically in stop-motion,2 which lends itself more to the abject than other forms of the medium. This connection between stop-motion and the uncanny has been observed by such scholars as Suzanne Buchan, Robyn Farrell and Nicholas Royle.3 This is hinted at in Nick Park’s films, particularly in The Wrong Trousers (1993) and its somnambulistic scene wherein Wallace sleepwalks to the robbery, his body bending and contorting strangely. However, this film, as

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is typical of Aardman’s mainstream output, offers more comfort than unease. For Steven Allen, Aardman’s features, such as Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), exude a childlike artificiality through the clunky, fingerprinted clay characters, meaning that these films do not evoke the uncanny in the same way as stop-motion films such as Corpse Bride (Tim Burton and MIke Johson, 2005), whose characters are smooth, pale and stylized. Rather, in Aardman films ‘the form reassures’ through its childlike shape and texture, which is ‘suggestive of the fantasy of a child’s imaginings’ and, as such, evokes a sense of familiarity and homeliness.4 As a result, the concept of the uncanny has not been widely linked to Aardman’s films. Home – the sense of belonging – and its relationship with the uncanny, however, are thrown into a different relief in the short films discussed in this chapter. Aardman, then, is a studio of contrasts, offering juxtapositions within its canon of work that includes both the familiar, homespun world of Wallace and Gromit and also a sinister, Other world in which any sense of cosy belonging is replaced with isolation and dysfunctionality. Character development within these worlds of difference is stagnated and repressed; protagonists are unable to evolve, adapt or escape. The sense of home, place and belonging that are typical identifying characteristics of Aardman’s work are inverted in the studio’s experimental short films discussed in this chapter  – Self is suppressed, and Otherness emerges with the uncanny to create a distinctly darker heartland.

Apocalypse and the ‘Other’ Van Norris discusses the widening scope of television in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, with the emergence of non-terrestrial channels and the subsequent shifting emphasis from viewers to consumers. This era demanded a reorganization of Channel 4 and the BBC and their programming remit in order to compete in this new media landscape. He claims that the animations that were the result of this change were products of this newly fragmented and more varied viewing network.5 Clare Kitson, who was Channel  4’s Commissioning Editor for Animation from the late  1980s to  1990s, maintains that the films produced by Aardman and other animators during this time helped to cement animation as part of the channel’s ‘actual identity’.6 Aardman’s Conversation Pieces (1983) and the Sweet Disaster series (1986), which featured Lord and Sproxton’s short Babylon, pushed at boundaries between the familiar and the unknown, producing arresting and challenging content that depicted gritty encounters in dystopian settings. Much of the animation broadcast by Channel 4 during this period reflected its ethos of

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providing innovative and controversial content, and the channel was eager to champion experimental animations that would have been otherwise marginalized for their bold, often-unsettling themes.7 Conversation Pieces, a series of five short films, was commissioned by Paul Madden, Kitson’s predecessor at Channel  4, and aired in  1983, scheduled ambitiously in a prime-time week-long run against the BBC’s Nine O’clock News. The films, vignettes of ordinary life based on recorded conversations in a similar vein to the two Animated Conversations films made for BBC Bristol in 1977 and 1978, explored aspects of British identity and helped to establish Aardman as a commercial studio. Subsequently, Channel  4 broadcast the darker, more haunting Sweet Disaster series in 1986.8 Aardman’s contribution to the series, Babylon, represents what Irene Kotlarz calls ‘a thoughtful, darker side of Aardman’s sensibility’.9 Although, we can argue that this darker side had already been present as an undercurrent in the earlier Conversation films. The Sweet Disaster films reflect the period of global unrest in the 1980s in which they were made; political anxiety about Reagan’s election to the White House, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and disagreements about the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty led to what many termed a new Cold War and the ‘reappearance of the haunting spectre of a nuclear holocaust’.10 Philip Sabin argues that Britain was instrumental in creating this international anxiety about nuclear war, with its angst about a potential Third World War seen as equalling that of the West as a whole.11 Babylon reflects this political climate, and all of the Sweet Disaster films represent various animated apocalyptic imaginaries. Babylon is experimental in its vision, and the soundtrack’s acoustic whispers of ‘peace and profit’ echo through a dark, apocalyptic world. The Doomsday clock is pointing to 11.52 pm, thirty years in the future. The film opens to haunting choral music before depicting a nuclear explosion; the setting is a destroyed metropolis, awash with green skies and dust. A man in a dinner jacket smokes a cigarette on a rooftop beneath circling vultures. Inside, a formal, political gathering takes place, the buzz of conversation interspersed with images of a map depicting a world at war. The man on the rooftop finishes his cigarette, picks up a white cloth and silver tray and returns inside, where a bullish guest assaults another and growls animalistically at him whilst drinks are served to the diners. The bully grows in stature as a speech commences, swelling with each word, until suddenly he explodes, gushing blood and bullets over the dinner guests. The waiter, unperturbed, returns to the roof and its apocalyptic skies, puts down his white cloth and watches the vultures soaring overhead. Babylon reflects the xenophobic and paranoid anxieties of nuclear war in Britain through its war room speech and the dual aggression and fear of its dinner guests. The film is

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also an indictment of the class system, depicting the privileged as destructive decision makers, whilst the disconnected waiter simply walks away, the sole survivor. The film’s narrative depicts the individual through its characterization of the bully and the bullied. Whilst tormentor and victim would become a common device in Aardman’s later work, such as Preston and Shaun in A Close Shave (1995), in their experimental short films there is a palpable sense of Otherness that sets this work apart from the more recognizable canon of films. This sense comes through the construction of both character and place. The bully in Babylon is positioned as Other, in part through his animalistic behaviour – he appears to be human, but is not; he growls as he bullies and his ‘monster’ status is elevated as he sits among the diners, instructing his victim beside him, until he bursts open in Švankmajer-esque style and devastates the environment and its occupants. For Richard Kearney, the no man’s land of Otherness is a place that allows the monster to flourish.12 The strange world of Babylon can be thought of as such a place. Due to its narrative and its material and aesthetic realization, Babylon lacks the reassurance found in Wallace and Gromit films such as The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Instead, the violent nature and Otherness of its bully and the roughly hewn figures of its war room (bearing little resemblance to the clay characters and sets of Park’s work) create a disturbing vision and the film lingers in the mind long after it has ended. Its surreal world and damned characters suggest Otherness and the uncanny and perpetuate a haunting darkness and a dystopian nightmare with no suggestion of resolution. There is no home here. In the world of Wallace and Gromit, family and the familiar are frequently threatened by the outsider, but home remains intact at all times. In Babylon, however, home, place and belonging have been erased, and the Other resides within this alien setting. The familiar becoming unfamiliar is key to understanding the uncanny  and its relationship to the home, and Nicholas Royle states that the uncanny may imply ‘the revelation of something unhomely at the heart of hearth and home’.13 For Freud, the uncanny was evoked through the familiar (heimlich) becoming unfamiliar (unheimlich) and the home itself represents both a ‘dream and dread’ as a trusted place that can hide the uncanny in its shadows.14 However, in the Aardman films such as Babylon, home and belonging are either entirely absent or replaced with empty, shadowy spaces that offer no comfort. These films offer a contrast to the ideas of home and belonging that are established so strongly in their more familiar output  and also align with Royle’s notion of the uncanny as homeliness being uprooted.15 Mike Featherstone suggests, ‘to know who you are means to know where you are’.16 As home and belonging are crucial signifiers of

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self and identity, when they are removed and are absent, as in Babylon, Otherness  and the uncanny are able to creep into the void that opens up. In the absence of home and comfort, these short films construct unfamiliar spaces that become Aardman’s alternative heartland. Place is contested and identity unhinged as the characters within these worlds remain lost and adrift, with no tangible ‘familiar’ to cling to.

Crime and dysfunctionality In  1989, Clare Kitson succeeded Madden as Commissioning Editor for animation at Channel 4 and launched the Four-Mations strand to showcase both British and international animation. The Aardman series of five short films titled Lip Synch (1989) was part of this strand and included three films that, in a similar vein to the earlier Animated Conversations and Conversations Pieces, animated recorded conversations. Going Equipped is the darkest film of the Lip Synch series. It features an ex-convict who sits playing cards as he reminisces about a childhood of neglect and poverty and how it led him to a life of crime. He sits in a dimly lit room as rain trickles down its window, its pattern creating a marbling effect on the walls. Cutaways reveal a disquieting past, exteriors of derelict spaces and interiors displaying chaos rather than comfort, as he admits that he was stealing at the age of seven: ‘it’s called creeping … you had to creep out there, take what you could’. He calls himself ‘a little thief ’ and a smile flits across his face at the memory of the childhood status he achieved because of this. The streaks of rain from the window reflect across his features as he talks, creating artificial tears that run down his face. As he recalls further crimes, the images of his past change to the interior of a prison, with its steel dinner trays and cold hard toilet seats, the rain becomes a tap dripping into a sink. He recalls prison life and the smell and sound of his fellow inmates: ‘You’ve got to listen to them piss’. Going Equipped is a quiet, thoughtful film that focuses on the dysfunctionality of its protagonist. Whilst it may be viewed as a nostalgic piece of regret and loss, through the character’s tone of voice and story, it is also an indictment of British society and its criminal justice system, revealed through the debilitating effect of prison on the petty thief. He is trapped within the system and cannot escape it. The film was made at the end of the 1980s, a decade of power, opportunity and greed. The film’s focus on the emptiness of spaces, the childhood home, the back yard, the shop and prison itself with an undertow of violence reflects the idea of the 1980s as a paradox.17 Graham Stewart claims that while Thatcher’s Britain was looked

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on with admiration by some, others were horrified by the social divisions that became pronounced in this era. In an interview with Douglas Keay for Woman’s Own in 1987, Thatcher herself claimed that achieving a good living, with a good income, was the ‘driving engine’ of life and that there was ‘no such thing as society’.18 The crime rate rose during this era, in particular burglary, which peaked at the end of the 1980s in response to poor economic conditions.19 Going Equipped evokes stealing as an act that remains invisible – hinted at rather than revealed visually – as well as the consequences of the thief ’s actions. The theme of loss is prevalent through the empty spaces, and amplified through the use of documentary audio material of an interview with the ex-convict. The quietness of the film implies stagnation of the thief ’s mindset; he is trapped by the social and criminal justice system that created him, and this evokes empathy for his situation; where there is silence there should be noise, and where there is emptiness there should be people. In the political climate of its time, Going Equipped is poignant in its revelations of Britain’s social divisions. Aardman depicts this in part through the thief ’s own dysfunctionality. The ex-convict is regretful about his past and uncertain about his future; he exists in a vacuum of immobility, unable to escape his situation, as he awaits the next card life will deal him. Rather than portraying him as a character who can move forward, Peter Lord dwells on the past and present as inhibitors to freedom. Going Equipped remains a tale of the dysfunctional: the ex-convict is trapped, both emotionally and physically, within a 1980s landscape of a divided Britain. He is a victim of, and has no way out of, the system. Place and lack of home again become significant in this film and echo Babylon’s visions of a no man’s land where monsters roam. Memories are inhibited and the emptiness of remembering creates a void in which flashbacks are abstract and the space of the home remains elusive. This ambiguity of place begins to lean towards the uncanny: home here is envisaged as barren and devoid of lively memories. If the ex-convict does not know where he is, he does not know who he is. His own memories of his childhood and its ‘creeping’ are stifled, revealed through the scenes of the empty spaces of his childhood haunts and of prison life and inmates, rather than his own physical presence within these spaces. These voids in Going Equipped mean that the character’s identity is compromised, just as the absence of home in Babylon becomes a negator of identity. As Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson state: ‘home … is where one best knows oneself ’;20 without home, or familiarity of place, these worlds become empty and stagnant, and they allow difference and isolation to creep in. The uncanny is created through

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Aardman’s construction of the unfamiliarity of ‘home’ and the Other; home is uprooted and characters are left to roam in a no man’s land.

Monsters and victims The dark themes of the Conversation Pieces and Lip Synch series were less prevalent in Nick Park’s films, which revealed a more romanticized world steeped in nostalgic, cultural references and parody (of Hammer Horror and Hitchcock thrillers, for example). Aardman, at this point, was quite firmly ensconced in its homely heartland, focusing largely on a lovable slapstick duo in films such as The Wrong Trousers(1993) and A Close Shave(1995), and familiarity and connection became the core of the studio’s outputs, with home and belonging at the heart. Stage Fright, in 1997, however, signified a return to the darkness of Babylon in Aardman’s short film catalogue. This was a BAFTA-award-winning piece created by Steve Box, who animated Feathers McGraw in The Wrong Trousers. Box also worked closely with Nick Park on A Close Shave and admits that Park’s style can be partly seen in Stage Fright in the characters’ physical appearances, but stresses that there is a difference.21 Stage Fright explores the transition between the Music Hall and silent film; Box recognized an opportunity here to platform a ‘weird world, somehow removed from ours’ and originally the film was intended to recreate the era of silent films in animation.22 Stage Fright was commissioned by Aardman’s advocate, Channel 4, and it is an unsettlingly bleak vision of a trapped, dysfunctional character and the threat of violence he endures within a changing world. Tiny is a music hall performer and dog trainer. He hides inside a wicker basket, where he finds solace, at the side of the stage, and he emerges in fear. The film reveals Tiny’s inability to either move forward or survive in the present. He admits that he is afraid of the crowd, ‘they hate me’, whilst Arnold Hughes, the star of his own projected film show, is Tiny’s bully and clearly represents the future. He is unafraid of change and is determined to survive at all costs, which includes victimizing others. Arnold intimidates and inhibits Tiny, to the point that Tiny cannot function. In contrast to the humorous foes of Aardman’s mainstream work, such as Victor, Wallace’s love rival in Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Arnold is far more ominous. He is a bulky, shadowy figure who is intent on physically harming his co-worker and ultimately attempts to murder him. As with Babylon, the bully here is represented as Other through his uncanny appearance. Arnold is first seen as an enormous figure, forcing Tiny to fall from the stage, from

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where he stands grimacing at him, revealing vampirish teeth in a wide mouth. He sports a garish, blood red bow tie and his hair, too, is a shock of red and the film’s score accentuates Arnold’s dangerous presence, its jerky strings reminiscent of the work of Jan Švankmajer or The Brothers Quay. Box leans towards the gothic in the representation of the villain and Arnold is clearly positioned as monster. Richard Kearney tells us that monsters defy ‘our accredited norms of identification’ – they are the opposite of the familiar, and therefore contest identity and the self.23 Arnold as monster (and Other) is effectively depicted in Stage Fright, but perhaps even more interesting than this representation is the Otherness and dysfunctionality of Tiny himself. Difference is viewed as a marker between those that we view as similar to us and those that we place elsewhere; Kearney discusses the idea that because we are unable (or unwilling) to see ourselves as ‘other’, we ‘simplify our existence by scapegoating others’.24 The character of Tiny provides an interesting study with regard to difference and how it is perceived (particularly in an Aardman film, wherein the protagonists are typically identifiable and familiar). From his emergence from the wicker basket, we understand at once that Tiny is different. Whilst his reactions of debilitating fear clearly present him as victim, his physical appearance and quirky behaviour denote also that he is Other. He giggles maniacally to himself and comments ‘it is safer in the basket’. Tiny is aligned more with the little dogs that live with him in this confined space than the humans outside it. His existence is debilitating and he achieves empathy through his positioning as Arnold’s victim rather than as a relatable and familiar protagonist. However, Kearney argues that figures that represent Otherness take up residence in a sort of frontier zone ‘where reason falters and fantasies flourish’.25 Whilst we may not understand him, Tiny’s behaviour and actions remain fascinating, and he challenges our decision of where to place him. He is stuck in a time out of time, unable to move forward into motion pictures but also unable to exist as a music hall performer; Tiny is a dysfunctional character who is crippled emotionally and physically by ideas of change and by the psychotic bully who physically represents such change and who appears to want to erase him. Place and stability are contested in Stage Fright. At the end of the film, the theatre begins to collapse and Tiny and his female companion Daphne flee, echoing the waiter’s retreat from the crumbling ruins in Babylon. The rubble of ruined worlds represents uncertainty and the unfamiliar, achieved through the destruction of even the most dysfunctional of homes. Home is refuted; in Babylon it is destroyed, in Going Equipped it has been eradicated, and in Stage Fright it is wholly contested. Featherstone’s view that to know oneself is to know where one is implies the interdependency of self and place in identity politics. Home and belonging shape our ideas of ourselves and

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what is important to us, and these markers of identity define the body of Aardman’s mainstream work; the common assumption is that their stopmotion films, in platforming home as comforting and identifiable, refute the uncanny. However, crucially, home is missing in the darker worlds of the animated short films discussed here, leading to a space for the uncanny to exist.

Sisters and corpses Luis Cook describes The Pearce Sisters (2007) as ‘an amusingly bleakhearted tale of two weather-lashed spinsters’.26 Originally, Cook wanted to make The Pearce Sisters using live-action ugly men dressed as women,27 but was dissuaded by Peter Lord and opted instead for a mixture of Computer Generated and 2D. The short film went on to win the coveted Jury’s Special Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and the Grand Prix prize at the Zagreb Animation Festival. In its creation, Aardman’s road forked once more away from the comfortable and familiar and into the territory of isolation, difference and the dysfunctional, a territory that represents its Other heartland. The setting for the film is an island off the Scottish coast, an assumption we gather from the sisters’ accents. They live in a hut at the water’s edge and regularly take excursions in their rowing boat to hunt for fish. The sea is wild beneath a pallid, nondescript sky, and the gulls are carved grey arrows into the background. The sisters’ clothing is muddy green, the same hue as the ocean. Their hair is oily black, parted in the middle, and their pallor is a reflection of the rain-soaked beach they live on; they are doppelgangers of each other, one a tiny mirror image of her large, masculinized sister. From an aerial shot of the boat, sister one resembles a father, sister two, a child. While portly sister one rows, the other smashes each fish with a mallet, while the gulls screech overhead. At the shoreline, sister one works in the wind and rain to chop and gut the bloody fish, flinging unwanted innards across the beach and later into the blank canvas of sky for the gulls, while the wind and sea rush past. When she spies a shipwrecked man in the ocean, she calls for sister two in a muffled, deep voice, and they go out once more to investigate. When the drowning man resurfaces, his eyes milky white and his body lifeless, they row him to shore. The film deconstructs gender stereotypes by blurring the distinctions between male and female; the shipwrecked man exposes the same stubbly body hair as sister one. They carry the man home and shave and dress his upper half in women’s clothing, smiling for the first time at their efforts.

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When the man awakens, he glances down at his exposed genitals, as sister two asks, ‘would you like some tea?’ and his scream is eerily echoed by her own. When he rips off the dress, the sister utters an animalistic growl and chases him with her mallet as he runs back to the sea. The sisters do not conform to female gender stereotypes aside from their ‘home-making’; they are savage survivors in a barren landscape. When the man is later washed up again, dead, his hairy buttocks raised and the hair under his arms bristling in the wind, it is the tiny, childlike sister two who wants to keep him, the purpose of which is unclear. She skips gleefully across the beach as her bulky sibling carries him once more, but this time to gut him as she did the fish. This act reflects the dissecting of gender stereotypes in the film; masculinity holds little value in the world of the Pearce sisters. They pierce fish skin and man skin with the same practicality, and hang both up to dry. Sister two then hosts a traditionally female tea party but with a twist – it is for a table full of dressed male corpses. The tea is not real, but the sister’s delight at her game is. The Pearce Sisters connects once again to the themes of isolation, difference and dysfunction. Its gender deconstructions are interesting: the interloper’s own sexuality is something to be undone, like a knot in a ball of wool. Men, in their natural state, do not belong on this island of violent women. The body itself can be conceived as a site of identity;28 it can be seen as powerful, flexible, strong or weak and as something that points to the inner Self. In animation, gender stereotypes are more easily deconstructed because of the malleability and limitlessness of the body.29 It is not a material body, but an idea of a representation, brought to life by the animator’s hand. The desexualization of the Pearce sisters is particularly interesting in terms of how identity is challenged. Rather than being fixed and conforming to familiar gender stereotypes, the sisters offer contradictions to their own animated physical bodies: sister one is stoic, strong and solid, yet she does the bidding of the willowy, smaller sister two. Sister two is childlike and gleeful, but also monstrous and unstable. Identities shift, animated bodies hide surprising traits, and, in the space that opens up between these shifts and revelations, Otherness creeps in. Sister two’s unbalanced mindset, revealed through her joy at tea parties with corpses, exists in perfect happiness within a horror setting that she does not connect with. Sister one, conversely, spends a considerable portion of the narrative staring out at the ocean with what appears to be regret or resignation. Her days are bound by routines and repetition, as well as fishing, rowing and gutting, she repeats the cycle of catching the fly in the empty teacup, peeking at it through her hands, and letting it go. This is her only visible act of penitence for the deaths and dismemberments that enable sister two’s tea parties. Sister seeks solitude at the shore’s edge, her present merges with the recent past and represents the dream and dread of home, and we wonder if she longs to

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escape the island and leave her sibling behind. The Otherness of island life, amidst male corpses and daily fish gutting, becomes the familiar for the Pearce sisters. Stuart Hall posits that ‘to have an identity is to know what one is not’; it is the opposite of difference.30 Clearly, the Pearce Sisters have a strong sense of identity, but it is one that suggests wholeness only when they are together and fragmentation when they are apart. One sister is a shadow of the other, a doppelganger. Sister two is the Other, the shadowy figure who watches, yet paradoxically the ‘innocent’ child; she skips to the gutting station, and smiles as she gazes up at the hanging corpse in the smoke house. Fish and man have little distinction for her. When she hosts her tea party, she utters little pleasured cooing noises as she role plays with her corpses. Society becomes warped and reimagined by sister two; in the absence of others, she creates her own version of a gathering and, in doing so, accentuates her own difference, dysfunctionality and sense of isolation. The two characters, together, represent stability in terms of their routines, as they work in this harsh environment, yet their familiar is our unfamiliar. The dark themes of the story, the violence, the washed-up body and the dressed corpses that are revealed at its denouement, create a starkly fascinating film of difference and dysfunction. Home is present in this short film and place is fixed – distinctions that set it apart from the other films discussed in this chapter. The setting is visual and visceral, a breathtaking world that invites us in to sample this environment. From the gulls etched into the watery sky to the sister’s windswept, weathered features, The Pearce Sisters establishes home, place and identity very clearly and carefully. Rather than interpreting place as an empty or fracturing space, it is solid and fixed. In doing so, however, director Luis Cook has conjured up a startlingly nightmarish world of dysfunction and violence. Home for the sisters is an appalling setting of a barren, dead landscape, within which they appear to thrive. It is the dream and dread of home that Freud alluded to, where the familiar and unfamiliar meet and contest the idea of home as safe. Trapped in this surreal hinterland, human behaviour has unravelled to the point that dysfunction is normality and violence is routine. Home is dream for the sisters (they have established their routines within this hinterland) and dread for their interloper and their audience. The familiar for the sisters is stark difference for us, and this world and its inhabitants slide seamlessly into Otherness and the uncanny.

A darker heartland Peter Lord announced, in the same year as the release of The Pearce Sisters, that Creature Comforts and Wallace and Gromit were Aardman’s ‘heartland’,

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but that boundaries always needed to be pushed.31 Aardman’s identity, we have seen, is complicated by the short films discussed in this chapter. They depict fear of apocalypse and regret at a life of crime, insanity in a darkened theatre and dysfunctional island life among corpses. Identity, here, is in crisis and the familiar is contested and, at the same time, what we assume we know about Aardman’s body of work is called into question. The studio’s stopmotion films largely embrace home and belonging and are not, therefore, viewed as uncanny, despite the form itself typically leaning towards this (e.g. the work of Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay). Aardman’s identity is situated within the familiar: of characters and place. However, as the familiar shifts to one side in the short films discussed above, it makes way for themes of Otherness to move into this space and flourish. Home lives are either absent or dysfunctional and selves are either intimidated by others or wholly displaced and replaced by creatures of difference. Home and place become dystopian worlds that offer no comfort or sense of belonging; these harsh and volatile environments simply offer backdrops to the nightmares that the characters endure. The lack of fixedness of home and place reflects the identity crises suffered by the protagonists, or ‘victims’ of these short films. Emptiness and solitude of setting and self create visions of apocalypse, insanity and trauma, and Otherness takes up residence in the disturbing spaces of Babylon, Going Equipped and Stage Fright. Within The Pearce Sisters, place is fixed and familiar for the protagonists, yet unfamiliar and uncanny for their audience, echoing the paradoxical notion of dream  and dread of home. Within the films discussed in this chapter, the monstrous and the victimized exist in a nightmarish vacuum of dystopian worlds that offer no resolution – this is Aardman’s darker heartland.

Notes 1 2 3

4

Emma Hall, ‘A British Empire of Animation’, Advertising Age 78, no. 34 (27 August 2007). Steven Allen, ‘Bringing the Dead to Life: Animation and the Horrific’, At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries 61 (2010), p. 87. Suzanne Buchan, Pervasive Animation (New York: Routledge, 2013); Robyn Ferrell, ‘Life-Threatening Life: Angela Carter and the Uncanny’, in A. Cholodenko (ed.), The ­Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 1991), pp. 131–44; Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) Steven Allen, ‘Bringing the Dead to Life: Animation and the Horrific’, At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries 61(2010), p. 92.

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Van Norris, British Television Animation 1997–2010: Drawing Comic Tradition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 5. 6 Clare Kitson, British Animation: The Channel Four Factor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 38–43. 7 Michael Brooke, ‘Channel 4 and Animation – How Britain’s Fourth Channel Became an Animation Powerhouse’, Screenonline. Available at: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1282041/index.html (accessed 22 December 2017). 8 The Sweet Disaster series included Dreamless Sleep (David Anderson), Babylon (Peter Lord and David Sproxton), Paradise Regained (Andrew Franks), Conversations by a Californian Swimming Pool (Andrew Franks) and Death of a Speechwriter (David Hopkins). 9 Animation World Network, 1 September 1999. Available at: http://www. awn.com/animationworld/history-channel-4-and-future-british-animation (accessed 20 November 2017). 10 Lawrence Freedman, ‘Foreword’, in P. Sabin (ed.), The Third World War Scare in Britain: A Critical Analysis (London: Macmillan Press, 1986), p. xi. 11 Philip Sabin, The Third World War Scare in Britain: A Critical Analysis (London: Macmillan Press, 1986), p. 3. 12 Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters – Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 3. 13 Royle, The Uncanny, p. 1. 14 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 251. 15 Royle, The Uncanny, p. 1. 16 Mike Featherstone, ‘Localism, Globalism and Cultural Identity’, in L.M. Alcoff and E. Mendieta (eds), Identities: Race, Class, Gender and Nationality (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 342–59. 17 Graham Stewart, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013). 18 Douglas Keay, ‘Interview for Woman’s Own’, 23 September 1997. Available at: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 (accessed 14 April 2018). 19 Ian Cobain, ‘Tough case to Crack: The Mystery of Britain’s Falling Crime Rate’, The Guardian, 31 August 2014. Available at: https://www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2014/aug/31/tough-case-mystery-britains-falling-crime-rate (accessed 14 April 2018). 20 Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson, Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement (Oxford: Berg, 1998), p. 9. 21 Ruth and Roger Whiter, ‘Aardman’s Steve Box Talks’, Animation World Network, 25 July 2002. Available at: https://www.awn.com/animationworld/ aardmans-steve-box-talks (accessed 21 April 2018). 22 Ibid. 23 Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, p. 4. 5

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24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 3. 26 Ramin Zahed, ‘Luis Cook: Creator, “The Pearce Sisters,” Aardman Animations’, Animation 21, no. 6 (June 2007), p. 32. 27 Andrew S Allen, ‘Interview with Luis Cook (The Pearce Sisters)’, Short of the Week, 3 March 2008. ­Available at: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/ news/qa-with-luis-cook/ (accessed 21 April 2018). 28 Karen Woodward, Questioning Identity: Gender, Class and Nation (London: Routledge, 2000). 29 Jane Batkin, Identity in Animation: A Journey into Self, Difference, Culture and the Body (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 93. 30 Stuart Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the “Other”’, in S. Hall (ed.), Representations, Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage/Open University, 1997), p. 226. 31 E. Hall, ‘A British Empire’, p. 9.

7

Washed Up: Animating Literary Corpses in The Pearce Sisters Nicholas Andrew Miller

‘I wanted to make a film that felt as if it had been washed up by the sea.’1

Literary Aardman Within the Aardman canon, a lovingly detailed stop-motion universe most prominently populated by inventive dogs, blinking sheep and charmingly daft, cheese-craving bachelors, it is tempting to locate Luis Cook’s short film The Pearce Sisters (2007) as an intriguing oddity. Most conspicuously, the film is not a work of stop-motion. Cook dispenses with the plasticine figures for which the name Aardman has become virtually synonymous, instead adopting an innovative production process based on the compositing of  2D drawings and  3D computer-generated images. In its overall design, the film presents a grim narrative landscape wrought in seasick colours.2 The heroines, Lol and Edna Pearce, are grotesque beauties with misshapen limbs and twisted, grinning faces; their decrepit seaside home clings to the rain-  and wind-lashed beach like a barnacle to an upturned rowboat. To look at, the film is fearsome and alien, attended in every frame by what Cook has called a ‘beautifully ugly’ aesthetic, and projecting the can’t-lookaway fascination of illicit desires long steeped in the suggestive gloom of the unconscious. The tone is comic, but bleakly so, and Cook’s narrative of spinster sisters surviving at the edge of the world amid perpetually driving rain and gusting wind, hauling herring and drowned men from the sea and gutting both, has the nightmare pathos of a surreal parable. Set against the wry wit, bright colours and cheerful disposition characteristic of certain parts of the Aardman catalogue, The Pearce Sisters might seem initially difficult to place, particularly as the company has grown increasingly associated with large-scale commercial box office hits and spin-off productions, not to mention plush toy merchandise and even

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theme park rides. In this context, Cook’s account of the film’s origins is worth noting. In Cook’s telling, The Pearce Sisters came into being not as a strange and unaccountable non sequitur in the Aardman lineage, but as part of a deliberate plan to return to a foundational aspect of the studio’s identity. Attending the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in the summer of 2005, a group of Aardman directors realized that the studio had not made a short film in over ten years. ‘Historically the studio had been built on short film’, Cook commented. ‘It seemed crazy that so much time had slipped by without making one’. Seeking to address this gap, the studio’s founders, Peter Lord and David Sproxton, announced an in-house competition. Any employee could pitch an idea, and the project selected would receive full funding and production support from the studio. ‘The motivation was simply to make a short film, nothing more strategic than that’, adds Cook. ‘They just wanted a great short film to represent them at festivals.’3 This history locates The Pearce Sisters as no aberration, but, on the contrary, the direct descendent of the formal experimentation and narrative creativity typical of the early Aardman shorts.4 From a production standpoint, it is true that Cook’s innovative choices regarding medium and process mark a divergence from the studio’s prominent identification with stop-motion. However, Aardman has by no means been devoted exclusively to clay and plasticine. From the beginning, the studio developed projects using cut-outs, object animation and pixilation, indeed, the studio’s founding character and namesake, the idiot superhero, ‘Aardman’, developed from Lord and Sproxton’s early experiments with drawn animation.5 As for the design of The Pearce Sisters, Cook has cited among his particular influences Aardman shorts like Ident (Goleszowski,  1989), War Story (Lord,  1989), Going Equipped (Lord, 1989), Creature Comforts (Park, 1989), Adam (Lord, 1991) and Loves Me, Loves Me Not (Newitt, 1992). Among this company, the film’s originality seems less a reflection of Cook’s putative departures from typical Aardman aesthetic and narrative traditions than, on the contrary, his desire to revisit those traditions via alternate routes. The conspicuous stylistic and tonal singularities of The Pearce Sisters seem, thus, on examination, a function of its lineage within a perhaps less commercially visible but no less vigorous tradition of technical innovation and narrative craft at Aardman. At the same time, Cook’s account of the film’s origins points to a different, important and generally overlooked circumstance that does in fact distinguish the film not only from the popular features for which Aardman is best known, but also from the shorts and, indeed, the advertising spots, music videos and other diverse productions that make up the studio’s output. When Sproxton and Lord announced their plans for the in-house short film competition in June 2005, Cook had

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just finished reading Mick Jackson’s Ten Sorry Tales, a collection of often fantastical, occasionally macabre, short stories that had been published earlier that year. He had found himself particularly drawn to the lead story in the volume, an account of two sisters who live together on a remote beach and smoke fish, and who one day encounter a drowning sailor and decide to rescue him: ‘It was minimal, miserable, bleak, and weather lashed’, said Cook. ‘It was a story that I thought I could bring to the screen.’ In selecting Cook’s proposal as the winner of the competition, it was arguably Lord and Sproxton who ensured the film’s status as an anomaly, at least in a narrow, technical sense. The lone exception within a formidable record of successful projects built on original concepts and scripts, The Pearce Sisters is, notably, the only film in Aardman’s over forty-year history to base its narrative on a literary source text. In a general way, Cook’s project thus serves to expand the context in which Aardman productions are commonly read and considered. The singularity of The Pearce Sisters’ origins in literary fiction invites consideration of the studio’s reciprocal influence on and by literature, as well as other arts and cultural discourses more broadly. Recent animation scholarship has mined this vein in a variety of contexts with salutary results, effectively challenging a century’s worth of cultural marginalization by revealing animation’s reach and impact as an expressive form that is, to borrow Suzanne Buchan’s term, ‘pervasive’.6 Within the context of this discussion, however, The Pearce Sisters opens a particular and compelling vantage on animation’s interaction with literary expression. Cook’s primary focus on the sensory bleakness and tonal misery of Jackson’s text, as opposed simply to its narrative arc, places a distinct emphasis on animation’s visual materiality in its interactions with literary language. His confidence in having found a story he ‘could bring to the screen’ is less a reflection of the narrative’s suitability for adaptation than of his interest in exploring particular processes and expressive materials that might be brought into productive visual dialogue with sensory qualities already present in the text. This emphasis on the material as the pivotal point of connection between visual and verbal expressive forms suggests a need to consider both Cook’s and Jackson’s projects in the context of their broader engagements with literary history. Ten Sorry Tales is a work that in tone and narrative content aligns with examples of imaginative fiction in British literature associated with the fantastic, the nonsensical and the absurd, a tradition represented by the likes of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Roald Dahl and many others7. Central to this tradition is an emphasis on the confluence of the real and the fantastical, as, for instance, in the figure of Carroll’s grinning Cheshire cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Dahl’s fruit-based airship in James and the

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Giant Peach. The rendering of imaginary entities, circumstances and events in material form is a strikingly accurate and efficient definition of Aardman’s approach to stop-motion, not to say animation in general, and in that regard the studio’s record of realizing previously undreamt visions in plasticine, clay, drawings, photographs, physical objects, paint and other materials, offers a strong visual corollary to Jackson’s verbal creation of fictional worlds. A common interest in approaching the marvellous as somehow elemental, in giving material expression to the imaginary, thus affirms a certain kinship between Jackson and the animators of Aardman, particularly those whose fingerprints are figuratively and literally visible in the early shorts that did so much to define the studio’s identity and creative mission. Registering this connection opens, potentially, a more expansive perspective from which to understand the interaction between the material and the imaginary as a motivating force behind the studio’s films, and indeed as an animating feature of Aardman itself. In contemplating the studio’s history through the lens of The Pearce Sisters, it becomes possible and perhaps even necessary to consider the reciprocal engagements between Aardman’s cultural and aesthetic influence and traditions of literary fiction. A methodical, comprehensive investigation into the studio thus conceived, a ‘literary Aardman’, is well beyond the scope of the present essay. My far more modest proposal in what follows is to explore The Pearce Sisters’ engagements with a specific trope that recurs with remarkable frequency in literary history as a figure for the encounter between the material and the imaginary: the drowned man washed up by the sea. Broadly speaking, such an inquiry may offer useful signposts for recalibrating the aesthetic and cultural influence of Aardman as a studio in the context of literary history. It is Cook’s selection of Jackson’s text in particular, however, that makes the consideration of this perspective on Aardman both interesting and important; for viewers, the opportunity created by The Pearce Sisters’ origins in literary fiction is not that of analysing the film’s generic or theoretical status as an adaptation, but that of considering Aardman’s production practices and imaginative ethos in relation to a specific example of another expressive form, one that is itself part of a rich and varied tradition based on the written word.

Handsome drowned men Jackson’s Ten Sorry Tales is a kind of episodic adventure in the surreal, a gathering of fictional stories and characters that despite their utter bizarreness, exhibit the unmistakable impress of the real. For readers, the stories are uncanny in the strict sense, precipitating encounters with characters whose

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oddball behaviour affirms that eccentricity is a deeply human, and therefore universally familiar, trait. In matter-of-fact tones, Jackson’s deadpan narrator spins offbeat stories of idiosyncratic characters whose slightly surreal lives seem nevertheless entirely plausible: a retiree builds a boat in his basement and waits for a flood so that he can set sail when the rising waters finally burst the building’s foundations; a spiteful horse collects buttons by violently biting them off the clothing of passers-by and ingesting them; a boy purchases an antique set of butterfly surgeon’s tools and uses them to reanimate thousands of dead insects mounted in an art exhibit. In these and other examples, the fanciful nature of Jackson’s characters’ actions is moderated by their motivation in human desires that are not only reasonable, but profoundly ordinary: the boat builder seeks purpose and freedom in retirement; the horse rebels against his pastured confinement with anthropomorphized resentment; the boy objects to a form of art that requires killing beautiful living creatures. Jackson’s creative imagination inhabits the stories with a light but powerful touch, redirecting the conventions of narrative logic and causal reasoning in favour of characters whose desires, fears and compulsions surface in quirky undertakings that fascinate in their own terms. What is particularly noticeable is the pattern, replicated in every tale, in which events and figures that might otherwise seem merely fantastical are anchored by concrete objects such as boats, buttons and butterflies, everyday articles that invite symbolic interpretation but that ultimately resist simple translation, serving instead as talismans of the more-than-real, tangible emissaries from the world of make-believe. Reading Jackson’s collection is in this sense a bit like traversing a tenuous boundary between fiction and non-fiction, a curious border on which the material and the imaginary seem routinely to meet and coexist. Jackson’s tales evoke a surrealism of the Dada variety: as in a Duchamp ‘readymade’, or a found-materials collage by Arp or Ernst, material objects function in these stories not in a merely symbolic sense as indicators or signifiers but as manifestations of imaginary experience itself.8 In Cook’s version of Jackson’s ‘minimal, miserable, bleak, and weather lashed’ world, matches, teacups, a wandering housefly and other everyday objects serve to anchor the fantastical contours of the tale in much the same fashion. It is, however, in a singular example of the material imaginary, the body of a handsome drowned man washed up on the sisters’ remote and desolate beach, that Jackson situates the tangible explicitly as a conduit to desires that are unconscious, unintelligible, unspoken or unseen. As the opening story of Ten Sorry Tales, ‘The Pearce Sisters’ occupies a role of structural importance and sets an emotional tone for Jackson’s volume as a whole. The tale follows the repetitive existence of Lol and Edna

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Pearce, who spend their days hauling nets of fish from the sea, gutting and hanging their catch in their smokehouse, and periodically trundling into town to exchange their kippers ‘for one or two of life’s little luxuries, such as bread or salt or tea’.9 Their rescue one day of an anonymous drowning man sets in motion a plot both grim and comical. Lugging the man inside still unconscious, they shave his whiskers and set him in a chair, dressing him in a pair of socks and one of Edna’s old pink house dresses. Finally coming to in response to these attentions, the man opens his eyes to find the ugly, leering sisters looming over him, at which point he lets out a blood-curdling scream and runs precipitously from the house. ‘And that may well have been the end of that’, writes Jackson, ‘had the fellow not stopped at what he wrongly considered to be a safe distance and, still wearing Edna’s dressing gown, raised an accusatory finger at the women who had just saved his life. A stream of insults came pouring out of him – a bilious rant, so crude and lewd that all the seagulls (not exactly known for their modesty) hung their heads in shame’.10 Indignant at seeing their kindness rebuffed, Lol pursues the man and brains him with a fish hammer, after which the sisters row him back out to sea and dump him unceremoniously overboard at nearly the spot where they originally found him. Jackson reportedly based ‘The Pearce Sisters’ on a local newspaper account of two women who lived in a shack on a remote Norfolk beach and smoked fish.11 The trope of the handsome drowned man discovered and revived by locals, however, is one that places the tale in correspondence with a wide range of other fictional texts. The Pearce sisters’ interest in male sea-borne bodies is in fact part of a long literary tradition that includes the mysterious whale-sized corpse picked over by townspeople in J. G. Ballard’s ‘The Drowned Giant’; the anonymous man who is ‘found drowned’ and haunts a hydrophobic Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses; the remains of Phlebas the Phoenician, a token of foreboding in the ‘Death by Water’ section of Eliot’s The Waste Land; Gulliver’s binding by Lilliputians in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; a quartet of water-logged gentlemen washed ashore in Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and so on.12 While the beaches of literary history are indeed awash with beautiful male bodies, it is to the earliest iteration and prototype for this narrative trope that ‘The Pearce Sisters’ bears a particular and curious resemblance. In Book 6 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus, after being nearly drowned at sea by the god Poseidon, is discovered on a beach of Scheria by the princess Nausicaa. Like Edna and Lol, Nausicaa lacks male companionship and, in a gesture of welcome, clothes her unexpected and attractive visitor in some of her own garments and takes him into her home. Nausicaa’s availability for romance is quite explicit in the text: she is both virginal and ‘outshines’ her maids,

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‘though all are lovely’,13 and Athena cautions her that a girl of  her charms and social standing should have her wedding clothes ready at all times. Alas, Odysseus, already married, must, in the end, continue on his journey home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope. In thwarting Nausicaa’s explicit romantic interest, the episode serves to delineate a sort of literary paradigm for the domestication of desire, a map for channelling attraction into the safe confines of marriage via rituals of hospitality; though left behind for now, Nausicaa will, it is implicitly understood, fulfil her dreams of marriage when a future, more eligible, visitor arrives on her shores.14 The Nausicaa episode establishes the figure of the half-drowned hero as the embodiment of erotic mystery, a sort of reverse-gendered Sleeping Beauty who awaits the living, awakening touch of human, female, desire. Jackson’s tale reiterates the essentials of Homer’s paradigm, down to the dressing of the nearly drowned man in women’s clothing, while altering the contours of the hospitality narrative in a remarkable way. Several days after dispatching their ungrateful visitor, the sisters find his body washed up on the beach, naked and now very much dead. They take him in once again, but this time gut him like a fish and string him up in the smokehouse for a week, to ‘stop him going off ’. Dragging his blackened, preserved body inside, they dress him in his old clothes, and set him at the piano, remarking to one another on ‘how nice it was to have a man around the house’.15 Jackson’s tale effectively rewrites the Nausicaa story as a revenge narrative, reconfiguring its commentary on female desire and the inadequacy of male receptivity to it. It is as a corpse, and not as a potential living husband, that the Pearce sisters’ drowned man fulfils his promise as a companion. In direct contrast to the plight of the princess Nausicaa, left behind by the already married Odysseus, the arc of Lol’s and Edna’s desire is only temporarily interrupted by their man’s return to the sea; instead, it is the arrival of his lifeless, grinning carcass that transforms their ramshackle structure on the beach into a domestic space of hospitality. Indeed, the story’s denouement confirms the impact of this shift as the sisters proceed to kill, eviscerate and smoke several additional young men, including a visitor from the local town council checking on building permits, a nosey window-peeping snoop and a ‘blameless rambler who made the fatal error of knocking on the Pearces’ door to ask for directions’.16 The last, the narrator informs us, is necessary ‘to complete the set’, and the story ends with the smartly dressed men arranged pleasantly round the parlour in various postures of gregariousness and sociability, sipping tea for eternity. In replicating Jackson’s narrative, Cook’s film places an entirely different emphasis on the drowned man’s rescue and subsequent death, and in the process alters the meaning of the corpse that eventually takes up residence

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in the sisters’ home. In the film, the Pearce sisters do not murder their ungrateful guest. Instead, after flinging his tirade of insults at his rescuers, the revived man turns and flees back into the ocean, evading Lol and her hammer but meeting his demise among the surging waves. That his death results from his own actions opens a crucial gap in the narrative: while the sisters gain ground as sympathetic figures (they are not, after all, murderers),17 the man’s wilful embrace of his own destruction emerges as an enigma at the story’s centre, a mystery that will take material form in the dead body that washes up on the shore. A number of possible explanations for his extreme reaction to the Pearces’ hospitality suggest themselves. It may be that the perceived threat to his masculinity, symbolized in the pink dress he finds himself wearing, is too much to bear. Perhaps he is angry that their rescue thwarted what was in fact an original suicide attempt. Or possibly it is simply their revolting appearance that awakens in him a crazed death wish. The plausibility of each of these interpretations, however, quickly fades on reflection: drowning himself is an exceedingly odd riposte to the threat of symbolic castration; a goal of self-harm is hardly consistent with the position in which the sisters originally find him, clinging for dear life to his accidentally capsized boat; and while the sisters’ appearance might explain his taking fright, screaming and running away, it will hardly wash as a motive for suicide. By shifting responsibility for the death from the sisters to the man himself, Cook places a curious hermeneutic emphasis on the materiality of the body that subsequently washes up onshore. In Jackson’s tale, the preserved corpse of the drowned man represents the cost of masculine failure in the face of feminine desire. Clothed initially in Edna’s pink gown, his flight from the Pearces’ home forecasts his return in a rewriting of desire’s domestication, a literal redressing of Nausicaa’s spurning by Odysseus. The body enters the house as the perfected form of male companionship; gutted, smoked, shaved and suited, he proves superior, from the sisters’ perspective, to the unappreciative living suitor. In Cook’s film, the drowned man returns as something else entirely. Shorn of its disposition as the product of a revenge narrative, the corpse washes up instead as an embodied enigma, a rigid and inert presence without name, without history and without explanation. In this guise, the body appears on the shores of Cook’s narrative as a kind of extra-diegetic arrival, a conundrum that offers an occasion for wonder and admiration, but that in some final sense exceeds narrative exegesis.18 Lol’s reaction upon finding him expresses nothing so much as her spontaneous sense of wonder at the return of this tangible mystery, the unintelligible material body. Approaching with curiosity, she tips his rigid, naked torso over, and jumps delightedly up and down, her glee that of a child anticipating

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the promise of a new plaything; as Edna shoulders the corpse and trundles up  the beach, Lol skips happily alongside, the picture of childlike joy. It is thus not as the recipient of the sisters’ justice, but as a marvellous and unexpected boon that the corpse takes up residence in the Pearces’ parlour. The drowned man is a wondrous, enigmatic doll whose presence succeeds in reshaping their familial unit precisely because he exists, materially, outside established domestic narratives. This image of domestic order and social community defined by the presence of a corpse suggests The Pearce Sisters’ nearer kinship with another literary rewriting of the ‘Nausicaa’ episode – Gabriel García Márquez’s celebrated short story, ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’. In this ‘tale for children’, the body of an immense and beautiful man washes up on the shore of a small village. His arrival is discovered first by the children of the town, who spend a day playing, delightedly burying and digging him up again, until the adults arrive and take him into one of their homes. Throughout the story, the drowned man is affirmed as an unintelligible but powerful mystery: the women are in awe of him and find their husbands lacking in comparison, the men seek unsuccessfully to locate his connections in neighbouring villages, and all wonder indiscriminately at his beauty and bulk. In García Márquez’s story, the drowned man is not a cipher to be interpreted, an entity to be fit, willy-nilly, into pre-existing cultural narratives of love, success, fear, safety, masculinity, femininity, domesticity and so on. He is simply present, impressive, beautiful, a source of curiosity and delight. He quite literally takes up a previously unperceived imaginary space in the lives of the townspeople, so that collectively they ‘knew that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors’.19 In the physicality of his magnificent body, he remains explicitly unintelligible, the material form of an imaginary desire for connection among the people, ‘so that through him all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen’.20 H. Porter Abbott has argued that in García Márquez’s story the handsome drowned man represents a deliberate relinquishing of narrative sense that involves the reader in a ‘textual experience of the extratextual unknown’.21 Abbott is precise and emphatic in demonstrating that the corpse surfaces within the text as an abiding mystery; it is not simply the site of the narrative’s deliberate resistance to interpretation (the signifier of reading’s failure), but a positive manifestation of the incomprehensible, the presence of the unintelligible itself as a persistent and persisting source of wonder. In this reading, the drowned man is a real body the influence of which lies in its remaining outside of previously imagined narratives. As García Márquez memorably puts it, ‘Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and

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best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him, there was no room for him in their imagination’.22 What matters most about the most handsome drowned man, in other words, is not the hermeneutic possibilities his body evokes, but the physical presence of the corpse itself as the form of a non-explanation, the material expression of imaginary, non-diegetic, human desire. Cook’s film enacts precisely this result in material and sensory, that is visual and aural, terms. In The Pearce Sisters the anonymous, storyless drowned man arrives first as a potential companion to the lonely Edna and Lol. Refusing their welcome and embracing a death previously avoided, he returns not as a character whose story is to be discovered and explored, but as a tangible enigma, a material wonder in their midst.

Beautifully ugly In choosing ‘The Pearce Sisters’ as the source text for his project, Cook assumed a task of cinematic adaptation driven less by narrow concerns for narrative fidelity than by the invitation to creative response implicit in that text’s own corporeal emphasis on its macabre material. As Cook has indicated, his attraction was not primarily to the narrative itself, so much as to the squalid wretchedness of its setting and tone, that is, to those factors that evoke the tale’s potential visuality. Accordingly, it is in the design of the film and not its narrative that Cook establishes its extraordinary dialogue with Jackson’s fiction. The elements of Jackson’s text that surface as material, enigmatic bodies are those that spur Cook’s visualization of the story in a language that is correspondingly textural, sensory and corporeal. Cook’s focus on the material and the sensory is immediately evident in the project’s design, particularly in its visual and aural approach to miseen-scène, in incongruously indexical images embedded within the drawn surface, and in verbal allusions to the historical real within its visualized fictional space. Most conspicuous is the weather that dominates the film as an unrelenting physical presence from the first frame to the last. A violent wind whips Lol’s pigtails perpetually sideways, pulls the smoke from the Pearces’ chimney in a straight, black, horizontal line across the sky, drives the rain across the desolate beach in sheets, and tears the very words, muffled and unformed, from Edna’s mouth when she attempts to speak. The wind is a positively biblical force that threatens constantly to upstage the heroines and to derail their story, howling at a deafening pitch and levelling its gale force energies so indiscriminately that creatures, structures and the very landscape itself seem in constant danger of being swept away.

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Cook also emphasizes the presence of sensory and physical reality through a curiously deliberate visual contradiction. Among the drawn figures and backgrounds that dominate the film’s aesthetic, he makes strategic use of photographic images: freshly caught fish flopping wetly in a basket, globs of shiny piscine organs flung to hungry crabs and seagulls, gleaming knives hung by the fish cleaning table, an aged china teacup, and a buzzing errant housefly all create moments of visual surprise, as if the sensory, the tangible and the real had suddenly appeared within the space of imaginary experience. Visually, these photographic elements serve paradoxically to underscore the textural surface of the drawings as well, strengthening the sense that  the significant correspondences between The Pearce Sisters and its literary source are not narrative but textual. As in Jackson’s Ten Sorry Tales, where boats, buttons and butterflies anchor imaginary experience, materiality is a tangible, persistent and visually enigmatic presence within the visual surface of The Pearce Sisters. A further, somewhat counterintuitive, example of Cook’s interest in material presences lies in his response to the invitation of Jackson’s text as a verbal document. Where Jackson narrates everyday events such as lighting the smokehouse fire or making tea, Cook anchors these actions with visual references to specific historical products and objects, thus grounding the sisters’ imaginary world once again in an extra-diegetic material reality. Fictional brands with suggestive names like ‘Luber Kerosene’ and ‘Grit’s Quality Tea’ (‘handpicked by wretched pygmies, imported and packed by Grimley Import Co, LTD, Offalshire, England’), give way to actual products obliquely referenced. The ‘SKAG’ brand stove, for example, recalls the SMEG company’s line of high-end ranges made in Italy beginning in 1948, and Lol lights the smokehouse fire with ‘Bry Grey’ matches, an implicit reference to the nineteenth-century British kitchen match company, Bryant and May, which marketed wooden safety matches under the name ‘BryMay’.23 Shifted towards guttural ugliness (‘SKAG’) and visual ennui (‘Bry Grey’), such names serve to import real objects shorn of their histories into the fictional world of the film; within The Pearce Sisters’ visual landscape, they operate as material enigmas that disrupt fictional consistency, mimicking Jackson’s employment of concrete talismanic objects to anchor his characters’ desires, fears and hopes. The visuality of the film is thus wrought with an eye towards the material rather than the strictly representational qualities of entities projected within the mise-en-scène. It is in Cook’s design of the film’s various physical presences, its miserable weather and garish colours, its photorealistic reminders of actual fish, entrails, utensils and flies, and its epiphanic treatment of real branded objects stripped of their histories, that this materiality quite literally takes shape. As in García Márquez’s ‘The

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Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’, elements of the real wash up on the beaches of fiction in The Pearce Sisters as sources of extra-diegetic wonder. Cook’s reflections on the range of influences that determined the film’s visual appearance provide an apt account of its evolution within an expansive and exploratory exercise in material design: The aesthetic certainly wasn’t chosen strategically; it evolved from the story. The two sisters had to look ugly for the story to work, so I started designing from that simple premise. My first thought was to dress up grim looking men as women (the UK has a rich pantomime tradition of this; see Les Dawson, Monty Python, The League of Gentlemen, etc.). Then I was going to find a way of tracking these ugly man heads and composite them on stop-motion bodies. I’d also seen Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibition and wanted to get a visceral flavour of that in there too.

Sproxton and Lord rejected these ideas as too risky, both visually and financially. An alternate source of inspiration presented itself but seemed unsuitable for different reasons. Illustrator David Roberts had created playfully macabre line drawings for Ten Sorry Tales, borrowing the gothic pen-and-ink style established by Edward Gorey in The Gashlycrumb Tinies and other works.24 Roberts had drawn particular narrative and tonal cues from Gorey’s illustrations for classic literary ‘nonsense’ texts, including Edward Lear’s The Jumblies and The Dong with a Luminous Nose, as well as Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children, which advances a hilariously dark morality in stories with titles like ‘Jim Who Ran Away and Was Eaten by a Lion’, ‘Matilda Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death’ and ‘Rebecca Who Slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’. Wary, however, of linking his film to an aesthetic lineage already well plundered by animator Tim Burton in films like Vincent (1982), The Nightmare before Christmas (1993), and Corpse Bride (2005), Cook fell instead to mining a broader range of visual sources, including ‘naïve’ paintings by Alfred Wallis, cubist landscapes by Ben Nicholson, calligraphic canvases by Cy Twombly, cartoonish abstractions by Philip Guston and grotesque caricatures by Basil Wolverton. Drawings of the three characters, Lol, Edna and the nameless drowned man, and of the desolate, windswept landscape they inhabit, developed slowly over time as amalgams of these influences, with a single design purpose as Cook’s consistent goal: ‘I wanted a beautifully ugly film’. Cook’s initial visual iterations of Edna and Lol as ‘ugly man heads composited on stop-motion bodies’ evolved from his early designs for a series titled The Dregs, in which he can be seen working out a kind of stylized cartoon realism (see Figure 7.1).25

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Figure 7.1  Edna and Lol as ‘ugly man heads composited on stop-motion bodies’ (reprinted with permission, Luis Cook).

Marrying a warped verisimilitude to simplified caricature, the figures became progressively more fantastical, with leering mouths, gaping mismatched nostrils, patched clothes, elfin shoes and distorted bodies done in flesh tones of a pale, sickly, Frankenstein green. Test runs using various animation techniques resulted in a composite process in which computergenerated models formed a sort of visual substratum with drawings layered on top (see Figure 7.2). This hybrid approach eventually produced the look Cook wanted: At the time most CG films looked very clean. I was keen on using CG in a rougher, scratchier, uglier way … . [W]e printed off the CGI shots and animated traditionally in 2D over the top of them, then composited the 2D back over the 3D. It was all an experiment really with each shot composited slightly differently, but within the tight confines of the designs.

The result is a film that has the look of traditional, hand-drawn animation, but that conveys unexpected and intriguing depth effects within a surface built

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Figure 7.2  Combining 3D and 2D imagery in The Pearce Sisters (reprinted with permission, Luis Cook).

up from individual images including, in addition to backgrounds, separate layers for CG models, fill areas, line drawings, highlighting and shading. Visually captivating, the film has a calligraphic and translucent feel, as if one were watching a sort of moving palimpsest in which flat drawings of characters and objects possess paradoxical material qualities of weight and volume.26 So far from marking a retreat from physicality into virtual imagery, the process of coarsening the CG forms by animating on top of them served, for Cook, to strengthen the sense of the drawings’ material presence onscreen: ‘[I]t felt … like the characters were rooted to the land, pushed down by gravity’.27 Visually, the film’s aesthetic is at once difficult to describe and astonishingly vivid. Elements of each frame exhibit the impromptu immediacy of drawn sketches, as if one had happened upon a page from one of the artist’s notebooks: stones, shells and seaweed are rendered as rudimentary scribbles, and the winged shapes of distant seagulls are implied in simple doodled curlicues. Yet within the same visual field, images of the sisters hauling nets of herring, attempting to revive the rescued man on the beach, and flinging fish entrails to hungry crabs and gulls pulse with a corporeal vitality, asserting incongruously physical and material presences within the planar flatness of

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the ‘notebook page’. One representative frame, for example, features a hungry crab slurping a pile of fish guts freshly jettisoned by Edna (see Figure 7.3). The crab’s green pincers glow with photorealistic detail, and the entrails gleam red, a gloppy, viscous mass. The beach on which they sit, on the other hand, has a flat, sketched appearance as if a bit of pale yellowed paper had been hastily strewn with random jottings. Odd scribbles, spiral and circle shapes, indiscriminate nicks, scratches and smudges suggest the miscellany of seawrack in a manner that belies visual depth cues and contradicts the physicality of the crab and its heap of viscera. This confluence of surface and depth is consistent throughout the film; inscribed planar surfaces cohabit comfortably with bodies that expressively convey volume and weight. Cook’s accretive technique, ‘photographic textures … scribbled over, made uglier and placed over rigged CGI models which were then animated’, results in a conspicuous emphasis on the materiality of the visual field. Objects and characters greet the spectator not as mimetic representations but as tangible, enigmatic bodies, ‘handsome corpses’ washed up by the sea. Cook recounts a representative moment in the development of the film’s material aesthetic: ‘I was in Cornwall when a big storm hit. The next day I took lots of photos of all the rubbish that got washed up on the beach. Wood, sticks, seaweed, plastic, bottles, toothbrushes, even old condoms. All rather unpleasant. I stuck it all in there with all my Cy Twombley-like scribblings.’ When Lol discovers the drowned man’s return, these items surface visually alongside the body as visitors at once strange and familiar, freighted, like the naked corpse itself, with the same uncanny

Figure 7.3  Surface and depth in The Pearce Sisters (Aardman Animations, 2007).

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quality that attends material objects in Jackson’s Ten Sorry Tales. Like its source text, The Pearce Sisters exhibits a hybrid visual field in which the real and imaginary intermingle, and in which natural objects appear at once commonplace and extraordinary, ‘[as if] reality has been tumbled, battered, and re-appropriated by the sea somehow’. While in many respects Cook’s chosen aesthetic in The Pearce Sisters suggests the very antithesis of what might be presumed as typical of Aardman design and technique, his approach to animation as a process of embodiment suggests otherwise. For him, the task of designing the film lay not in forging faithfully accurate representations of the characters described in Jackson’s fiction, but in constructing bodies from elemental materials that convey, not unlike plasticine and clay, specific qualities of substance and presence.28 For Aardman, the project marked an extraordinary new departure that  was at the same time a return to the studio’s roots. In the context of that history, the film’s formal uniqueness and literary lineage qualify it as a valuable lens through which to contemplate Aardman’s pattern of inscribing human desire and behaviour within a world of imagination and fantasy; Cook’s material dialogue with Jackson’s text in The Pearce Sisters represents a powerful and innovative model for navigating the shoreline between literary fiction and animation. A signal example of the film’s power in this regard occurs two minutes into the film, as Lol finds herself atop the sisters’ dilapidated seaside home. Attempting to mend a leak in the roof, she pulls a scrap of board from the pocket of her frock. To her consternation, the bit of wood has a large, round knothole in it, and she pauses momentarily as if contemplating the irony and dubiousness of her task, before the wind suddenly rips the useless fragment from her hand and flings it to the beach below. Later, while gathering kindling for the smokehouse fire, she comes across this same bit of holey detritus and, in an expressive, childlike moment, brings it playfully to her eye to peer through it down the beach. The point-of-view shot that immediately follows joins Lol’s sightline to that of the film’s viewer, and the piece of wood becomes for us, as for her, an improvised optical device, a kind of lensless camera. Within its round frame, a flock of hungry gulls appears, wheeling and diving as they circle low over the sand, their cries reaching us in muted cacophony across the near distance. For the viewer, Lol’s wooden peephole operates in the manner of an iris-shot in an old silent film, neither magnifying nor diminishing its objective but framing it, blocking out what is extraneous and focusing attention on what the Pearce sisters, along with the film’s spectators, will shortly discover is there: the washed-up corpse of a naked man. This scrap of wooden debris through which spectators and characters together gaze in

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this sequence offers an apt simulacrum for The Pearce Sisters itself, a film that must enter the consciousness of even the most ardent and well-versed Aardman devotee as a startling, accidental find, a bit of cinematic flotsam that feels, in confirmation of Cook’s wish, ‘as if it had been washed up by the sea’.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

Quoted in Paul Wells et al., Basics Animation 03: Drawing for Animation (Lausanne, Switzerland: AVA Publishing, 2009), p. 170. I am grateful to Luis Cook for his patience in answering my many questions about the genesis and development of The Pearce Sisters, as well as his generosity in sharing unpublished design materials used in production. Cook offered this comment on his palette for the film: ‘I had an art teacher once who told us that “red and green should never be seen!” Even the colours were intended to evoke a sea sick feel’. This and all other quotes from Luis Cook in this chapter are taken from various email correspondence between Cook and the author between 27 March and 21 May 2018. The Pearce Sisters ultimately demonstrated the wisdom of this plan, proving a worthy heir to the Aardman tradition of success from the moment of its premiere in 2007. A Special Jury Award for Short Films at Annecy was quickly followed by a BAFTA Film Award for Best Short Animation and nine other awards at festivals from Córdoba to Zagreb. Inclusion in the Animation Show of Shows catalogue of 2007 further confirmed the film’s place among must-see animation shorts of the last half-century. See Chapter 5 (Hosseini-Shakib) in this volume. See, for example, Lord and Sproxton’s Aardman series for BBC’s Vision On in the 1970s; the influential music video productions for Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ (1986) and Nina Simone’s ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’ (1987); and the studio’s advertising work for companies like Enterprise Computers, Scotch Videotape and Perrier in the 1980s. See Suzanne Buchan (ed.), Pervasive Animation (London: Routledge, 2013), in particular the concluding essay, ‘Animation Studies as an Interdisciplinary Teaching Field’ (pp. 317–37), in which Paul Ward argues that animation is ‘the missing link, the glue, the universal touchstone and meeting place for a very wide range of theorists, historians, and practitioners working within contemporary moving image culture’ (p. 318). For a sampling of rigorously interdisciplinary assessments of animation in relation to literary narrative, aesthetics and history, see in Suzanne Buchan (ed.), Animated Worlds (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2007): Rachel Kearney, ‘The Joyous Reception: Animated Worlds and the Romantic Imagination’, pp. 1–14; Richard Weihe,

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‘The Strings of the Marionette’, pp. 39–48; Miriam Harris, ‘Literary Len: Trade Tattoo and Len Lye’s Link with the Literary Avant-Garde’, pp. 63–77; Paul Wells, ‘Literary Theory, Animation, and the “Subjective Correlative”: Defining the Narrative “World” in Brit-Lit Animation’, pp. 79–94. 7 Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn, Children’s Fantasy Literature : An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Jackie Wullschläger, Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne (New York: Free Press, 1996). See also Chapter 8 (Sergeant) in this volume. 8 Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (eds), Surrealism: Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2016); David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), Dada and Surrealist Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 9 Mick Jackson, Ten Sorry Tales (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 3. 10 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 11 Cook, email correspondence. 12 An interesting corollary to these literary examples in animation history is Caroline Leaf ’s Two Sisters (1990), in which a reclusive, severely disfigured writer and her overly protective sister live together on a remote island. In a twist on the drowned man trope, a male admirer of the writer’s stories swims across the water to meet her. Cook has said that Leaf ’s film was not an influence, except perhaps unconsciously: ‘I had seen the film before but it was only after The Pearce Sisters was completed that someone pointed out the comparisons’. 13 Homer, The Odyssey, Robert Fagles (trans.), Reprint Edition (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), 6.120. 14 In the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses, Joyce offers a devastating exposé of this romantic narrative in the person of Gerty McDowell, for whom the dream of marriage functions as both an unrealizable fantasy and a prophylactic measure against the risks of actual human contact. James Joyce, Ulysses, Hans Walter Gabler (ed.) (New York: Vintage, 1986). 15 Jackson, Ten Sorry Tales, p. 8. 16 Ibid., p. 10. 17 In an interview featured on the blog, Short of the Week, Cook suggested that he loved the idea of Lol and Edna as deliberate killers, ‘but couldn’t make it work. It would have been the end of the story in the middle of the film and we would have lost any crumb of sympathy we may have had with the sisters’. Andrew S. Allen, ‘Interview with Luis Cook (The Pearce Sisters)’, Short of the Week. Available at: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/news/qawith-luis-cook (accessed 22 January 2018). 18 Frank Kermode has theorized the surfacing of such enigmatic bodies within narratives as a form of textual secrecy. As readers, ‘we are most unwilling to accept mystery, what cannot be reduced to other and more intelligible

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forms. Yet that is what we find here: something irreducible, therefore perpetually to be interpreted; not secrets to be found out one by one, but Secrecy’. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 143. For an especially powerful and provocative exploration of reader resistant literary texts, see Vicki Mahaffey, Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); also Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 19 Gabriel García Márquez, ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’, Collected Stories, Gregory Rabassa and J.S. Bernstein (trans.) (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 253. 20 Ibid. 21 H. Porter Abbott, ‘Immersions in the Cognitive Sublime: The Textual Experience of the Extratextual Unknown in García Márquez and Beckett’, Narrative 17, no. 2 (10 May 2009), p. 131. 22 García Márquez, ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’, p. 248. 23 According to Cook, ‘Bry Grey’ also alludes to the first stop-motion film in history, Arthur Melbourne Cooper’s Matches an Appeal (1899), a oneminute advertisement featuring an animated BryMay matchstick man encouraging donations in support of soldiers fighting in the Boer War. This connection is a point of interest for animation historians, though not in all likelihood the average viewer, for whom the significance of the brand remains its enigmatic material specificity. 24 See the omnibus editions of Edward Gorey’s Works: Amphigorey: Fifteen Books (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980); Amphigorey Too (New York: TarcherPerigee, 1980); Amphigorey Also (San Diego, CA: Mariner Books, 1993); Amphigorey Again (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006). 25 The project, pitched while Cook was working at Aardman, was never produced, although the designs influenced a later BBC digital ad campaign. 26 Cook has acknowledged his intention to create ‘a crude and calligraphic pictorial world’ (‘un mundo pictórico crudo y caligráfico’). See E.A. Albedo, ‘The Pearce Sisters – Luis Cook (2007)’, N+2: Animación de autor, 25 September 2013. Available at: http://nmasmas2. blogspot.com/2013/09/the-pearce-sisters-luis-cook-2007.html (accessed 8 May 2018); Sam. ‘The Pearce Sisters: Integrando 3D+2D’, Animaholic, 5 February 2008. Available online: http://animaholic. blogspot.com/2008/02/pierce-sisters-integrando-3d2d.html (accessed 8 May 2018). The result is an emphasis on the film’s visual field as an inscribed surface, rather than a space for mimetic portrayal. As Laura U. Marks puts it, ‘Calligraphic animation shifts the locus of documentation from representation to performance, from index to moving trace.’ See Laura U.

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Marks, ‘Calligraphic Animation: Documenting the Invisible’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no. 3 (November 2011), especially pp. 307–11. 27 Cook’s combination of 2D drawings with 3D CG images also echoes the literary aesthetic employed by Jackson, who emphasizes his heroines’ pressing boredom, loneliness, unsatisfied desire and overall flatness of affect while affording the reader access, through the arrival of the drowned man, to the rounded volumes and layered depths of the surreal, the fantastic and the magical. 28 Cook’s fusion of drawings, photographs and CGI generates visual representations that also retain their own character as material entities. In this respect, The Pearce Sisters suggests a certain technical and aesthetic alignment with the material processes of stop-motion animation as it has developed over decades of production at Aardman.

8

Wallace and Gromit and the British Fantasy Tradition Alexander Sergeant

Aardman Animations is arguably the UK’s finest contemporary exponent of the animated fantasy film. Drawing on what J.P. Telotte describes as animation’s ‘invariably fantastic aspect’,1 Aardman have produced popular animations that display tendencies towards anthropomorphism and comic exaggeration, both of which are also prominent features of traditional fantasy storytelling. This is especially true of the studio’s signature commercial property Wallace and Gromit. Created by Nick Park as part of his final-year project at the National Film and Television School, Wallace and Gromit were first made famous through a series of Oscar-winning shorts aired sporadically on British television between 1989 and 2008. The international popularity of  these shorts has spawned a global franchise that has been described as ‘one of the few genuinely eccentric places left in the movies’ and ‘as quintessentially British in flavour as a wedge of Wensleydale’.2 The world of Wallace and Gromit has become synonymous with Aardman itself, existing across an array of media platforms including video games, television spin-offs and other merchandising outlets, but this global popularity has not come at the expense of its British identity. It is, rather, precisely the franchise’s ability to simultaneously celebrate and lampoon concepts of British nationality that gives the distinctly British feel to its characters, scenarios and comedy. Wallace and Gromit is a fantasy franchise. It features outlandish narratives involving situations that are self-consciously designed to be larger-thanlife, not to mention a whole host of non-human characters (dogs, robots, penguins/chickens) who display the fantasy genre’s tendencies towards anthropomorphic caricature. Yet, asserting the identity of Wallace and Gromit as fantasy cinema matters not only because it effects how we might categorize the Aardman franchise in accordance with popular film genre labels, but also how this quintessentially British franchise contributes to discourses of nationality. Despite its similarities to certain aspects of British society, the world of Wallace and Gromit is as much a fantasy as the more

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obvious secondary fantasy worlds of C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien. The only difference is that whilst the worlds of Middle Earth and Narnia display similarities with British culture as part of their respective authors’ attempts to bring authenticity and richness to worlds that are self-consciously unreal, the world of Wallace and Gromit displays elements of self-conscious fantasy within a setting that is ostensibly representative of a certain vision of Northern English society. Contextualizing Wallace and Gromit within what Colin Manlove’ describes as the ‘domestic emphasis’ of British fantasy,3 I wish to explore the narrative and stylistic conventions of the Wallace and Gromit films that establish this distinctly British feel to its fantasy storytelling. Trading on a set of shared literary and visual influences found within the rich heritage of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British fantasy fiction, Wallace and Gromit becomes quintessentially British not so much in the way it represents reality, but through the way it departs from reality. Viewing Wallace and Gromit through the lens of British fantasy theory, then, reveals an ambivalence in Wallace and Gromit’s attitude towards British identity and British fantasy heritage. On the one hand, there is potential to read the franchise as a subversion of outmoded concepts of British national identity, using as it does well-worn stereotypes and viewing them with an askance lens so as to potentially critique and reject their assumed reality within contemporary society. On the other hand, those same stereotypes serve as a source of wonder within the world of Wallace and Gromit, lampooned through the use of fantasy, but affectionately so in a manner that arguably reinforces their assumed rightful existence within contemporary society. This chapter does not promote either of these readings as the correct interpretation of the franchise. Rather, it showcases how the potential for either interpretation relies on audiences treating the images and scenarios onscreen not as representations of reality, but as objects of fantasy. In short, claiming Wallace and Gromit as an example of British fantasy helps to reveal the sociocultural underpinnings of their world, utilizing the critical rubric of fantasy fiction to illuminate what is at stake in the franchise’s engagement with culturally engrained ideas of Britishness, and how such a process is imaginatively communicated onscreen.

The British fantastic: Wallace and Gromit and national context During the numerous behind-the-scenes articles that accompanied the release of their first feature film, Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), Aardman’s trademark process of stop-motion animation was often described as offering

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audiences a ‘stylized’ or ‘anatomical’ realism.4 At the same time, Wallace and Gromit has also been praised for its idiosyncrasy and eccentricity, features that function as a key aspect of the popular appeal of the franchise. Drawing from Nick Park’s childhood influences from visual and literary sources including The Dandy and The Beano comics, the horror films of Hammer Studios and the fantasy adventures produced by Ray Harryhausen, in particular his Mother Goose Stories (1946), Park has often spoken of the sense of ‘quirkiness, creativity and imagination’ that he sought to emulate in his own work.5 Therefore, whilst Wallace and Gromit does not match the most recognizable conventions of a specific type of fantasy identified by the use of secondary worlds and a relatively stable iconography of dwarves, elves, goblins and other such fabulist creatures, it does self-consciously draw from other traditions of fantastic storytelling established particularly within the British context over the past centuries. Steeped in the folkloric traditions of the fairy tale, fantasy fiction first emerged as an artistic response to the European cultural enlightenment during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tied to the aesthetic and political aims of romanticism, the genre has historically been intertwined with the Enlightenment’s undercurrent of nationalism, embracing folklore not only to highlight the imaginative potential of the written word or visual arts but also to celebrate a cultural legacy shared between different European societies. In eighteenth-century Germany, pioneering fantasy writers such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as well as composers such as Richard Wagner delved into a treasure trove of folklore and fairy tales to articulate the shared cultural heritage that existed between the politically disjointed Germanic states.6 In the United States, romantic sagas such as Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819) and James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) set in a fantasy version of the American frontier functioned, as Brian Attebery argues, to invest obscure corners of the nation with ‘human interest’ that celebrated the newly discovered American landscape.7 Fantasy has, therefore, played a crucial role in articulating and shaping discourses of nationality since its inception, assisting the process by which national identity is constructed through a shared awareness of an imagined community.8 Within the British artistic and literary heritage of the genre, fantasy has functioned largely ‘not in terms of creation, but in terms of disturbance and destruction’.9 This is seen in a broad tradition of writers stretching from Geoffrey Chaucer to Jonathan Swift to the works of Lewis Carroll, each of which utilizes fantasy as a device for satire to playfully subvert prevailing social and political norms. Swift’s Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is a grotesque subversion of aristocratic tradition, whilst Carroll’s Alice novels (1865 and 1871) feature numerous scenes in which Victorian intellectualism

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is lampooned through various nonsense-filled dialogue exchanges in which supposedly logical suppositions are used to prove illogical syllogisms such as one must always move forward to stay still, and that the best technique for drying wet clothes is a discussion of history. This emphasis on fantasy as a device for satiric subversion within the British traditions of the genre is often masked due to the international popularity of a number of key British fantasy authors whose works are often atypical of the conventions of this heritage. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are responsible for the most globally popular fantasy fictions produced by British authors, but the type of ‘secondary world’ narratives popularized through their work is actually not characteristic of the wider tradition of British folklore.10 Instead, the British fantasy tradition is typified not by the construction of secondary worlds, but an askance alteration of our own world in which the laws of reality are simultaneously represented and played with to subvert the status quo. Wallace and Gromit fits within this broader tradition of British fantasy, albeit in a manner that reveals as many mid-twentieth-century influences as it acknowledges the influences of a longer tradition of storytelling stretching back to the high point of romanticism. Emerging out of the end of what Van Norris refers to as the ‘second wave’ of British animated cartoons, Aardman’s early output ‘predicted the Third Wave still to come’ by moving away from the European-influenced formal experimentalism that typified earlier British animation.11 Park’s work as an animator exemplifies what Brian Cosgrove, co-founder of the Cosgrove Hall studio, describes as a ‘warm and cosy’ streak within British animation,12 celebrating rather than decrying the banality of everyday concerns such as the domestic setting of the British living room and comforting traditions such as afternoon tea. Park’s work for Aardman, and the enthusiasm with which it was received by audiences, established a particular tone for the studio within the public consciousness that on one level showed his contemporary visual literacy and on another harked back to firmly engrained storytelling conventions held still within the British cultural zeitgeist. Creature Comforts (1989), for example, fuses the sense of comedic subversion of the status quo that The Beano achieved on the page through a style of animation that, as Paul Wells argues, is ‘gentle in tone, but ironic in style’.13 In this way, Park’s early work provided a British alternative to shows like The Simpsons that similarly used animation to subvert conventional domestic life in the US national context. Yet, at the same time, Creature Comforts respects the traditions of the British fantastic, modernizing those traditions by drawing from more immediate literary and visual sources found with mid-twentieth-century popular culture but remaining steadfast to the underlying principles that give British fantasy is particular national sensibility. In this way, Park’s early work would set the

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blueprint for a franchise that achieved global popularity, creating a style of animated fantasy film distinctly aware of its own national status and identity.

Wallace and Gromit and anthropomorphism Perhaps the most striking component of the world of Wallace and Gromit that pulls its core mythology into the realms of the fantastic is its use of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is a trademark feature of popular animation, but its prominence more widely in children’s literature and media can be traced back to the British literary fantasy tradition, epitomized in works such as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, A.A. Milne’s The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and Richard Adams’s Watership Down.14 As Juliet Kellogg Markowsky argues, anthropomorphism signals ‘the flight of fantasy itself ’.15 As a storytelling technique, it disturbs the world of reality to provide an alternative perspective, allowing the usually fixed boundaries and identities upon which the distinction between human and non-human depends to be temporarily suspended. Wallace and Gromit’s anthropomorphism is established in the opening sequence of A Grand Day Out. Accompanied by the franchise’s now-famous orchestral theme, the film begins with a panning shot of Wallace’s living room that introduces the duo of man and dog via a number of ‘family photographs’ hanging on the wall. Reaching the carpet, the scene then begins to introduce the domestic setting these two inhabit, travelling across the floor to reveal a rather lived-in living room wherein travel brochures and camping magazines litter the carpet and coffee tables. However, this sense of the familiar and domestic is quickly disrupted by the presence of the dog Gromit, who sits in his own armchair next to Wallace. The duo read quietly, and the sound of ticking clock provides the scene with an additional sense of rhythm in line with the pace established by the earlier camera movement. Gromit is thus positioned within the mise-en-scène as a spouse-like figure. Each consumed with their own activity, the couple share the room in comfortable silence with a sense of ritual and regularity that suggests an air of domestic tranquillity. The real-life boundaries between human and animal are played with and subverted, establishing an atmosphere of the fantastic. The series makes use of these anthropomorphic tendencies in order to play on the audience’s perspective of the action and allegiance to the characters, as well as to open up a liminal space wherein the narrative itself is viewed from a perspective of fantasy. The Wrong Trousers (1993), for example, tells its story largely from the point of view of Gromit as he suffers the frustrations and humiliations of being placed in the position of a ‘mere’

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dog at the hands of Wallace. Reacting with disdain at being given a leash as a birthday present, a gift that confirms, in Wallace’s words, that somebody owns him, Gromit’s objection is borne out of his refusal to be relegated to the status of pet rather than the position of partner he more naturally inhabits in other instalments. This is true both on an emotional level – Gromit is seen to provide Wallace with much needed guidance and support – as well as at the level of commercial activity – he shares with Wallace the labour and the credit for the duo’s various business enterprises. In fact, it is when the harmony of the duo is threatened by outside forces that Gromit is relegated to a position as Wallace’s pet, a threat often arising in the form of various competitors for Wallace’s affection including Feather’s McGraw in The Wrong Trousers – a figure who also mocks animalistic notions of species through his ability to ‘disguise’ himself as a chicken through the use of a rubber glove – as well as later love interests such as Wendolene Ramsbottom in A Close Shave (1995), Lady Tottington in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Piella Bakewell in A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008). In these scenarios, the villainous or untoward nature of these characters is often foreshadowed by the threat they pose to Gromit’s status as an equal partner to Wallace, a relationship that an audience familiar with the franchise knows is crucial to their success. Gromit frequently demonstrates his intellectual superiority and emotional maturity in comparison with Wallace’s dim-witted charm, yet in spite of Gromit’s assumption of human comforts such as his armchair and newspaper, he is dependent on Wallace for access to the human world. The frequent threats posed to Gromit within the narratives of the series showcase the fragility of this dependency. In the case of A Matter of Loaf and Death,  the  transference of affection from Gromit to Piella directly reduces Gromit to the role of ‘dog’, similar to the status of her own pet Fluffles, robbing him of his own room and redecorating the house, making Gromit feel an outsider in his own home. The narrative strategies of such plot points invite the audience to feel the injustice and fear Gromit feels. By asking us to witness the events from the point of view of Gromit, even the more representational elements of the Wallace and Gromit universe become somewhat fantastical, viewed as they are from the mindset of a character who, through his animal status, exists in a space outside of both society and reality. Gromit’s perspective is inherently fantastical in that to imagine ourselves sharing his perspective is to imagine a dog possessing impossible cognitive faculties beyond the realms of everyday life, offering us a sentient space through which to view the fiction outside the confines of realism. Audiences can therefore read, for example, Wallace’s obsession with cheese and British comforts as somewhat fantastic occurrences rather than simply as typical or everyday, as Gromit’s anthropomorphism becomes a device

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used to provide an askance vision of British society in a manner reflective of the traditions of British fantasy storytelling. Anthropomorphism within British fantasy, as appropriated by authors such as Beatrix Potter and Richard Adams, is often linked to a deeper cultural desire to, as John Pennington argues, ‘escape the industrial world and recapture Aracadia’.16 Epitomizing a harmony with nature and a freedom from the modernizing forces of industry and commerce, the invocation of the myth of Arcadia within twentieth-century fantasy literature allowed writers to present a melancholic view of contemporary, urban culture. The myth of Aracadia engages in a nostalgic escapism that ‘constructs a literature of revision that provides useful equipment for living; their didactic fictions teach us that the world is fallen, but that the world is also vital’.17 The myth offers itself to readers through a mixture of nostalgia and melancholy that articulates a dissatisfaction with the contemporary world. Yet, the dissatisfaction is not channelled into a desire to change reality, but a melancholic recognition that the constructed worlds of Watership Down, Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck are ‘just fantasies’. Because they are not real, because their anthropomorphism declares them to be fantastic, they cannot exist in reality. The lost world such authors present cannot be reclaimed, but instead enjoyed only as passing utopian fantasies tinged with British societal concerns. This subversion of contemporary life through nostalgia appears in Wallace and Gromit, albeit in a manner that reflects the more immediate concerns of its sociocultural climate. Whilst British fantasy fiction of the nineteenth and early twentienth centuries steeped in the Arcadian model reflected concerns over industrialization, Wallace and Gromit’s nostalgic vision of middle-class Northern England values community against the sweeping ideological agenda of individualization within Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite Britain. Seen through Gromit’s eyes, the world of Wallace and Gromit is desirable due to its sense of community. Due to his animal status, Gromit is constantly shut out of public life, unable to participate in the same eccentric festivals or inane conversations that characterize Wallace’s interaction with the world, and he is at the whim of his owner’s often-erratic temperament to achieve a sense of belonging and security. Yet, that same sense of community that is valorized through the perspective of a character that can never be part of it is seen from a perspective that cannot be occupied in reality. Gromit’s anthropomorphism means that he evades the real world of humans in every sense. Within the context of the fiction, Gromit’s ability to function outside of human society gives him the necessary insight to bring about a narrative resolution, whether through his ability to make alliances with fellow animals like Shaun the Sheep in A Close Shave, or

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through his outsider’s perspective that allows him to see past Wallace’s focus on social acceptance and solve the mystery of Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Yet, beyond his outsider status within the mechanics of the plot, his fantastical perspective given his anthropomorphic status pulls the story-world into a realm of self-conscious fabrication. Gromit cannot realistically become part of Wallace’s community because neither Gromit nor that community exists. Like previous examples of Aracadian British fantasy novels, Wallace and Gromit uses anthropomorphism both to express a longing for a lost world and to construct that lost world as self-consciously impossible fantasy. The representation of a sense of community that is increasingly absent from a post-industrial Britain is simultaneously celebrated through nostalgia and exoticized through fantasy, constructing the cosiness of such a landscape as both admirable and false.

Wallace and Gromit, nostalgia, satire and subversion The Arcadian tradition in British fantasy that stems from the ideas of romanticism borne in opposition to the societal effects of the industrial revolution discussed above went on to inflect the writings of authors such as Tolkien and Lewis, whose work was rooted in what Meredith Veldman terms a ‘suspicion of industrialization and empiricism’.18 Ostensibly, the manner in which technology is presented within the Wallace and Gromit universe might seem to clash with such literary and artistic traditions because Wallace’s role as an inventor not only serves as his most defining and admirable characteristic, but also often functions as the main narrative thrust that allows the story to depart from the everyday world of reality established within the narrative. Yet, whilst technology is partially celebrated within Wallace and Gromit it is also reminiscent of the nostalgia displayed in the Arcadian streak of British fantasy, treated with a degree of suspicion. In The Wrong Trousers, it is Wallace’s purchase of the eponymous Techno trousers that attracts the attention of Feathers McGraw and allows him to steal the diamond from the museum. In A Close Shave, the villainous Preston is made uncanny due to his initial ability to pass as a dog, only revealing his robotic and therefore artificial nature later in the narrative. In The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace’s ambition to cure the town of its rabbit infestation proves to be his folly as his ill-fated machine creates the beast of the title. Not only is technology often a source of antagonism within the franchise, but it is also a source of comedic incongruity, utilized often within a bathetic situation that involves a mismatch between the technological sophistication on display and the ends to which such ingenuity is being put. This helps to

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undercut the potential for a utopian celebration of technological wonder. In A Grand Day Out, Wallace is motivated to design a rocket capable of going to the moon because he has run out of cheese. The Wrong Trousers opens with an extremely elaborate wake-up system that requires the house to be fitted with trap doors, escape hatches, pulleys and other such gadgetry so that Wallace need not walk down stairs or spread jam on his toast, a feat repeated in the opening of Curse of the Were-Rabbit whereby the duo build into their elaborate preparations for their job as pest controllers a device that provides them with a cup of tea during their exit procedure. As such, technology in Wallace and Gromit interacts with the series’ aforementioned anthropomorphic traits to blur the lines between animalism and humanism. Beyond the franchise’s representation of technology, the broader satiric impulse that lies at the heart of the Wallace and Gromit universe further indicates its place within a distinctly British tradition of fantasy. As Eric Rabkhin argues, ‘[s]atire is inherently fantastic. Not only does it depend on narrative worlds that reverse the perspectives of the world outside the narrative, but also the style usually depends on irony’.19 In the traditions of British fantasy storytelling, this satiric impulse has functioned as a key characteristic of the broader tendencies towards subversion and critique. As Manlove argues, ‘[c]omic fantasy has done particularly well in England, where the impulses to laugh at absurdity and to create it are both strong’.20 Exemplified in a literary tradition stretching back to Jeffrey Chaucer through to the satires of Jonathan Swift, this comedic impulse as represented through fantasy often manifests through a dynamic expressed by Manlove as ‘the high and the low, or the little and large’.21 Frequently utilizing comedy in order to express distinctions of class, the type of subversion achieved through this fusion of fantasy and satire allows humour to be used as a force that temporarily elevates the position of the powerless at the expense of the powerful. Whether it be Titania’s devotion to the weaver Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Edward Lear’s celebration of nonsense  in opposition to the conservative values of Victorian society in poems such as ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, satire in the British fantasy tradition is used to provide a temporary position of authority to that which is often repressed or excluded from dominant discourses, a device that allows it to once again enunciate its more subversive tendencies. A similar comedic reversal of the dynamic between the powerful/ powerless is at play in Wallace and Gromit, albeit within a more transnational discourse that often positions British filmmaking traditions in opposition or in dialogue with two popular Hollywood genres of the fantastic: horror and science fiction. These parodic allusions to US genre filmmaking allow the satiric impulse that underlies a lot of British fantasy

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fiction, so often used to give voice to the powerless against the powerful in folklore, to speak to anxieties of globalization and US cultural dominance. Scott Lash and Celia Lury link the comedic elements of Wallace and Gromit to a Bergsonian theory of the comedic as a form of ‘disruption’.22 Littered with references to all manner of popular genres, an interplay is established between the fantastic elements of the world of Wallace and Gromit, which are often exemplified through its use of animation, and narratives that remain focused on the banalities of traditional British middle-class culture. In the opening credits of The Wrong Trousers, for example, the trademark opening of orchestral theme over panning shots of Wallace’s wallpaper is quickly interrupted by a scene reminiscent of horror cinema. Jagged lettering reminiscent of pulp horror magazines and pronounced shadows of the eponymous trousers on the walls recall the title sequences of the classic  1930s Universal creature features such as Frankenstein (1931) and The Wolfman (1941). Similar references to the history of both British and US horror cinema appear elsewhere in the series. The first half of The Wrong Trousers, for example, is essentially an extended riff on Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), whilst A Close Shave begins with a brief homage to Psycho (1960). The Curse of the Were-Rabbit contains numerous allusions to horror conventions, including a scene in which the foreboding sound of a church organ, first seeming to be functioning as non-diegetic accompaniment to the scene, is revealed as being played by a sheepish elderly organist. As the film then establishes the successful completion of a giant vegetable competition as its key source of dramatic tension, the typical hysterics of a classical horror film are undermined by the relatively parochial concerns of the village inhabitants. Rather than being used as vehicle for the abject or as device to discomfort audiences in lines with the aesthetics of horror cinema itself, these allusions to the horror genre are instead used as part of the traditions of satire within British fantasy. This comedic subversion of US genre cinema asserts the British identity of the franchise not only through the humorous juxtaposition of US narrative conventions and iconography and ‘middle England’ banality, but also through the broader subversive atmosphere established through these comedic tropes that draws upon traditions of British fantasy storytelling. The satiric impulse of British fantasy often seeks to lampoon figures of authority in a manner that utilizes comedy’s propensity for subversion to provide a voice for the downtrodden or imposed. A tacit but powerful component of Wallace and Gromit’s parody of genre conventions is the way US heroism is made the object of fun by channelling it through a British vernacular and sensibility. Not only does comedic subversion through fantasy occur at the level of the dramatic stakes of each Wallace and Gromit

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adventure – replacing, for example, the murder of villagers with the murder of villagers’ vegetables and a trip to the moon with a picnic on the moon – but also through the vernacular in which such stories are articulated. A similar attitude to the conventions of science fiction takes places in A Matter of Loaf and Death, whose finale contains a nod to Aliens (1986). This reference is used to knowingly and mockingly aggrandize Fluffles’s act of bravery as she thwarts Piella’s evil plan by commandeering a machine equipped with oven gloves in a manner of Aliens’ Ripley’s own assault on the alien creature to save her surrogate daughter Newt. Injecting this famous cinematic moment with the banalities of baking and oven-gloves positions a British re-appropriation of generic conventions within a far more domestic sphere. Such references not only help to negotiate a US–UK relationship in which the drama of American genres is pulled through a British lens of eccentricity and banality, but also engages with British storytelling and comic traditions as form of nostalgic celebration. In this way, the comedy of Wallace and Gromit manifests what Wells refers to as the post-1980 turn within animation towards ‘observational comic tropes’ and away from the counter-cultural discourses of the earlier decades.23 Through a dialogue between British and US traditions in genres such as horror, comedy and science fiction, the fantastic in Wallace and Gromit contributes to a transnational dialogue that both subverts and celebrates such conventions. This allows the comedic element of the franchise to be rooted in distinctly national concerns, subverting the assumed power and influence of US genre cinema in a comparable way to the subversion of authority in traditional British fantasy literature.

Conclusion: Wallace and Gromit in the quest for the carnivalesque This chapter has situated some of the formal and stylistic conventions of the Wallace and Gromit universe within the broader traditions of British fantasy storytelling in order to better pinpoint some of the characteristics that identify the stories as quintessentially British, despite the fact they depart so much from the contemporary reality of living within the UK. Looking at Park’s nostalgic-fuelled creation of a world somewhere between the pages of The Beano and the monster movies of Ray Harryhausen, it is difficult to ignore the manner in which Wallace and Gromit departs from reality not only at a physical level, but at a social level as well. The films are full of talking animals, far-fetched gadgets and silly puns. They are also lacking in social and cultural diversity, presenting only a very narrow subsection of traditional British society that excludes more than it includes.

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Assessing any fantasy text within such sociopolitical parameters will often lead one quickly into some rather broad and long-standing debates. Conceived partially as a form of protest against dominant trends within European society towards rationalism and empiricism, fantasy fiction has long been defined through a dialectical critical commentary that  has simultaneously celebrated the genre’s potential to subvert the givens and assumptions of a preconceived notion of reality whilst at the same time deriding the political opportunities contained within such an act of subversion. Sharing an iconography with European folk stories, fantasy is bound by a sensibility that, as Mikhail Bakhtin describes, is ‘saturated with a specific carnival sense of the world’.24 It has the ability to make the fool the king for a day, but that process can be argued to either highlight the inherent idiocy of such political institutions or else provide justification for the order of things by setting itself up as a form of transgression from a supposed ‘norm’. As Rosemary Jackson argues, fantasy fiction ultimately constitutes not a transgression or a replication of reality but rather operates a form of ‘paraxis’.25 It subverts and supports, is bound by the socio-historical context it emerges from and yet deliberately transcends that context. Wallace and Gromit’s place within this debate is similarly paradoxical in that it contains much that can be argued to be subversive in the manner in which it utilizes certain fantasy conventions. Its use of anthropomorphism gives its world a fantastic charge that then allows it plenty of space to critique certain aspects of contemporary British culture, to which the world of Wallace and Gromit offers a transgressive alternative. It presents technology in a spectacular, nostalgic manner, rejecting a world bound by rationality. It celebrates British eccentricity over British conformity, offering this as a comedic foil to the larger forces of globalization and Americanization through its dialogue with genre conventions. Yet, the franchise also presents a world that shows little awareness of the important changes that have taken place within British society over the past half century and strikes a note of nostalgia that seems to wish for a less complicated, and less diverse, Britain than the one that currently exists. As its stylized world of British cosiness becomes increasingly divorced from reality, the fantasy on screen begins to avoid the world off screen altogether. By staying true to many features of British fantasy storytelling, Wallace and Gromit plays on traditional and outmoded concepts of British nationality, defining itself largely through a white, Anglo-Saxon culture from which such conventions have emerged. On the one hand, that outdated concept of ‘Britishness’ is worth critiquing through fantasy and the franchise can be said to do that. On the other, by only critiquing this aspect of British identity, whole swathes of British society and culture are left out of the process, conspicuous in their absence. If Wallace

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and Gromit is a very British fantasy franchise, then such a classification might say as much about the ephemeral nature of nationality as it does about the ephemeral nature of fantasy.

Notes J.P. Telotte, Animating Space (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010), p. 15. 2 A.O. Scott, ‘A New Challenge for an Englishman and His Dog’, New York Times, 5 October 2005, p. E1; Leslie Felperin, ‘Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit’, Variety, 26 September 2005, p. 54. 3 Colin Manlove, The Fantasy Literature of England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 10. 4 Rachel K. Boseley, ‘Animating Atmosphere’, American Cinematographer, October 2005. p. 6. Available at: https://www.theasc.com/magazine/oct05/ curse/page6.html (accessed 19 December 2015). 5 Cited in Owen Gibson, ‘A One-Off Quirky Thing’, The Guardian, 21 July 2008. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/jul/21/ television (accessed 1 November 2015). 6 A summary of this period of writing is provided in Gary K. Wolfe, ‘Fantasy from Dryden to Dunsany’, in E. James and F. Mendlesohn (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 7–20. 7 Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 20. 8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991). Emphasis added. The term ‘imagined community’ represents the central argument of Anderson’s famous treatise on nationalism and can be found throughout this text. For an introduction to the concept, see pp. 1–9. 9 Brian Stableford, ‘The British and American Traditions of Speculative Fiction’, in M.K. Langford (ed.), Contours of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 40. 10 Their writings are an attempt to atone for a relative dearth of indigenous folk tales and romantic sagas in comparison to those of nations like Germany in which the world-building narratives exemplified in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen helped to forge part of a growing sense of nationhood. If Tolkien and Lewis had truly tried to replicate this in British fantasy fiction, then their fantasy creations might have built on surviving British folk tales such as Jack and the Beanstalk, Tom Thumb and Dick Whittington with, as Manlove elaborates, their combination of ‘mute courtliness, chivalry, love, idealism and religion, with heroism, decency, generosity, loyalty and common sense’. Manlove, The Fantasy Literature of England, p. 17. 1

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11 Van Norris, British Television Animation 1997–2010: Drawing Comic Tradition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 34. 12 Cited in ‘“Warm and Cosy” British Animation’, BBC News, 16 March 2012. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/ newsid_9706000/9706363.stm (accessed 28 November 2015). 13 Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 60. 14 Watership Down is referenced within the Wallace and Gromit franchise in Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Gromit briefly stumbles across Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, a song featured heavily in the animated adaptation released in 1978, whilst flicking through a number of different radio stations. 15 Juliet Kellogg Markowsky, ‘Why Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature?’, Elementary English 52, no. 4 (April 1975), p. 466. 16 John Pennington, ‘From Peter Rabbit to Watership Down: There and Back Again to the Arcadian Ideal’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 3, no. 2 (1991), p. 68. 17 Ibid., pp. 77–8. 18 Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 3. 19 Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 146. 20 Manlove, The Fantasy Literature of England, p. 114. 21 Ibid., p. 115. 22 Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 92. 23 Paul Wells, ‘“The Sight of 40-Year-Old Genitalia Too Disgusting, Is It?” Wit, Whimsy and Wishful Thinking in British Animation, 1900-Present’, in I.Q. Hunter and L. Porter (eds), British Comedy Cinema (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012), p. 204. 24 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 107. 25 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 19.

Section Three

Process and Production

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Animation Storyboarding as Part of the Pre-Production Process: An Aardman Case Study Paul Ward

Introduction There is little doubt that the pre-production process is a vitally important stage for any film, where things are planned, mapped out and what has often been referred to as a ‘blueprint’ for the production drawn up. Because of the labour-intensiveness of the animation process, this pre-production planning arguably becomes even more important. There are signs of an increase in scholarly interest in the processes of animation production – including preproduction aspects of the pipeline such as storyboards, character designs, concept work and pre-visualization.1 This has partly been driven by the welcome reframing of approaches to film, media and animation industry practice that has followed in the wake of the shift to a ‘production studies’ paradigm marked itself by a deeper attention to production artefacts, spaces and behaviours.2 Despite this welcome shift in emphasis, it is still routine for storyboards to be presented in the literature in a normative, instrumentalist, ‘common sense’ manner.3 For example, ‘the main purpose of the board is to provide a practical and accurate idea of how the finished film will turn out’.4 Additionally, ‘art of ’ and ‘how to’-type books about storyboarding (e.g., Fionnuala Halligan’s The Art of Movie Storyboards or Giuseppe Cristiano’s The Storyboard Design Course) present this key pre-production process as self-evident rather than analysing the type of work it entails.5 Central to my discussion is an examination of storyboarding in the wider context of animation labour – not only as labour in and of itself (storyboarding is a highly skilled job), but as a process which is indicative of the future labour of others. The overall objective is to further develop and deepen the ways in which we might understand the animation process as ‘labour intensive’. It is commonplace to refer to animation in general in this

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way – and it seems to be especially true of how stop-motion animation is perceived.6 But what does this notion of ‘labour intensiveness’ mean for particular specialists, like storyboard artists, within the overall animation production process? Historically, the work of the storyboard artist seems to inhabit a contradictory space in that they are recognized as a vital part of the pre-production phase of the pipeline – playing an essential role in the development of the storytelling – but at the same time their role, and the artefacts they produce, is often devalued and seen as subordinate to other parts of the production process. Unlike many other aspects of stop-motion animation production, recent digital technological innovations have not materially changed this relationship. As Chris Pallant and Steven Price note, ‘[a]lthough [the move to a digital workflow] represents a radical shift in the materiality of the storyboard […] its functionality remains relatively unchanged’.7 This productive tension between materiality and functionality is an important way of understanding artefacts like storyboards, and the labour that underpins them. As we shall see in relation to Aardman in particular, the storyboarding phase is not only a multifaceted and iterative stage of story development, the boards also play a vital role in the highly complex production management of their projects.

Storyboards: Histories and discourses The ‘invention’ (or gradual evolution and development) of the storyboard tends to be credited to Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s. Usually attributed to Disney artist Webb Smith, there was a move from ‘comic strip’-style visual mapping out of stories in notebooks to a more formal drawing of specific actions on separate sheets, which could then be pinned to a board, in sequence. According to Christopher Finch: If changes had to be made, drawings could be moved or taken down and replaced. It was the ideal method for developing an animated film, and it was perfectly suited to Disney’s style. He no longer drew, but he could shape the movie at the storyboard phase, controlling the overall structure.8

There are a number of notable things implied here: the notion of ‘visual planning’ being an integral part of story development; the fact that this new process gave a sequential ‘overview’ of the entire story; that this ‘overview’, in turn, enabled efficiencies in terms of improvements to the film; and, finally, that this seemingly collaborative story process was ultimately controlled

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by Disney via his Story Department. The ‘story conference’ stage became subject to intense scrutiny by the studio management and, according to Mark Langer, ‘by using the script and the storyboard as a choke point, Disney could oversee production. The Story Department became the chief organ of this management and occupied a place at the very top of the hierarchical pyramid.’9 In their celebrated book about Disney animation, The Illusion of Life, Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston recall: Writers of proven skill had been brought into the studio, but they were seldom given a chance to write. A script could be used in the beginning to show suggestions of what might be done with the material, but more often the ideas were talked over, tossed around, beaten to death, changed discarded, revamped, built upon and “milked” without a single word being put on paper. Since animation is a visual medium, it is important that the story ideas, the characters, the business, the continuity, and the  relationships be presented in visual form rather than in words. So the storyboard was invented.10

The breezy, determinist language (‘so the storyboard was invented’) masks what was no doubt a more complex emergence of a way of working and glosses over the power relations at play. These bubble to the surface in a distinction Thomas and Johnston make elsewhere in their book between the ‘storyman’ and the ‘sketch man’ – and a nascent division of labour (‘the storyman did the talking in the meetings’)11 – with the former being very near the top of Langer’s hierarchical pyramid (because those in the Story Department reported directly to Disney himself). As Matt Stahl has argued, there is a tension, though this is certainly not unique to animation production, between ‘above the line’ creative personnel (including writers, producers and directors) and ‘below the line’ craft and technical labour (which would include storyboard artists), a tension that is exacerbated by the often creative interventions that storyboard artists, despite being below the liners, make to the stories (e.g. in the form of adding, or improving the timing of, gags). Stahl cites one telling example of a 2002 case when ‘a group of Animation Guild writers, well aware of authorial contributions by lower-paid storyboard artists, sought to shore up the boundaries around their own positions and downplay the originating work of the [storyboard] artists’, with the clear implication being that the writers’ labour was more valuable and creative than that of the storyboard artists.12 We can identify here a tendency for talking about the work of storyboard artists, and the storyboards they produce, as an important but ultimately

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subordinate part of the filmmaking process as a whole: important, because the key scenes, actions, character relations and so on are ‘mapped out’ in what then becomes seen as a ‘blueprint’ for the future film; subordinate in that this process is ultimately driven and overseen not by the storyboard artists, but by what would be termed the ‘story men’ in Thomas and Johnston’s parlance, along with the directors and producers. This perceived subordinate role of storyboard artists and their labour is borne out by a further detail from the 2002 case Stahl cites: the writers argued that storyboard artists should not be referred to as ‘artists’ at all, but should be termed ‘graphic enhancers’. Alongside this way of talking about storyboard artists, there is also the tone of instrumentality of much of the discourse around the actual storyboards. They have a common sense meaning and function: they ‘serve a purpose’, namely to ‘board out the story’. They are, apparently, simply a means to an end – to make the film and tell the story in as clear and efficient way as possible. One of the things that we can draw out from just the brief historical references above is that storyboarding emerged from a specific model of animation production  – the streamlined, for-profit, efficiency-driven studio system innovated by Disney. As we shall see, though, the emergence of storyboarding as a distinct process in the pipeline – from its roots in the looser ‘story meetings’ where animators would rehearse gags and other business – has meant that there are some important aspects of how various different types of animation labour can be conflated, or even ignored, in favour of other roles in production that are deemed to be more valuable.

Aardman’s approaches to storyboarding Writing about storyboarding within the specific contexts of stop-motion animation and Aardman conforms with the way that storyboarding, when it is actually discussed at all, is positioned as a certain kind of animation work that is valued in particular ways. For example, Ken Priebe’s The Advanced Art of Stop-motion Animation has no entries at all for ‘storyboards’ in the index;13 Aardman’s book Cracking Animation, about their animation production process,14 has a few pages on storyboards, but these are more descriptive than analytical. Barry Purves’s book Stop-motion includes some comments on storyboards and pre-visualization in a subsection titled ‘Working with others’.15 However, discussions with Aardman personnel reveal the fundamental role that storyboarding plays in the studio’s production process. To a certain extent, storyboarding at Aardman conforms to the perception discussed above – as a functional activity that is subordinate to the ultimate storytelling of the film. It is equally clear, however, that the storyboarding process cannot simply be equated with ‘mapping’ the story or creating a

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‘blueprint’ for the film – it is an integral part of the creative process of story development more generally. Long-standing Aardman director Luis Cook, for example, notes that in a lot of cases the starting point for what becomes a fully worked board is the director’s own sketches and swift thumbnails. In some cases, such activity is a form of visual development from a written script or story idea, although this is not always the case. Michael Salter, Head of Storyboarding at Aardman, likewise noted that when working on Nick Park’s films, there might be a broad scenario but the ‘scripting’ is something that is initially ‘worked out’ by Park himself, acting out the scenes and doing rough thumbnails in the way that Cook suggests.16 This chimes with what Paul Wells outlines,17 namely  that the specific qualities of animation often mean that a ‘script’ as such (as in a formalized, written document) might not exist – or, if it does, it has emerged from (and not necessarily prior to) the ferment of story meetings, LAV (live-action video) sessions,18 thumbnail sketches and other aspects of pre-production that are completely visual and practical in nature. In effect, the storyboarding stage of the process is one where the tangle of ideas, gags and the director’s overall vision starts to be formalized into a document that enables the film to actually get made. Cook has referred to storyboarding ‘[a]s a distillation process’, thereby drawing attention to the ways in which the storyboarding process concentrates or distils the essential components of the story.19 Similarly, Wells has used the term ‘condensation’ to refer to the specific properties of animation that enable certain storytelling conventions to come to the fore  – those to do with compression of actions, alongside certain tropes such as sudden transformation/metamorphosis, or what we might call the ‘economy’ of character design. Although Wells uses the term ‘condensation’ to pinpoint what he sees as an underlying quality or trait of animation in general, he makes a similar point about animation script development and storyboarding when he talks about it being a compressed or condensed ‘shorthand’ that implies a ‘bigger picture’ without explicitly showing every detail.20 This suggests that the ‘blueprint’ analogy for storyboarding is inaccurate – as Cook makes clear, the process is not about mapping out every last detail of the story, it is about capturing the essence of the scenes. As Cook says, ‘with storyboards, clarity is everything, but you are looking to “plus” the script, make it more visual. It is important to show, not tell, and minimize exposition’.21 The purpose of the storyboarding process, then, is not simply to map out the story in a routinely ‘functional’ way, but to act as a space in which the overall creative process of story development can be played out – eventually leading to the ‘distilled’ or finalized boards that are used for the final shoot.

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This broad functionality of storyboards as a creative tool is something that is common to all studios and production contexts, but it is equally apparent that an artist or studio may utlize storyboards in different ways depending on the specific production context and animation technique. For example, Richard Phelan, storyboard artist for Aardman notes: The differences between 2D, CG, and Stop-Motion often come into effect later in the boarding process as the initial pass is an attempt to make the story as good as possible. Afterwards [with stop motion] we will then go through the boards to look for things like: what sets are needed, number of puppets, camera movements, etc. and make amendments.22

This highlights the fact that, like any aspect of pre-production, assets like storyboards (and here we can also include character designs or concept work for locations/layouts) go through various iterations: Phelan’s reference to ‘the initial pass’ is what many in the industry would refer to as ‘the rough’ (as in a ‘rough version’ of the board). Phelan emphasizes that the initial focus has to be on story (and, in Aardman’s case, this more often than not means gags): getting that right involves reiterations and reworking. However, Phelan’s comment also points to a ‘second order of business’ when it comes specifically to stop-motion animation production. Alongside thinking about making the story ‘as good as possible’, the team need to go through the boards and think logistically about sets, puppets, how the camera will navigate the space and so on. Arguably, these are not things that other forms of animation need to think about (or not in the same way, at least).23 They are more properly thought of as production management – a vital part of the production pipeline at Aardman, due to the fine balance of assets like puppets, sets and props that need to be constructed, and the shooting and animating schedule that needs to be mapped out. It is apparent, therefore, that the value of the storyboards at Aardman is directly linked not only to the creative process, but also to their important function in the overall production management of the projects. Aardman Production Manager Richard (‘Beeky’) Beek’s sense of the purpose and function of storyboards confirms this, and links directly with what Phelan says: In stop motion the storyboard provides a great deal of the information required by every department involved (what sets, puppet and props are required) – but for this information to be of real value the storyboards need to be applied to a schedule. This should be done repeatedly at every stage of boarding – this not only allows each department to plan ahead

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(build/delivery schedules) but also to be able to highlight potential issues to Production/Director.24

Beeky’s reference to ‘every stage of boarding’ emphasizes that at this stage in pre-production an overall schematic for the film will be mapped out (what Phelan refers to as a complete ‘initial pass’ of the storyboard), but then more detailed/polished versions of the boards will be produced that respond to some of these logistical, production management questions. It is clear from this that the specific requirements of storyboarding in stop-motion mean that they have to be ‘readable’ as important planning documents in terms of production management – a guide not just to how the story will unfold but also to set building, puppet building, prop building and other aspects of delivery. My argument to this point has focused mainly on how storyboarding for animation is part of the pre-production process that distils or condenses story ideas into a functional visual document. It ‘tells the story’, but it also has other important functions – namely enabling the smooth planning and management of the shoot, something that is of paramount importance for stop-motion animation.25 Cook clearly identifies an aspect of this when he summarizes what might be said at a board review: ‘OK, if that’s the shot, how are we going to get lights and animators in there?’26 Clearly, whatever the type of animation, the action, movement of characters and so on need to make sense in terms of the logic of the story world. But stop-motion has a particular set of constraints in the shooting process which means that the shots need to make sense at that other important level – that of the animators, director of photography, director and other members of the team working on set. This observation is backed up by Beeky, when he notes some key criteria, especially in relation to how boards need to be considered in the  context of budgeting and overall planning. In talking about the Shaun the Sheep television series, he says: The tighter the budget/schedule, normally the tighter the production requirement from the storyboard – the Shaun the Sheep series is probably the best example of how we create films/animatics around these very detailed and strict production requirements. There are: • A target number of shots per episode (averaged across the series) • A target running time of animatic + small allowance for growth on studio floor (handles on the shot)27 • Looking for repeat angles/reuses of set ups • Shots shouldn’t regularly require camera moves and/or multiple passes and should be sympathetic to required shot rate and minimizing clean up/rig removal.

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• Character count – avoid a reliance on shots which required large numbers of characters. • Boards should be realistic/work within parameters of existing sets and be reasonably accurate in terms of scale – avoiding scale cheats which cannot be replicated on the studio floor.28 As can be seen, there are a number of important production constraints that need to be borne in mind at the storyboarding stage. His focus on Shaun the Sheep (the TV series) means that the specific requirements of stop-motion are foregrounded in his remarks. It is notable that there is a recognition to be mindful of having too many characters in shots – something that most animation, not just stop-motion, is likely to bear in mind – but most of his points here relate to the production (and post-production) activities of stop-motion and the specific labour involved. So, there is also recognition that storyboards should enable the reuse of expensive-to-build sets and should avoid camera movement if possible. Boards should be constructed with rig removal (the process in post-production where puppet rigs/supports are digitally removed) and other post-production clean-up in mind. In other words, storyboarding, as a phase of pre-production, in order to be effective, needs to bear in mind the steps that need to be taken during the production and post-production phases. The remark relating to rig removal demonstrates that there are highly specific and detailed elements of the workflow that will be ‘mapped out’ at the storyboarding phase. Storyboarders at Aardman therefore have to be particularly mindful of the labour of others later in the production process. Another storyboard artist at Aardman, Ashley Boddy, notes the distinction between boarding for different types of stop-motion project, in particular the differences between commercials, broadcast (i.e. TV series like Shaun the Sheep) and feature films. When talking about the broadcast regime, his comments back up what Beeky says: There is a fairly tight schedule so you get a couple of passes at an episode and then, generally, it gets made. […] You tend to think more economically in terms of storytelling … so you look for shot set-ups you can re-use, the set you’re using (stop motion specific), [and] number of characters on screen.29

In other words, the storyboard artist needs to keep in mind the economy of storytelling and Boddy states that the storyboarders will look for where they can ‘be smart with staging to get the same point across in less time’.30 Yet this economy in storytelling is also wedded to an understanding of other types of economy in production. It is clear then that storyboards need to

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have readability and be understood across the entire spectrum of production activity by many different people. This links back to the point made earlier, quoting Pallant and Price, about the materiality and functionality of storyboards: the specific form they take (their materiality) and the purpose(s) they serve in the workflow (their functionality) are crucial in helping us understand how they modulate animation labour. Storyboarders therefore need to have an intimate understanding of how their ‘working through’ of the story elements will be interpreted by other people.

The production ‘domains’ of storyboard labour at Aardman In her article on how storyboard artists work with and cognitively process ‘roughs’ as part of the overall storyboarding process, Janet Blatter notes: Popular and industry publications depict a linear workflow process that proceeds from script, graphic model packs, storyboard, timing (line tests or animatics), rendered artwork and animation (characters and backgrounds), sound and dialogue editing, and so on to postproduction. However, unlike the ideal presented in manuals, studio animation practice is messier.31

The ‘ideal’ that Blatter refers to is part of the common sense/instrumentalist discourse about parts of the process and the pipeline in general – the ‘we do it this way because that’s the way it gets done/it gets done because we do it this way’ tautology. As Blatter’s work demonstrates, this does not mean that the people who work in animation studios are unthinking or uncritical – far from it – but it does show that when parts of the process are considered ‘routine’ or ‘non-problematic’ then they will be done on what she calls ‘automatic pilot’.32 Again, this sounds like a pejorative term, but Blatter makes clear through her use of the term ‘cognitive chunking’ that ‘experts […] remember complex ideas by structuring and clustering them together’.33 So, their expertise and skill is in little doubt, but it is the production cultures in which they are working that drive their activities in a certain direction. Blatter’s conceptual frame for understanding storyboards offers three ‘domains’ in which they function and need to be ‘read’: as an intended film (filmic), as a hypothetical world (fictive) and as a future activity (directive).34 Paul Wells has picked up on Blatter’s points, noting that boards therefore function as ‘a creative tool, a planning tool and a production tool’.35 Blatter also notes:

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The rough board is used to review the filmic and fictive worlds in terms of editorial and practical consequences, and to direct the clean-up artists as to what components need to be refined, detailed or added for line testing. When a board is reviewed in the directive domain, it must be complete, accurate, and display efficient use of human and financial resources. At a local level, the rough must be complete and accurate enough for its reviewers to evaluate it. Nonetheless, a rough is functionally incomplete; if the panels included all of the elements, it would lose its effectiveness as a sketch.36

Blatter’s focus is on the rough board as part of the entire boarding process, and how these are ‘read’ from a cognitive perspective; she is interested in how artists, animators and others involved in the production read or infer from the inevitably ‘incomplete’ information present in different versions of the boards. One of the central paradoxes here is also highlighted – namely in what Blatter calls the ‘directive domain’, that the rough’s incompleteness and ambiguity is both a strength (precisely because it is ‘open’ and enables discussion around action and so on) and a potential weakness (precisely because it is incomplete and open to manifold interpretation). The paradoxical tension inherent in storyboards being both complete (in the sense that they show a ‘shot by shot’ breakdown of a film) and incomplete (in that they are open to interpretation and inferences from those working with them) can be discerned in the aforementioned analogy of the ‘blueprint’. Pallant and Price note how widespread the analogy is, whilst taking issue with its accuracy and noting a preference for Kathryn Millard’s use of the term ‘prototype’.37 The main problem with the term ‘blueprint’ of course is that it implies a technical drawing that is meant to be followed to the last detail (with things like room dimensions or window sizes in an architectural blueprint, or the exact sizes of components in a piece of machinery) otherwise the artefact being planned will not work. Storytelling – and the phase of storytelling captured by the storyboard – simply isn’t like that and there are multiple spaces within the process that not only enable but actively encourage interpretation and further development work. Certainly the initial sketches, followed by the ‘rough’ or first pass of the board, will embody a range of possible approaches and outcomes, but even once the board is cleaned up and locked down, there is still scope for creative interpretation. Matt Stahl has examined the ways in which the labour of storyboard artists needs to be seen in the context of the overall structure of the animation industry, noting that there is an inbuilt tendency towards certain ‘below the line’ workers engaging in what he calls ‘non-proprietary authorship’. Roughly

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translated, this means taking ‘ownership’ of something for which you don’t get remunerated. For example, storyboard artists who contribute and rework gags when this is, strictly speaking, the work of the more highly paid writers, who end up receiving formal credit and pay for this work. Part of the issue here is that there are in-built (and seemingly inevitable?) ‘grey areas’ in the pre-production process – we can see this in the already-cited comments where a director might thumbnail or rough out a scenario, and perhaps even contribute to later iterations of a storyboard, alongside the storyboard artists. The notion of the boards functioning within a ‘directive’ domain (as a future activity) again emphasizes the importance of seeing them as pre-production artefacts that map out the future labour on the production in question. Boddy identifies how such creative interpretation, story development and (specifically) reworking of scenes/gags can continue during the shooting stages of production.38 He notes at one point that ‘there’s always a last man standing’ in the storyboard teams – meaning that, as the rest of the story team are redeployed to other projects, one person remains on board in order to rework specific shots as required. (Boddy fulfilled this role on Aardman’s most recent feature Early Man.) This further emphasizes the importance of storyboarding in the overall production. The initial boarding process is about developing and then distilling the story as much as possible so that the intense labour required at the animation stage is directed in the right way (and no resources or labour are wasted). Nevertheless, some modifying or reworking of scenes or actions is always going to be required and the iterative dialogue noted by Boddy demonstrates that the storyboarders are the essential link in this process and play an important role in all three of Blatter’s ‘domains’ by helping to regulate the animation labour required at all points in any given production. What is notable about examining storyboarding through these ‘lenses’ is that it gives us important insight into how a studio such as Aardman negotiates the specifics of its mode of production, and how it negotiates the complexities of stop-motion animation from the pre-production phase through to completion. One of the underlying points of this chapter has been to examine the ways in which a pre-production process like storyboarding is part of the managing of other people’s labour later in the production pipeline. Storyboarding is certainly a creative and imaginative activity, operating in the ‘filmic’ and ‘fictive’ domains, as defined by Blatter. The idea of storyboards existing in a ‘directive’ domain, however, means they need to be understood as an indication of future activity: the functional value of the storyboards lies in the way they are used to regulate, manage and predict workflow in this most labour intensive of production contexts.

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Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

See, for example, Paul Wells, Scriptwriting (Basics Animation) (Lausanne: AVA Publishing, 2007) and ‘Boards, Beats, Binaries and Bricolage: Approaches to the Animation Script’, in J. Nelmes (ed.), Analysing the Screenplay (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 89–105; Tony Tarantini, ‘Pictures That Do Not Really Exist: Mitigating the Digital Crisis in Traditional Animation Production’, Animation Practice, Process & Production 1, no. 2 (2012), pp. 249–71; Matthew Teevan, ‘Animating by Numbers: Workflow Issues in Shane Acker’s 9’, Animation Practice, Process & Production 1, no. 1 (2011), pp. 83–96; Matt Stahl ‘Nonproprietary Authorship and the Uses of Autonomy: Artistic Labor in American Film Animation, 1900–2004’, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2, no. 4 (2005), pp. 87–105; and ‘Cultural Labor’s “Democratic Deficits”: Employment, Autonomy and Alienation in US Film Animation’, Journal for Cultural Research 14, no. 3 (2010), pp. 271–93; Janet Blatter, ‘Roughing It: A Cognitive Look at Storyboarding’, Animation Journal 15 (2007), pp. 4–23; Chris Pallant and Steve Price, Storyboarding: A Critical History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). Work in this field is epitomized by John Caldwell’s book Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) and the anthology Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, ed. Vicki Mayer, ­Miranda Banks and John Caldwell), as well as the online Media Industries journal (www. mediaindustriesjournal.org/). See Caldwell, Production Culture on how ‘common sense’ thinking structures much of the professionalized discourses in media production. Barry Purves, Stop-Motion (Basics Animation) (Lausanne: AVA Publishing, 2010), p. 120. It is in the nature of these sorts of books – ‘Art of …’ and ‘Making of …’ type books – that the production processes are ‘laid bare’, but this is done in a very specific way, that ‘frames’ things normatively rather than opening them up for critique. An honourable exception in book-length form is Chris Pallant and Steven Price’s Storyboarding: A Critical History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015) which carefully examines storyboards across a variety of contexts and identifies how they function in the overall production process. See, for example, Alice Gambrell, ‘In Visible Hands: The Work of Stop Motion’, Animation Practice, Process & Production 1, no. 1 (2011), pp. 107– 29, who draws attention to various discussions of the labour-intensiveness of animation in general and stop-motion animation in particular; Siobhan Synnot, ‘Wallace and Gromit Creator Opens Up on Latest Animation’, The Scotsman, 16 January 2018. Available at: https://www.scotsman.com/news/ wallace-and-gromit-creator-opens-up-on-latest-animation-1-4662240

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(accessed 17 January 2018), who refers to stop-motion at one point as ‘perhaps the slowest, most labour-intensive artistic activity since the building of the pyramids’; and Andrew Pettie, ‘The Painstaking Production of Shaun the Sheep’, The Telegraph, 20 November 2009. Available at: http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/6617069/The-painstakingproduction-of-Shaun-the-Sheep.html (accessed 17 January 2018), which contains the exclamatory pun ‘Ewe won’t believe how long it takes to make …’, and notes at various points that it is ‘preposterously laborious’, has a ‘dizzying attention to detail’ and that ‘[w]orking methodically on these scaled-down sets … requires the patience of a primary school maths teacher and the precision of a keyhole surgeon’. 7 Pallant and Price, Storyboarding, p. 12. 8 Christopher Finch, The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdom (London: Virgin, 1995), pp. 27–8. 9 Mark Langer, ‘Institutional Power and the Fleischer Studios: The “Standard Production Reference”’, Cinema Journal 30, no. 2 (1991), p. 7. 10 Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (New York: Disney Editions, 1981), p. 195. 11 Ibid. 12 Stahl, ‘Nonproprietary Authorship and the Uses of Autonomy’, p. 100. 13 Ken Priebe, The Advanced Art of Stop Motion Animation (Boston, MA: Course Technology/ Cengage, 2011). 14 Peter Lord and Brian Sibley, Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3D Animation (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2010). 15 Purves, Stop-Motion, pp. 120–1. 16 Michael Salter, interview with author (10 March 2015). 17 Wells, ‘Boards, Beats, Binaries and Bricolage’. 18 LAVs is an acronym for live-action videos – brief recordings of the animators, director, storyboard artists ‘acting out’ certain scenes, character relations and actions, and so on. These are then used as reference material for further development and iterations of the story, the characters and the boards. 19 Cook, interview with author (22 January 2015). 20 Wells, ibid. 21 Cook, ibid. 22 Richard Phelan, interview with author (1 May 2015). 23 Clearly, other types of narrative animation – 2D/drawn and CG being the main ones – also require careful planning of the story world and mapping out of the spaces (and times) in which the narrative unfolds. But the requirement of production personnel to actually ‘get into’ the space physically is of course not the same at all. Stop-motion requires that animators need to be able to manipulate puppets, lights and camera need to be moved around, and the boarding of the scenes needs to be mindful of these processes.

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24 Richard Beek, interview with author (9 March 2015), my emphasis. 25 Clearly some of the characteristics I note here (about the stop-motion animation shoot) are also applicable to storyboarding for live-action filmmaking, and it is certainly true that stop-motion and live action have some considerable overlaps at this level. What is intriguing is the extent to which the storyboarding process for stop-motion helps to distil the story in order to absolutely minimize the amount of shooting (i.e. animating) that needs to be done. As Ashley Boddy notes in a video interview with Adam Savage: ‘it’s almost like you’re making the mistakes [in storyboarding] so that you’re eliminating all the possibilities down to just what it could be.’ [‘Storyboarding a Stop-motion Film’, YouTube video, 21 February 2018. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99037H-Bac (accessed 3 May 2018).] 26 Cook, ibid. 27 When Beeky refers to ‘handles’ on a shot, he is drawing attention to what in live-action shooting would be a form of ‘coverage’ – i.e. ensuring that a specific scene is ‘covered’ from a variety of angles, enabling cutaways in the edit suite and so on. In the case of ‘handles’, these refer to animating a little beyond what is strictly necessary for the shot itself, giving enough flexibility in the editing stage for cutting and other transitions. 28 Beek, ibid. 29 Boddy, interview with author (13 February 2015). 30 Ibid. 31 Blatter, ‘Roughing It’, p. 11 (original emphasis). 32 Ibid., p. 14. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 8. 35 Wells, ‘Boards, Beats, Binaries and Bricolage’, p. 92. 36 Blatter’s immediate focus in the point she is making is 2D animation, hence the reference here to ‘line testing’, but the general points she is making about board review and ‘completeness’ are applicable to other forms of animation, including stop-motion. Blatter, p. 13. 37 Pallant and Price, Storyboarding, pp. 5–7. 38 ‘Storyboarding a Stop-motion Film’.

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Life’s a Treat: Shaun, Timmy, Aardman and Children’s Television Linda Simensky

In addition to their well-known short films, feature films and commercials, Aardman Animations has had significant impact on children’s television, ranging from their series of shorts, The Amazing Adventures of Morph in 1980, to their recent short form series Shaun the Sheep (2007–16) and Timmy Time (2009–12). After Aardman’s success with Wallace and Gromit, along with other award-winning short films and commercials, producing series for television was a logical next step. Frequently, short films and commercials are stepping stones to feature films and television series for successful animation studios. Historically, television was particularly appealing for studios aiming for the widest possible audience. However, television, with its punishing production schedules, limited budgets, targeted demographics and network executives, is not always a perfect fit for a production company with quirky ideas and broad audience appeal. As such, Aardman’s work for television has not always fit neatly within the confines of demographically targeted television channels and programming blocks. Despite the success of their children’s television series in the UK and internationally, the studio has often found the television model more challenging than working in features, shorts, commercials or even digital production. Over the years, Aardman’s approach to television, particularly television for children, changed several times. As shifts in the animation and entertainment industries led to new or changing audience demographics and changing funding strategies, Aardman encountered several challenges as they considered producing series for television. First, they needed to determine if the company wanted to be in the international television market. And if they did, they needed to decide if their focus would remain broad – family programming – or whether they would also produce programming specifically aimed at children. Given the typical funding structures of television co-productions, Aardman also had to decide whether they would be comfortable sharing creative control with networks

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or production partners. Despite these potential obstacles, Aardman created a number of television series, several of them for children. This chapter will examine Aardman’s forays into children’s television, with a look at two of their popular series, the Wallace and Gromit spin-off, Shaun the Sheep and that series’ ­spin-off, Timmy Time, and will consider the particular challenges that children’s TV presented to Aardman’s working practices and brand integrity. Aardman first came to public attention with the Morph character (which appeared in  1977), and they later gained wider recognition through the original Creature Comforts short (1989) and the Wallace and Gromit short films (1989–2008). This output reached a mass audience through television and represented a unique sensibility that was funny for all ages. To an international audience, the Aardman productions captured a very British view of the world, through eccentric but charming characters such as Wallace from Wallace and Gromit and, later, the farmer in Shaun the Sheep. The timing of their earlier work was particularly auspicious – animation was not only growing in popularly through the late 1980s and 1990s, but it was also no longer being seen as only for children. The perception of animation as family viewing had last been prevalent in the  1940s and  1950s with the theatrically released short animated films, made by Disney and the other animation studios of the time, that were screened alongside feature films. Subsequently, the advent of television turned animation into children’s fare.1 The resurgence of animation overall in the late 1980s opened up a number of opportunities for enterprising animators to present their work to a broader audience once again. With Aardman’s success in the early 1990s, the company was looking for areas to diversify and grow beyond their half-hour specials, short films and the commercials that helped fund the company. They had already committed to producing feature films. The animation industry was still growing at this point, but there were not that many outlets for production beyond film and television. So, with their comedic sensibility and appealing characters, a key potential area for growth was children’s television. Producing children’s television, however, presented new, quite specific, challenges. The economics of children’s television are of a different order to features and commercials, which have much higher per-minute budgets and longer production times. And while there is some freedom when producing for children over the age of six, the educational and standards requirements of children’s television for younger viewers can make television more restrictive to produce and, therefore, more frustrating for those who are not specifically interested in speaking to preschoolers. Furthermore, the expense of television programming frequently

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requires a production company to take on international partners and devise co-production schemes to fully fund a series. Producers have persisted, however, because a successful series can lead to international recognition, as well as important funding streams such as licensing, merchandising and international sales to multiple platforms. For Aardman, television was therefore a way to build the company and expand the audience for not only their characters, but also the more general Aardman sensibility and brand.

Moving into children’s TV: Shaun the Sheep Aardman’s first foray into children’s television animation was the Wallace and Gromit spin-off series Shaun the Sheep in 2007. This series of seven-minute shorts was broadcast on CBBC in the UK, the BBC children’s channel that targets viewers aged six and up. The shorts also ran as interstitials between longer series on the Disney Channel in the United States. Shaun the Sheep is a comedic plasticine stop-motion animated series about Shaun, a funloving sheep who lives with a flock on a farm run by an incompetent and myopic farmer. The mere presence of an individualist, freethinking sheep who could lead the rest of his flock to mayhem while solving problems is a funny idea, made funnier by the ridiculous situations the sheep often find themselves in. The character Shaun made his debut in A Close Shave, the 1995 Wallace and Gromit short. While Wallace and Gromit themselves were already beloved characters, Shaun was the scene-stealing, comedic breakout character in this film. When the idea for Shaun as a series first was developed, Aardman director Richard Starzak2 was asked to direct the pilot. The original writers of the pilot, David Fine and Alison Snowden, had taken the script in a preschool direction with the overall and quite general series idea being that Shaun would have adventures. In this version, Shaun had much of what he needed. He had a bike and a cart, and he could use a computer. This ultimately lacked tension, as Starzak pointed out: ‘Everything was fine for Shaun. It wouldn’t generate any stories, and actually it had nothing to do with sheep, you could replace all the characters with humans. There’s no point in them being sheep, so I said it wasn’t sheepy enough.’3 Starzak then wrote his own pilot script, Kite, in which the sheep needed to get a kite down from a tree. His idea was that Shaun would emulate the silent film comedian Buster Keaton. As such, the reference points the studio would use in developing the series were not other stop-motion preschool series, but also silent films and slapstick comedy.4

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As for the direction of the series, Starzak commented: Let’s go back to basics. What do sheep do? They eat grass, so that’s good, there are restrictions on Shaun already. They’ve got sheepdogs … they show the sheep into the field, they tell them when to start eating, when to stop, when to get back in barn. So that’s good, we’ve got something for Shaun to push against now. The introduction to the farmer, we’ve got this hierarchy. We’ve got the farmer who’s actually in charge, but who’s not in charge because he can’t see very well. We’ve got poor Bitzer who’s torn between the farmer and the sheep, who wants to be one of the flock but he’s also responsible to the farmer. It’s a nice complication to that character. And Shaun wants to have some fun and doesn’t like to be told what to do. The rest of the flock are the Greek chorus. It all seemed to make sense, and naturally we saw that that created a lot of story ideas. We showed the pilot to the BBC, they liked it, and commissioned the series.5

The biggest challenge for the series was the production budget from the BBC, which the Aardman producers felt was too low for the first three seasons. Originally Shaun was budgeted as a preschool series, where budgets are usually smaller due to the perceived simplicity of the stories and visual direction. However, because the shorts ended up being for the slightly older audience of six- to nine-year-olds, the budget did not cover the increased cost associated with the older demographic. Aardman covered this shortfall for the first three seasons and by season four they were able to dictate a budget that represented what the series would actually cost.6 The rest of the series came together easily. The model makers had just finished making the feature film, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the WereRabbit (2005) and had thought expansively about how to build the Shaun sets. In their enthusiasm, they built huge feature-quality sets, not televisionsized ones which would have been smaller and simpler, in keeping with the smaller stories and limited costs of television production. The large sets leant the world of Shaun a sense of scale more akin to the types of animation shorts screened at festivals than a typical television series. While broadcasters scheduled the series on television to target viewers in the six-to-nine demographic, they found that the show’s broad humour and Aardman’s pre-existing popularity meant the programme appealed to the broader, extended family demographic. Starzak alluded to a reason for this broad appeal when he commented that ‘the thing about Shaun is that there is something of a family unit about the characters. The farmer is like a parent; Bitzer is an older sibling; and Shaun is a younger sibling. There’s a sense of a family unit there which again I think is a universal idea,

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everybody recognizes that.’7 Furthermore, despite Shaun the Sheep being targeted to children there was, in the Aardman tradition, a certain degree of quirkiness and irreverence to the show. Shaun’s cheeky, fun-loving nature and ambivalence to the farmer’s authority leant him a rebellious streak. Such anti-authoritarian tendencies were atypical for children’s animation and Starzak acknowledged that ‘I was being a bit subversive […] I had no desire to make a preschool show, or even necessarily a children’s show. […] what we were trying to do was make each other laugh.’8 In this way, Shaun captured the Aardman sensibilities and transcended its intended audience of young children, becoming instead family viewing. The series was successful enough to form the basis for a summer 2015 movie targeted to a broad family audience, Shaun the Sheep Movie, and a Shaun the Sheep  2015 Christmas special, The Farmer’s Llamas, ran on the BBC 1 in a primetime slot. Importantly, the Shaun the Sheep franchise had international appeal. While the series’ lack of dialogue had been a practical decision – related to the time-consuming, expensive nature of lip-synch – this approach encouraged the production team to explore more visual cinematic language such as silent comedy and slapstick. Ultimately, this slapstick humour and lack of dialogue helped Shaun become a hit in non-English-speaking territories. The series sold in 170 countries, with particular success in Japan, Germany, the Middle East, Indonesia and Australia. The Aardman sensibility is particularly a good match in Europe with public broadcasters, and in Asia, where there is a growing fan base. However, the United States and Latin America are somewhat more challenging for the Aardman brand for reasons that could not be transcended by the series’ visual humour and lack of dialogue. In the United States, the cable channels tend to target relatively specific audiences, and rarely skew to the broad audiences that Aardman appeals to. Similarly, in the Latin American region, stop-frame animation is often seen as specifically for a preschool audience.9 In both contexts, a character like Shaun was hard to fit into the quite rigidly demographically targeted schedules.

Off to preschool with Timmy Time Timmy Time was a spin-off of Shaun the Sheep, and the series represented a new direction for Aardman. Jackie Cockle, the creator of Timmy Time had been the show runner on Bob the Builder (BBC/HIT Animation, 1998–2004) and was hired at Aardman during the late 2000s to develop their preschool slate. Cockle was asked by Miles Bullough, who was head of TV at Aardman at the time, if there was anything she could do with Timmy. After watching episodes of Shaun the Sheep, Cockle decided it made sense to send Timmy

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to preschool, with the purpose of showing kids that preschool could be fun. She remembered her own experiences at that age, when she was scared to attend nursery, and wanted to depict preschool in a friendly light. She came up with a world for Timmy that was different to that occupied by Shaun: a more diverse universe featuring animals other than sheep. With this new direction, a number of original characters were created for the series. The look of the series was different, as well, as Cockle went with a more preschool-friendly look – bright, colourful and saturated in a way that made it visually distinct from the Shaun farm palate.10 Similar to Shaun, Timmy as a character was designed to be an enthusiastic free spirit who did whatever he wanted, and thus, he found himself in trouble regularly. As a motivating force for the stories in the series, Timmy needed to learn to behave and get along with the other animals and the theme song of the series promised, ‘a little lamb with a lot to learn’. Timmy Time stories included many of the typical preschool themes, such as pretending and playing, and art and music-related topics. But whereas Shaun was a classic unconventional character in the Aardman tradition, Timmy was motivated to get along with others and to see the advantages of following rules and conforming, in keeping with the socializing goals of preschool television. It can often be difficult to make purposeful topics like these humorous for preschoolers. For Aardman as a studio, changes and realizations came about through Timmy Time. First, for the studio to produce the volume of television programming that a preschool series would demand, they needed to organize productions in a more standardized fashion, and Cockle instigated new processes for the television production team. With seventy-eight ten-minute episodes to produce, she put a rolling production pipeline in place. Prior to this, Aardman had worked more loosely, but the new, stricter pipeline was necessary to keep the series on schedule and on budget.11 As such, producing Timmy Time was a learning curve for the Aardman staff. They had to get used to a faster pace and a television production schedule, where there was not as much time to dress a set, for example.12 It also became clear that not everything that worked so well for Shaun would work for Timmy. The Timmy Time producers made a similar decision to produce the show without dialogue and focus on the visuals. But whereas in Shaun the Sheep the lack of dialogue had been a creative catalyst for effective physical comedy and subtle but comical facial expressions, Timmy Time writers found this lack of dialogue to be more restrictive than productive. For this show, the writers needed to determine how to tell preschool-friendly stories without dialogue but also without the broad slapstick used in Shaun the Sheep. Shaun’s level of physical comedy was not a viable an option for this age group, because slapstick tends to be imitable, even dangerous at times,

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and therefore of concern to parents and broadcasters. Instead, Timmy Time used blinks and expressive visual reactions, dialogue-like sounds from the characters that captured emotions (but didn’t sound like animal sounds or dialogue), and clear body language, which were all more appropriate options in this preschool context.13 Timmy Time was produced primarily for CBeebies, the BBC’s preschool channel, which is targeted to children aged six and under, and the series premiered in 2012. The series also ran on Disney Junior in the United States from  2012 to  2014 and did well internationally. Despite this success, the unfamiliar preschool sensibility, which with its conformist ethic is generally quite earnest and direct, meant Aardman found it harder to capture their typical quirky and irreverent sensibility. As a result, producing the series felt less fulfilling for the company than most of their prior production experiences and it was hard to fit the show comfortably into the Aardman culture. This compounded the decision by Aardman, around  2012–13, to shut down the broadcast department, despite CBeebies wanting to commission more episodes of Timmy Time. Instead, they opted to focus more on features and initiatives they felt were a better fit for the company.14

Co-productions in children’s television While Shaun the Sheep and Timmy Time were Aardman’s main forays into children’s television as creator or producer, the company has also coproduced several programmes for children’s cable channels. These included the sketch comedy series, Planet Sketch (2005–08), created by Andy Wyatt, Purple and Brown (2005–08), a short-form series created by Richard Webber for Nickelodeon and Chop Socky Chooks (2008–10), a co-production for Cartoon Network, produced with Decode Entertainment and DHX Media in Canada. However, much as with Aardman’s own forays into children’s programming, these ventures ultimately proved unsuccessful for the company. Planet Sketch, a co-production with Decode Entertainment in Canada, was produced for Teletoon in Canada and CITV in the UK in 2005. This fifteen-minute series was animated mostly in 3D CGI and deviated from Aardman’s usual aesthetic and sensibility. Purple and Brown, a more typical Aardman production, was a series of one-minute stop-frame shorts that premiered on Nickelodeon in 2006. Purple and Brown were two comical plasticine blobs who spent each episode laughing about something silly and occasionally getting comically injured. Chop Socky Chooks, which

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premiered on Cartoon Network in 2008, was a comedy/action CGI series created by Sergio Delfino featuring three kung fu-practising chickens who protected Wasabi World from the evil Dr Wasabi and his henchmen. All these series were targeted to viewers aged between six and eleven. Despite the fact that cable channels were eager to commission projects from Aardman, Aardman found network commissions and co-productions challenging to establish and that the overall experience was not in line with the company’s ethos or typical mode of production activity. Deals for most cable channels frequently involve a full commission. As such they also require the transfer of ownership of the property to the channel, or at least include ceding a fair amount of creative control. Neither the loss of intellectual property nor doing service work was appealing for Aardman.15 Similarly, working on co-productions with deals that required work splits (dividing the production between partners, with some work done at Aardman, some work done in other countries at other studios) were too complicated and were not creatively right for the Aardman. The producers found that the experiences took them away from the Aardman sensibility and closer to a broader and generic aesthetic. Ultimately, these co-production experiences helped Aardman realize that any properties they worked on needed to be created in-house, and the company needed to maintain full control of the creative aspects of their material. This meant that, going forward, they would generally deficit finance the projects they were passionate about rather than depend on channels for full commissions and that they would only consider co-productions when they would specifically allow them to try something new that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do,16 such as try out a new computer animation program or produce a music video.

Strategy moving forward Alix Wiseman, who oversaw international sales division for TV, DVD and Digital Sales at Aardman from  2006 to  2016, confirms that by  2015 Aardman’s strategy was to focus on broad audiences and family viewing with programmes featuring humour and storylines that worked on more than one level. Shaun the Sheep remains a good example of this approach, with its broad comedic stories that appeal to a wide range of viewers, specific references to amuse adults, and comedic visuals, slapstick and action. This approach would allow Aardman to focus on the kind of material they do best. This meant that while there still would be potential interest in shows for the six-to-twelve age range, preschool programming would be unlikely to fit this approach, because such shows tend not to speak to a broad audience.

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An older-skewing, edgy series might also be considered for shorts and experimentation,17 but would not be enthusiastically embraced as a typically Aardman sort of production.18 This approach led the management at Aardman to adjust their overall television strategy. In focusing on features and family television, they were not looking to bring in a large volume of production and co-productions. The goal would be to do less and do it really well.19 Because it takes so long for Aardman to develop and produce stop-frame animation, and it also takes time to train highly skilled animators, there is a structural need within the company to limit the volume of work. While not every studio has the luxury of taking this approach, it can be a winning one for any animation studio focused on high-quality production, overall excellence and brand building. This business strategy is reflected in the company’s internal positioning statement, which guides the company’s steering committee through their decision-making. It includes a list of values that captures the company’s philosophy and culture, such as creative integrity, the pursuit of excellence, humour which is well-observed, quirky and true, and the ability to be in charge of their own destiny. In addition, they committed themselves to providing an open and collaborative working environment in which to produce their work.20 In 2017, Sarah Cox, an animation industry veteran and creative director/ producer was hired by Aardman as Executive Creative Director of New Content. Her remit has been to oversee the development of a new slate of Aardman intellectual properties aimed at children and family audiences across all platforms including digital and broadcast. According to a press release on the Aardman Animations’ website, future commissions would focus on the company’s signature humorous character-driven stories with global brand recognition. The slate would combine Aardman’s hallmark storytelling, character and comedy expertize with a variety of visual styles, with Cox spearheading efforts to foster top-quality creative talent and keep the company at the forefront of innovative content development.21 In conversation, Cox noted that the leaders of the company have an eye on the future, as in ‘what would Aardman look like in ten years?’ To that end, Cox has been tasked with finding new characters to add to the slate and to grow shows that would help build the brand.22 As of January  2018, Cox was working on the development of a few children’s television projects, with a specific focus on a comedic bookbased property, Daisy Butters, about an imaginative eight-year-old girl who questions things and challenges authority (mostly her mother) as she confronts new situations.23 Regarding preschool, Cox notes that humour remains important to Aardman, so while they have not ruled out new

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preschool shows, they were also not a priority for the company. She noted that for preschool, they were still considering new ways to use Timmy Time, such as using a narrator and editing existing footage to teach English.24

Moving into the future One of Aardman’s unique characteristics as a media production company is that it is creatively led, rather than run by business decisions. This has included making the decision that they are only going to do work that makes sense for the company. The charming and lovable nature of their characters has made Aardman seem like an obvious fit for children’s television and the success of a property such as Shaun the Sheep has made many fans hope that they will produce more series for this audience. However, while animation for children might seem to some like a natural direction and an area of  growth for the company, the company’s vision now is to move the art of animation forward by producing material for the largest audience possible with the broadest approaches to humour and storytelling. Beyond features and television, this includes content for digital platforms such as YouTube  and  360-degree animated films that can be viewed interactively on phones. While Aardman has not turned away from producing animated series for children, they are conscious of how well various characters would fit the Aardman brand and work for children. As Sarah Cox noted, ‘tone of humour and approach is the thread. The Aardman sense of humour and attitude, the warmth and charm, the self-deprecating, naughty and rebellious’ would be necessary in any sort of programming they produce.25 As Aardman moves forward producing new features, specials, shorts and digital material, they are focusing on the areas where they are most passionate and the audiences they most want to connect with. They are also working on platforms where they have more control of the creative content to best capture the Aardman sensibility. These include newer and emerging digital platforms that are less dependent on standard television demographic breakdowns and more oriented to broader audiences and give production companies more control over their own destiny than when working with broadcast and cable channels. As audiences are increasingly viewing material on these digital platforms, this is the direction for any company looking for more control and a larger fan base. As viewing shifts to these digital portals that function as entryways to larger repositories of content with fewer limitations on age and target demographics, Aardman will be well-positioned to take advantage of this migration.

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Notes 1

See Amy Ratelle, ‘“Animation and/as Children’s Entertainment” and Nichola Dobson, “TV Animation”’ in N. Dobson et al. (eds), The Animation Studies Reader (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 191–202 and 247–56. 2 When the Shaun the Sheep series was first developed, the director Richard Starzak was known as Richard Goleszowski, and is still known as ‘Golly.’ 3 Richard Starzak, interview with author (29 June 2015). 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Alix Wiseman, interview with author (29 June 2015). 10 Jackie Cockle, interview with author (29 June 2015). 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Wiseman, interview with author. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Aardman had already produced material in this vein with the Rex the Runt (1998–2001) and Angry Kid (1999–2007) series that aired on BBC 2 and BBC 4, respectively. 18 Wiseman, interview with author. 19 Ibid. 20 Alix Wiseman, phone interview with author (5 November 2015). 21 Aardman.com, ‘Sarah Cox Joins Aardman as Executive Creative Director’, 9 February 2017. Available at: http://www.aardman.com/sarah-cox-joinsaardman-as-executive-creative-director/ (accessed 28 January 2018). 22 Sarah Cox, phone interview with author (19 January 2018). 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid.

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Shaun the Sheep – Buster Keaton Reborn? Richard Haynes

[T]he silence of silent film is not simply a medium; it is an instrument.1

Aardman Animations’ long-running series Shaun the Sheep (2006–16) has become one of the studio’s most successful properties. In 2015 Shaun starred in his own feature film Shaun the Sheep Movie and a sequel was released in 2019. When I began work on Series Two as an animator in 2009, having stepped out of six years of preschool animation, I quickly realized it was a new territory. This was performance-based animation, heavily reliant on subtle eye movements and full-body slapstick to an extent that is unusual for children’s animation. In fact, I quickly realized, Shaun the Sheep is essentially silent comedy. None of the characters in the series or the film speak, although some do communicate via non-vocal sounds, and other sound is limited to music and sound effects. The lack of dialogue is a significant guiding factor in the approach the studio took to conceiving Shaun’s creative world. In particular, Shaun’s creators drew inspiration from the silent clowns of early Hollywood such as Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and, most dominantly, Buster Keaton. Shaun the Sheep Movie’s co-director Richard Starzak acknowledges that ‘Buster Keaton was always a model’ for the studio.2 However, the influence of silent film comedy on Shaun the Sheep extends to more than inspiration for his creation. Silent comedy also pervaded the process of animation and a picture of Keaton was ‘pinned on the studio door just to remind the animators that they didn’t have to make it bleat too much, or be too physical’.3 In this chapter I will explore, in part through reflection on my own participation in the production of Shaun the Sheep as an animator, on the ways that the series, and its subsequent feature film version, are in dialogue with the practices of physical comedy in silent cinema of the 1910s and 1920s, and in particular the work of Buster Keaton. I will look at common traits found in the characters of Shaun and Keaton in order to argue that Shaun the Sheep is not only a contemporary silent comedy, but also features a contemporary silent star. In his book, Shadow of a Mouse, Donald Crafton has observed the

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‘dissonance’ at the heart of our engagement with animated characters – that they are both drawings and at the same time performers that we engage with in a similar way to other on-screen stars.4 Here I will be thinking about how my performance as an animator brings Shaun into being as a performer, or star, in his own right, and how these elements of performance/performer are informed by early silent film comedy acting. Shaun the Sheep is not unique as an animation that owes much to the on-screen clowns of the silent age. Crafton notes that Felix the Cat’s ‘balletic movements and victimization by his environment are seen as derived from Chaplin’s screen character’ and that Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, one of Walt Disney’s first characters, ‘may be viewed as closer to Keaton and his ability to transform the absurd mechanical environment of the modern world into something useful and humane’.5 Later, Warner Brothers’ cartoonist Chuck Jones, who was a key figure in the studio’s Golden Age of animation production in the 1940s and 1950s, acknowledged the influence of Charlie Chaplin on their work, in particular his use of exaggeration and ‘his body to let you know something was funny’.6 However, in the landscape of contemporary mainstream animation Shaun the Sheep stands apart in its continued dependence on the tropes and techniques of early, silent film comedy. Crafton suggests that animated characters can enact two types of performance: figurative and embodied.7 The former is seen mostly frequently in early animated cartoon shorts and was borrowed from silent cinema, in particular from the likes of Keaton, Chaplin and others. This type of character animation ‘emphasized movement that conveys signifying gestures and pantomime typical of broad humour and slapstick rather than emotive personality, character nuance, and emotional expression’.8 This approach was the starting point for Disney, but he eventually favoured, and indeed pioneered, the latter ‘embodied’ approach, described in the second part of this quote. However, as Crafton also notes, the figurative and the embodied in animation are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and in some instances, ‘embodiment [can] overlay primarily figurative performances’.9 My suggestion is that Shaun is just such a character: while he is figurative in terms of his characterization, he requires an element of embodied performance by the animator in order to bring him into being.

Shaun the Sheep and the context of early silent comedy Similar to Keaton’s on-screen persona, Shaun the Sheep features characters who need/want to do something, cannot find the ideal means with which to do it, before being inspired and utilizing an alternative means in order to

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realize their desire or intention. As Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja state of Keaton, ‘this gives rise to a large number of image metaphors’ and a ‘metaphorical power rests in the transference of qualities from the visually absent domain […] to the present target domain’.10 One example of how this manifests in Shaun the Sheep is the episode ‘The Snapshot’ in which Shaun,11 downhearted as a result of a missed photo opportunity, is inspired to create a collage from a shredded photo of himself when he sees some Cubist art in a shop window. Like Keaton, Shaun thinks pragmatically, immediately adopting a ‘bright’ idea, enacted on the spur of the moment, rather than taking time to consider the implications of his actions. In this episode I animated a scene involving Shaun and Bitzer (the dog) heading to the city to find a photo booth so that Shaun can have his picture taken. This follows the disappointing result of the farmer’s attempts at photographing the farm’s inhabitants in which Shaun was half left out of the frame. The two characters each have the same target and motivation (to find the photo booth and take Shaun’s photo) but they each have individual ideas, initiated and inspired by a cause and then an obstacle. This relationship is reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy, who often strived towards the same outcome, but had very different ideas about the best way to achieve it. For example, in The Music Box (1932) the comedy duo’s competing notions of how best to drag a heavy piano up a long flight of steps leads to disastrous consequences. Upon realizing their place within a busy city of humans, and in an apparent attempt to conceal their anthropomorphic qualities, Shaun physically suggests they should hide behind a display board by gesturing towards it. He then engages in a pantomimic routine of sign language, trying to express to Bitzer his ideas for their next move. Much time is spent on the interaction between the two characters because it is important to convey that Bitzer is not on the same wavelength. Shaun initially appears the more intelligent of the two, and yet Bitzer has the idea to busk for the money they need to pay for photos. Here Shaun is displaying the ‘one track mind’ Noel Carroll suggests is characteristic of Keaton’s comedy gags: he considers the job in hand, and acts in a linear fashion.12 For Shaun, as for Keaton, the doing of the present dominates his mind: they need photos, and to get them they need money, so they busk in order to get the money. Unfamiliar with city life, they struggle to operate the photo booth correctly, and after a moment of despair at the poor results of the photographs, Shaun is inspired to combine pieces of previous photographic attempts as Cubist art. This punchline isn’t delivered until the next scene, so the audience, and Bitzer, are not yet aware of Shaun’s idea. This recalls a scene from Sherlock Jr. (1924), where Keaton sets up a gag in a series of stages that ultimately enables his escape from a room, through a

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window, unexpectedly appearing dressed as an old lady. It’s a remarkable stunt, and the cross-dressing reveal is one the audience cannot foresee. In both examples, Shaun and Keaton adopt a degree of intelligence, proving they have thought things through, initiate bright ideas and can see the bigger picture. This may appear like they are straying beyond their one-track focus, but they remain single-mindedly committed to the job at hand. In this way, this example from Shaun the Sheep is exemplary of the series’ tendency to, like Keaton’s films, ‘bring about a sense of fulfilment and give us a feeling of inner accomplishment’.13 Shaun, like Keaton, is a neutral character, neither hero nor villain, merely an instigator around which a plot is formed and who ‘has no emotions; he obeys a metaphysical urge’.14 Yet he is the ‘star of the show’, as was Keaton. Both are also figurative characters, in that their personalities are primarily defined by physical and facial movement, or the lack thereof. In early animation characters were drawn from stock poses using model sheets that ‘provided a formulary of poses and facial expressions’.15 This was a practice adopted from film acting, and theatre acting before it, and the ‘material circumstances of dramatic presentation’ that required actors to ‘communicate with their bodies’.16 Just as book illustrations were available to actors that linked ‘poses and gestures to conventional meanings’, so too animation model sheets ‘enabled clarity and consistency of acting’.17 While we did not have to adhere rigidly to model sheets when working with Shaun, the animation process did require consistency across all the animators working with the character. For example, when animating Shaun walking I had to be sure to replicate his stylistic, identifiable walk established by the animators who had worked on Shaun before me, which involves one leg raised from the ground and bent at the knee for two frames, followed by the next leg for two frames, and so on, all while Shaun is progressing steadily forward. It was important that his walk was in keeping with other animators’ efforts because the walk is a defining characteristic of an animated character and so it must be consistent across all scenes, no matter who they were animated by. In addition to movement, consistency is required in terms of the use of facial expressions to convey Shaun’s emotions in a similar way to how the silent comedians communicated their feelings to the audience. As Christopher Bishop notes, referencing James Agee’s essay on Keaton that appeared in Life magazine in 1949, ‘[Keaton] used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things’, including ‘a one-track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity’.18 Shaun embodies such a motionless face and his acts of instigation will often ignite from that same one-track mind, with one simple task and the desire to complete it at the core of his motivation. The combination of this singularity of focus and physical attributes centred

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around clichéd, instantly recognizable facial expressions – whether it be happy, sad, perplexed and so on – is a trait of early figurative animated performances that themselves were adopted from silent film comedy. Crafton has noted that ‘in the 1920s and ‘30s animators studied the physical movements and personae of silent clowns Chaplin and Keaton, for example, to re-perform them as Felix and Mickey’.19 As such, the broad, identifiable and characteristic traits that originated from vaudeville were carried through into short films and comic strips.20 ‘Comedy,’ according to Aristotle, ‘is an imitation of inferior people – not, however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful’.21 If a link can be drawn between humour and what is ‘ugly’ or ‘mishaped’ then a further similarity is apparent between the silent clowns and Shaun.22 Silent comedy movie stars were often slightly out of proportion or unusual in body shape (e.g., Keaton’s short height or Oliver Hardy’s size), and the characters in Shaun the Sheep are exaggerated, ‘ugly’ forms of animals and humans. Shaun, like Keaton, is short and stout, with a stance that exaggerates a sheep’s inherent gormlessness and that conveys his at times idiotic, underhanded character. This emulates the physicality of Keaton who, when static, would adopt a straight, balanced look that suggests he is in control of a situation whilst appearing as if his mind is elsewhere. Keaton was also able, with his well-trained body, to achieve his own stunts and turn the unbelievable to believable by evidencing that it was, in fact, him doing it – often within one long shot. As Bishop says, ‘[Keaton’s] control over his seemingly rigid body was superb, much as it sometimes seems like a piece of errant machinery.’23 Such rigidity is leant to Shaun in part through the physical attributes of the stop-motion armature – the metal skeleton that forms the basis for the puppet. There are times, however, where animators adopt a more fluid and graceful approach and the animation of Shaun often evidences a carefully timed flexibility that further echoes Keaton’s comic performances. Animation is often compared to dance, and I have animated numerous scenes that call for balletic movements, whether it be running dogs, dancing sheep or squabbling pigs. The desire to produce fluid, smooth animation results in an effective, contrasting marriage between gracefulness in expression (movement), rigidity in physique and ugliness in appearance (design). Keaton was notable among the silent clowns for the way he ‘moves his graceful body in spatial configurations characterized by order and symmetry’.24 This contrast is a form of exaggeration – or, more precisely, simplification – applicable to both Keaton and Shaun. Referencing Vincent Amiel’s  1998 essay ‘Le Corps au cinema’, Peter Kravanja highlights that this contrast ‘considerably reduces the validity of a possible “psychological explanation” of [Keaton’s]

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behaviour. The truth of his body is felt to come not “from the inside” but “from the outside”’.25 This is equally true of figurative animated characters who, as extroverted characters that ‘accentuated dynamism and immediate legibility’,26 audiences did not expect ‘to learn anything about their […] depth of being’.27 Shaun’s gormless character, portrayed in facial and bodily expression, is a source of physical humour and both Shaun’s and Keaton’s stories are delivered through a series of one-off physical gags, another characteristic of figurative animation performances that ‘resembled gags that one might see in a comic strip [or] in a short film comedy’.28 An episode of Shaun the Sheep is constructed in this way, although the pay-offs and contexts in which the gags exist naturally vary. Interesting to note is a particular type of gag that seems typical of silent comedy, known as automatism/inattention, ‘where concrete intelligence fails’.29 As inhabitants of their worlds as we understand them, Keaton’s and Shaun’s characters are successful at times and not at others, and problems are often solved through sheer luck as much as through careful, intelligent consideration. Sometimes unexpected occurrences will benefit each of these characters, while at other times they each calculate the mechanics of a situation step by step (which can be communicated by either a series of clear, physical stages of changing or developing thought, or through a simple, singular expression). In many ways then, Shaun is the epitome of the figurative animated character – one that uses easily recognizable movement and expressions in the service of physical, visual gags and has much in common with the physicality and humour of early silent comedy. However, as the following sections explore, Shaun’s animation also relies on embodied methods of animation that require a certain type of physical investment by the animator.

Animating Shaun: Timing, preparation and instinct It is a Monday morning in April 2009. At Aardman, Aztec West, Bristol, I am facing a puppet unlike any other I have worked with before. His name is Shaun and he is one of many duplicates. Puppets I had previously animated included the likes of Fifi Forget-Me-Not, Postman Pat and Rupert Bear, all of whom have smiling faces and cheerful, colourful aesthetics designed to appeal to their preschool audiences. Here before me stood someone quite different, lacking a mouth, let alone a smiling one, or any colour at all. With a black and white complexion and expressionless face, here was a miniature version of Buster Keaton. Animating Shaun, I soon discovered, was performancebased. As a director said on the first day, it’s all in the eyes for emotionally

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driven close-ups and the body for physically driven wide shots. Such reliance on the physicality of the animated character in the absence of any dialogue to convey plot and humour has a significant impact on the animation production process. Cosgrove Hall shows, such as Little Robots and Postman Pat, which are aimed at a preschool audience, employ frequent ‘talking head’ shots, where a puppet stands for a good number of seconds, either conversing with another character or addressing the audience. These are invariably storyboarded and are generally simple and straightforward to animate, with little preparation required. Lacking dialogue, Shaun the Sheep relies more heavily on body language to communicate the characters’ states of mind and motivations. In order to animate this communicative body language a deep, physical investment into the characters is required by the animator. In a way the characters become our avatars, as suggested by Don Graham, drawing instructor at Disney during the 1930s, in that we must understand or ‘get inside’ the characters before drawing or manipulating them.30 In this way, Shaun can be seen as an animated character that evidences both the figurative and the embodied. While his action is dependent on ‘distinctive movements and characteristic gags’,31 his animation still requires the type of embodied enactment described by Crafton as typical of the introverted, internally complex characters that exemplify embodied characters. In an effort to fully immerse myself in the characters I often found myself acting out the action that I needed to convey through the puppets, much like a silent comedian, but also something that Crafton describes as more typical of the animation of embodied characters.32 Shaun the Sheep is an example of the effective application of anthropomorphism and this depends on animators successfully translating something in their own physicality via the process of animation in ways that will evoke empathy. Empathy is another characteristic Crafton aligns with embodied, rather than figurative, characters.33 But, as Ed Hooks notes, the pursuit of empathy was also central to Chaplin’s comedy and he ‘understood how to play to the heart, how to evoke laughter one moment and tears the next’.34 This kind of connection with the audience is one that the animator is also striving to achieve. It can be argued that in the case of Shaun the Sheep, the animator is in fact the performer, and the character projects the animator’s efforts, and hidden presence from the past, to become the on-screen ‘star’. As a stop-motion animator, I feel the very act of animating is, in itself, a performance, one that relies heavily on both preparation and instinct. Paul Wells has noted Chaplin’s determination to get things absolutely perfect in relation to timing of the gag. Chuck Jones ‘liken[ed] the numerous takes Chaplin would do to secure this perfection with the numerous drawings that he threw away in a spirit of executing an exact sequence of

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graphic choreography’.35 This lineage of precision in the pursuit of animated gags is equally as present in the shot preparation for Shaun the Sheep as in the Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes animated shorts directed by Jones and bringing Shaun to life required the same sort of exhaustive planning. In particular, the timing of a shot, which when I began work at Aardman I quickly understood sat at the top of the company’s implicit hierarchy of importance regarding their animation process.36 For Shaun the Sheep, timing of the action is always first and foremost, because the audience’s empathetic response is wholly dependent on it. In relation to the timing of gags, any experienced animator understands that a hold, or pause, is a much more powerful communication tool than a piece of action. These moments offer the audience the chance to breathe, digest what they have witnessed and prepare for what they are about to see (anticipation). Effective use of these pauses, referred to as moving holds, has long been a characteristic of Aardman’s work and were certainly prominent in Nick Park’s early films, including Creature Comforts (1989). As an animator I am constantly aware of what a welltimed hold can bring to the success of a shot. This is particularly the case for Shaun, who has a limited number of moveable facial parts that can be used to convey emotion or reactions. While Shaun’s neutral expression is a gormless, mouthless look, his relatively limited range of emotions is communicated through a selection of replacement mouths, consisting of ‘open’, ‘teeth only’ and ‘closed’, which can all be flipped to suggest an upbeat or downbeat emotion, and the all-important pair of eyes. His body has to do the rest. The true key to the success in communicating emotion with Shaun lies in body language and timing, much as was the case for Buster Keaton. For the episode ‘An Ill Wind’ I completed a shot featuring Shaun eating grass on a windy day.37 The brief was to show Shaun responding to an unusual noise coming from the farm behind. The length of the shot in the storyboard was five and a half seconds and I had to calculate how much of that was to be spared for each section of the brief, namely Shaun going about his business, hearing the noise and then reacting, leaving time for him to walk towards the farm. Planning the timing of shots sometimes involves the use of ‘blank’ bar sheets,38 but much it comes instinctively. I settled on sixteen frames of Shaun chewing and looking out one way, followed by a turn to the opposite direction just over a second in. Two seconds pass before Shaun begins to react, which consists of four frames of tightly shut eyes and the head coming down (in anticipation) followed by a big up movement and wide-open eyes with pupils turned slightly inwards. This creates a somewhat perplexed expression, and is a sharp contrast to

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the sleepy, relaxed mood of Shaun I conveyed, through application of halfeyelids, for the previous two seconds. Shaun’s movement here recalls that of Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), where his reaction to a strong gust of wind is conveyed when his eyes switch from sleepy to wide. In this example the effect of the wind against Keaton’s remarkably agile body is shown through a series of long and wide shots. He desperately tries to fight against the wind through slapstick falls, swift turnarounds, jumps over flying debris and countless other moves before suddenly standing still, at an angle, and tilting his head towards the camera. This contrast to the action, communicated through the ‘moving’ hold, not only has dramatic comedic affect but tells us the change in Keaton’s thought pattern; he tried fighting the wind by use of physical action, which only worked for so long, and so he adopts the fresh method of stillness – which we know can only last so long too. This glance to the camera lasts for just under a second and I adopt a similar length of time as an animator in order for a hold to read (eight frames being a general minimum). I maintain Shaun’s moving hold for, again, sixteen frames, and then animate Shaun swallowing the food he has been storing in his mouth – represented by attached ‘bulging cheeks’. The shot is now four seconds in, and I keep Shaun gazing (thinking time) for ten frames before he investigates. Actions and holds are overlapped, and timings are stretched and compressed accordingly to avoid repetition or mechanical motion. This is similar to the way Keaton moves his body, where the end of one movement, or one idea, overlaps and smooths over the start of  the next. Ultimately, as with Keaton’s comedy, the shot in ‘An Ill Wind’ flows at an appealing pace and the audience can appreciate Shaun’s thought process. The pacing of this shot is also facilitated by using the ‘rule of thirds’, in that something is happening, something then disrupts that and this then leads to a reaction to that disruption. This is also something familiar from the Keaton sequence in which he fights the wind in his static, leaning pose, before a load of boxes fly off a truck and into him, initiating a more extreme physical action than the last. For me, animation is like music, and there is a rhythm to the Shaun shot that doesn’t feel repetitious, and yet nothing feels too quick or drawn out. In this way, while animating Shaun requires a great deal of prior preparation, it also heavily relies on the animator’s innate sense of pacing, rhythm and effect. As such, the animation process is a balance between planning and instinct, similar to Chaplin and Keaton, who would not have broken their timing down to the frame but did, as Paul Wells highlights, time their gags extremely tightly, adopting their own instinctive processes.39 As observed above, the comedy of the photo booth scene in ‘The Snapshot’ also depended in part on timing, in particular the delay of the delivery of the

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unforeseen gag regarding the Cubist art. This is also a common tendency in Keaton’s comedy and the similarity is further demonstrated through exploring the set-up for the punchline of his early short, One Week (1920). This film’s final gag is beautifully staged and timed. Keaton and his wife are trying to drag their recently completed house (built, with disastrous consequences, by Keaton himself) off a railway track as a train is approaching. They realize they can’t shift it and so step aside, eyes covered, dreading and awaiting the inevitable. We, the audience, believe the train will hit due to the ingenious framing of the image. The train, however, passes the house safely since it is travelling on the adjacent line. We then cut to Keaton and his wife, who display sighs of relief with which we, the audience, empathize. Moments later, however, we cut to a wide shot, framing the entire house, just in time to see a second train, travelling from the opposite direction and smashing through the house. This, coupled with the instant reaction of the two unfortunate protagonists, is funny because of the timing, framing and, most importantly, build-up of anticipation towards the unforeseen gag. This anticipation is created through a series of holds employed by Keaton, clearly displaying his thoughts and changes of emotion in a way that calls for nothing but empathy. This is why the impact is funny; we imagine what it would be like to experience it ourselves, and Keaton’s failing attempts at constructing the house correctly and sensibly up to this point invites us to laugh unashamedly. Although simpler, a scene I animated in the Shaun episode, ‘The Boat’ is built around this kind of anticipation.40 The characters are playing on a huge boat on wheels but, when trying to shift it, they can’t no matter how hard they try. One sheep (the hefty Shirley) lifts the anchor with ease, before handing it to Bitzer. The extreme weight is conveyed in the way Bitzer almost drops the anchor before lifting it with somewhat less ease than Shirley. This build-up visually describes the anchor’s weight, and Bitzer is left for a moment, holding it. Suddenly, a gust of wind starts pushing the boat and we cut to Bitzer, at which point my task was to convey a series of emotions that proves he realizes: the boat is moving, the anchor is attached with rope, he is holding the anchor, so he’ll go flying with the boat. These holds, providing the chance to read the dog’s thoughts and emotions, are key to the anticipation behind the gag. Like with the Keaton gag, we know something is going to happen but not how it will pan out, and we are then entertained as a result. In this case, due to holding the anchor with the rope slightly wrapped around him, Bitzer swiftly spins around before heading in the direction of the boat. This makes the gag last longer and offers extra time for the audience to digest. The moment of realization and the timing of that ‘look’ is what counts in both these examples, and the gags would not be as humorous without them.

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Conclusion It is evident from my description of the process of animating Shaun the Sheep that the series, in a similar way to early figurative animation, owes much to the performances of the comedians of silent cinema: Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton in particular. Similar to the figurative performances outlined by Donald Crafton, Shaun acts and reacts through his outer self – through bodily movement and, at times, slapstick for the sake of physical humour – in a way that often relies on easily readable physical expression and movement. But he is also dependent on the embodiment of the animator – brought into being through their physical actions in narratives whose comedy often relies on their instinctive sense of timing and movement. Like Keaton, he, through figurative attributes, is a ‘star’ but, unlike Keaton, through embodied attributes and by being performed beforehand by careful timing by another being (the animator), he is an avatar. Interestingly (and true of all team-based animation), Shaun is an avatar of many beings (animators) who have to conform to the expectations audiences have of him – he has a particular walk, specific facial expressions and so on. Keaton’s performances were created by Keaton alone, but Shaun’s were created by many individuals striving for consistency.

Notes Jeremy Cott, ‘The Limits of Silent Comedy’, Literature/Film Quarterly 3, no. 2 (Spring 1975), p. 103. 2 AFP, ‘Buster moves: “Shaun the Sheep” Modelled on Silent Movie Star’, Expatica, 21 March 2015. Available at https://www.expatica.com/uk/news/ country-news/Buster-moves-Shaun-the-Sheep-modelled-on-silent-moviestar_467029.html (accessed 20 May 2018). 3 Ibid. 4 Donald Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 17. 5 Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 295. 6 Paul Wells, ‘The Chaplin Effect: Ghosts in the Machine and Animated Gags’, in D. Goldmark and C. Keil (eds), Funny Pictures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 27. 7 Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse, pp. 23–48. 8 Ibid., p. 23. 9 Ibid., p. 53. 10 Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja, ‘Metaphors in Buster Keaton’s Short Films’, Image & Narrative 13, no. 2 (2014), p. 138. 1

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11 This episode was originally broadcast in the UK on 15 March 2013. 12 Noël Carroll, Comedy Incarnate: Buster Keaton, Physical Humor and Bodily Coping (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 1–14. 13 Peter Kravanja, ‘Buster Keaton’s Comedy of Hegelian Beauty’, Image & Narrative 20 (2007). Available at: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/ inarchive/affiche_findesiecle/kravanja.htm (accessed 20 May 2018). 14 Carroll, Comedy Incarnate, p. 13. 15 Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse, p. 29. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Christopher Bishop, The Great Stone Face (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), p. 10. 19 Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse, p. 85. 20 Ibid., p. 24. 21 Kravanja, ‘Buster Keaton’s Comedy of Hegelian Beauty’. 22 Ibid. 23 Bishop, The Great Stone Face, p. 15. 24 Kravanja, ‘Buster Keaton’s Comedy of Hegelian Beauty’. 25 Ibid. 26 Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse, p. 23. 27 Ibid., p. 24. 28 Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse, p. 24. 29 Coëgnarts and Kravanja, ‘Metaphors in Buster Keaton’s Short Films’, p. 142. 30 See Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse, p. 40. 31 Ibid., p. 23. 32 See Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse, p. 45, in which Crafton describes how acting out characters’ parts was a significant part of the animation process at Disney. 33 Ibid., p. 24. 34 Ed Hooks, Acting for Animators (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 49. 35 Wells, ‘The Chaplin Effect’, p. 26. 36 Lower on the hierarchy, although still important is that the models should be clean and any plasticine should be well sculpted and smoothed out. Less important is the actual smoothness of the animation, although as animators we always strive to make our animation fluid. When one studies much of Aardman’s work the natural imperfections of stop-frame animation are sometimes visible, and yet they don’t detract from the storytelling. 37 This episode was originally broadcast in the UK on 14 December 2010. 38 Bar sheets, otherwise known as ‘X-sheets’ or ‘dope sheets’, are charts that animators use to work out their timing. Frames are displayed in real time, and so details can be added to help animators keep on track with movement and performance. 39 Wells, ‘The Chaplin Effect’, p. 26. 40 This episode was first broadcast in the UK on 17 May 2010.

Section Four

Surface and Performance

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Aardman’s Neo-Baroque: The Dual Nature of Special Effects in Aardman’s Feature Film Production Thomas Walsh

The use of special effects to depict the destruction of various vegetables throughout Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) culminates in a particularly poignant moment where Gromit’s hopes of winning the local vegetable competition with his giant marrow are literally smashed to pieces. In Gromit’s attempt to save Wallace, his marrow is destroyed by a collision, and although in itself the marrow cannot emote sadness or disappointment, the slow viscous movement of clay used to mimic the marrow’s innards is as expressive of Gromit’s feelings of disappointment and failure as are his facial expressions and body language. As a visual metaphor, it literalizes the shattering of his dreams. This particular scene raises the central concerns to be addressed by this chapter: in the absence of an anthropomorphized character, which might suggest an underlying presence of androcentric motivations and emotional states, to what extent can special effects animation be considered a dramatic performance in its own right, and not just the simulation of natural phenomena as an adjunct to character performances? Additionally, in what way is this type of performance informed by the tactile nature of the materials being animated? It is important to note that Aardman is unusual in terms of how special effects fit into its production pipeline. Effects elements in hand-drawn or computer-generated animation feature film production are usually dealt with by a distinct department with its own disciplines and discrete set of relationships between effects animators that is separate from character animation. At the Aardman studio, however, animators handle both characters and effects together on a shot-by-shot basis, with no distinct effects department specialized in animating non-character phenomena on set. This process, where an animator is involved in manipulating both character puppets and non-androcentric materials as part of a single cohesive

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performance, prompts the consideration of the special effects element as another type of avatar,1 similar to but distinct from the character puppet.2 Aardman’s feature films Chicken Run (2000), Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012) utilize both analogue and digital methods of effects production to generate non-character phenomena. This chapter will consider the implications of this hybrid production process and how the resulting effects elements comprise part of a dramatic performance.3 For stop-motion effects, animation that involves the movement of physical materials in front of a camera, there is a lingering trace of what might be described as a more ‘concrete’ process of special effects working alongside the post-production procedure of digital visual effects. This trace helps preserve the sense of profilmic space, something which can be regarded as a component part of contemporary stop-motion aesthetics in general; and one that more specifically informs Aardman’s distinctive house style of animation, thus helping to determine approaches to the effects production process itself. The deployment of the concrete process of using physical materials has a distinct impact on how effects elements relate to the body of the animator and also how they are experienced by an audience. As such, they can be seen to constitute an embodied perception of the world that can be considered in relation to the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl. In the Aardman films under discussion in this chapter, the mixing of analogue and digital processes constructs the special effect as a site of tension between Aardman’s signature tactile aesthetic (which is a signifier of a corporate entity that produces commercial animated products), the animator’s mimetic performance of the effect on set within the dramatic context of the shot and the audience’s haptic knowledge of the materiality of two distinct worlds: Aardman’s fabricated world projected on-screen, and a lived world which they inhabit and experience phenomenologically.

Aardman’s neo-baroque Special and visual effects work produced for Aardman feature films occurs within a particular production context – that of ‘orthodox’ commercial animation production.4 Inherent in this context is the use of digital compositing to efface the ontological difference between physical objects and virtual effects in order to present the illusion of a single, cohesive image world on-screen.5 This concern is an overpowering element of commercial animation production that seeks to reduce the more subversive potential of animation’s propensity to foreground its own production processes. As

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a commercial form of film production, the Aardman feature film might be seen to partake in the aesthetics of what Sean Cubitt calls a Hollywood neo-baroque mode of filmmaking,6 where digital processes formulate a seamless experience of ‘enclosed and enclosing worlds’.7 Live-action and animated effects elements produced under these conditions are seamlessly integrated to the extent that there is little or no evidence of the production process which makes their on-screen presence possible. In a similar way, the final Aardman image seeks to efface the difference between physical effects photographed on set and digital effects produced in post-production. The ‘enclosure’ of their on-screen world is a result of the digital simulation of tangible materials and the aesthetics produced by practical effects processes. In reflecting on some of the practicalities of planning effects work that seeks to create a seamless blend of physical and digital processes, Aardman production manager Richard Beek pointed out how effects elements are identified as part of a storyboard reviewing process, and that it was preferable to construct as many production effects elements physically in front of the camera as possible. This is due to the relative expense of producing visual effects digitally in post-production, but also the importance of preserving a sense of what he called ‘surface contact’:8 the sense of effects elements existing within the space of the set and thereby making physical contact with both character puppets and other parts of the surrounding environment, rather than being added digitally in post-production. This practice of in-camera effects work was noted as part of the production process for Aardman’s first feature film Chicken Run by Computer Film Company’s senior visual effects supervisor Paddy Eason who explained: They’re quite smart at getting everything they can in-camera […] At one point for example, the chickens dig a tunnel under the fence of the farm, using an egg whisk to excavate the earth, with all these bits of earth flying up in the air and landing again. They did that using a series of dirt elements applied to sheets of glass placed before the camera – sort of the dimensional equivalent to cel animation […] but then it fell to us to match that look in CG.9

As intimated by Eason, computer-generated elements could be deployed in post-production to achieve certain types of effects that would be difficult and time-consuming to enact on set with physical materials. For example, clay, the main substance used for the puppets in Aardman films, has tactile qualities that can be problematic for the representation of certain types of more ephemeral phenomena, such as smoke or dust clouds. Digital effects produced in post-production can be used to overcome the physical

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limitations of what might be possible on a live set, as well as enhancing the effects that were filmed on set. However, it is important that any computer elements or digital enhancements match the analogue stop-motion elements photographed on set. Ironically, although this simulation of actual materials helps to provide a coherent, enclosed on-screen world, it is simultaneously contingent on maintaining a sense of connection to an outside world of real materials and handmade production processes, which are important aspects of Aardman’s signature style that help differentiate the studio in the commercial, feature animation marketplace. Aardman’s distinct charm is inherently linked to in the robust and clumsy qualities of clay figures. Although the studio has long since moved towards silicone puppets and digitally sculpted replacement parts for greater ease and accuracy of production in a feature-length format, the pliable properties of clay remain at the heart of its signature style. This is particularly evident in Chicken Run, where a mixture of silicone bodies and plasticine parts was used to realize the studio’s ‘chunky’ tactile aesthetic, established by director Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit short films in the late 1980s and 1990s.10 Brian Sibley has described Aardman’s house style as presenting ‘unlikely characters and zany situations […] in a super-realistic style that believably locates their otherwise bizarre scenarios in the world of our own experience’.11 The super-realistic style that Sibley refers to is carried through the realistic rendering of environments (and at times effects elements) in terms of scale and materials which are recognizable as being similar to the everyday world of human experience, with characters given an ‘unlikely’ appearance and ‘zany’ potential through their rendering in plasticine and silicone. It is primarily the characters that establish clay as a primordial substance of sentient beings in the Aardman cinematic universe – the chickens in Chicken Run are given an illusion of a particular type of materiality that has an inherent ‘zany’, cartoon potential, encoded with the mutable organicism of clay as a natural substance. However, they do not exist in an entirely clay-based world – environments and effects elements possess the illusion of materials equivalent to what an audience might expect to encounter in a real world – chicken coops have the texture of wood, chunks of soil flying through the air look like actual soil, and bath bubbles have the translucency and lightness of real suds. This results in moments where the Aardman image can consist of a startling disparity between realistic environmental elements and the fantastic characters that exist within these spaces. For Chicken Run in particular, external spaces are rendered as realistic, human-proportioned spaces, with careful approximation of accurate scale in set construction and atmospheric perspective in lighting, whereas internal spaces are rendered as

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more caricatured and fantastical, better suited to more intimate moments with clay figures. The practical effects elements deployed in external/internal instances can be seen to conform to a similar scheme of caricature and realism depending on whether it is an internal or external environment. This tailoring of the effects elements in relation to the environment helps to create a greater coherency and sense of surface contact between the characters and their environments. As described above by Eason, in the opening sequence from Chicken Run, when the protagonist Ginger digs underneath a security fence, the flurry of soil flying through the air looks and behaves according to real-world physics, whereas later when we enter into the fantastical inner world of Mrs Tweedy’s pie machine globules of gravy and pastry have been sculpted and accentuated for dramatic or comic effect, allowing animators and designers to indulge in the more plasmatic forms of animation imagery that resist stable, allotted forms. In the first instance the effect is used to give Ginger a sense of agency in a realist world, despite being an obvious cartoon incursion in a real space. In the second instance the pliable properties of clay used to simulate more gelatinous substances such as gravy and pastry reinforce the illusion of the plasmatic potential of the puppets as clay figures  – even though in reality their rigid armature and silicone construction lack the potential for fluid transformations. As this discussion has demonstrated, at times the relationship between environments, effects and character puppets can differ in relation to levels of realism and caricature. However, the importance of preserving the stylistic integrity of physical production techniques in the final image is paramount in creating a distinctive Aardman aesthetic. In terms of special effects production, the effort to maintain an illusion of physical production techniques in certain instances required the generation of effects in-camera from a variety of sources, including both animation and live-action, and combining them with other elements in post-production, as was the case with the animation of fog elements in Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This process included a testing phase of cloud shapes projected onto gauze that could be manipulated on a frameby-frame basis, to the shooting of fog plates on an empty set and combining these plates with characters in post-production.12 Throughout this process the visual effects supervisors at Motion Picture Co. were aware of the need for a ‘slightly stylized realism’ to maintain consistency with the overall design of the production and Wallace and Gromit’s signature style,13 first established in Nick Park’s debut short film A Grand Day Out (1989) and described by production designer Phil Lewis as having ‘a handmade quality […] The Wallace and Gromit look therefore has much to do with the use of texture – everything’s got a characteristic texture – and colour’.14

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Issues surrounding the incursion of digital visual effects into stop-motion production have been discussed by Andrea Comiskey, who addresses the use of special effects in stop-motion film as part of a discourse involving a ‘handmade imperative’ that is opposed to ‘the presumed dematerialization of culture’ wrought in more general terms by computers and digital processes.15 Comiskey states: Central to the handmade ethos are the tactile interactions of craftspeople with tangible materials, the most privileged instance of which is the animator’s manipulation of the array of physical objects within an actual profilmic space.16

Aardman’s aesthetic seeks to preserve this sense of physical objects existing in a profilmic space, regardless of the production technique being deployed, be that a special effect or visual effect, or the dramatic register intended for the audience, be that realist in nature or more caricatured. Similar to Cubitt’s notion of a Hollywood neo-baroque, Aardman’s neo-baroque filmmaking creates an enclosed stop-motion world with the illusion of one production technique being used: the manipulation of real materials in a profilmic space. The aesthetics of this world are predicated on a handmade imperative, regardless of whether or not elements of the on-screen image have been produced digitally in post-production. Although the visible difference between types of production process (physical and virtual) has been erased, thereby creating a coherent enclosure, the aesthetic of the final image is still connected to an external world through its consistent use of tactility as a point of reference for the audience (even if some of this tactility is a computer-generated simulation). Arguably, the practical effect that preserves a sense of a physical production process within the on-screen diegesis can provide a challenge to the seamlessness of other types of digital filmmaking. This might return us to a more substantial sense of self-awareness in relation to real tactile experiences, which have been captured within the traces of actual human participations in a material world rather than their virtualization in a digital world. For stop-motion effects in particular, there is a lingering trace of what might be described as a more ‘concrete’ process underlying the procedure of digital manipulation, helping to preserve this sense of a profilmic space. Animator George Griffin, in his attempt to define a form of concrete animation, notes how contemporary use of the term ‘concrete’ includes the sense of a ‘defiant backlash against the pervasive reach of digital processing and its tendency towards virtual reality’.17 He goes on to state:

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I propose to link concrete to actual materials, objects not just images, and the processes which cause them to spring to life […] the tactile, the tangible, the real, the stuff which is often forgotten in the river of illusion.18

In a similar way the Aardman film can be seen as a more concrete form of animated filmmaking, with its use of ‘tactile’ and ‘tangible’ materials acting as a reminder of a real world as opposed to a virtual world of ‘digital processing’. In terms of effects production processes this is the difference between the special effect enacted in front of the camera and the visual effect added digitally in post-production. In the Aardman film, the physicality of the special effect not only helps to preserve a profilmic space and give fantastical cartoon characters a sense of agency in a realistic world, but also reminds the audience of their own tactile experiences of the real world. The movement of real material objects as part of a practical special effects process engages both the ‘optical’ and ‘haptic’ viewing positons of the audience – the recognition of movement on the one hand and materiality on the other.19 These viewing positions are bound up with the complexities of animation as a type of performance. As with other forms of animation, multiple bodies are performing and performed in the practical, special effects image; the animator’s body, the audience’s actual body and the ‘epiphenomenon’ of the animated bodies projected on-screen, which are ultimately co-animated by both viewer and animator.20 Although we can identify multiple bodies involved in producing effects animation, the process can be seen to be governed by two fundamental aspects: the mechanical simulation of real-world physics and the caricaturing of action to help express the dramatic context of a scene; this duality of effects performance is discussed in the next section.

The duality of effects performances Animator Barry Purves, in his account of stop-motion history seems to make a distinction between stop-motion as special effect and stop-motion as performance, noting how early special effects practice played an important role in the genesis of stop-motion film production. He states in relation to Ladislaw Starewicz’s 1930 feature film The Tale of the Fox that ‘[t]his early film […] was one of the very first times that stop-motion was used to create a performance rather than a special effect’.21 Similarly, in relation to the final moments of King Kong’s battle with a tyrannosaurus rex in Willis O’Brien’s original  1930s production, he states that ‘there is a thought process and

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a  special effect becomes a performance’.22 Implicit in these comments is a reading of the special effect as something to be executed mechanically by the animator and that lacks the underlying ‘thought process’ or sentience we might otherwise expect from a character performance. For Purves, the simulation of sentience is a necessary element in defining stop-motion movement as a performance. Thus, what Purves alludes to is the dual aspect of effects performances: on the one hand the necessarily mechanical nature of mimicking natural phenomena that behave in relation to real-world physics, and on the other how effects elements reside in a dramatic context and might be used by the animator to express an emotional or psychological intention, albeit not necessarily an anthropomorphic one. With this in mind, effects can still be considered a performance but a performance of a different order, one that exists outside the anthropomorphic simulation of an emotional/ psychological realism. The dual nature of the effects performance, divided between the mimicking of physics and the necessity for dramatic caricature, can be explored in relation to how Donald Crafton, in Shadow of a Mouse (2013), identifies different types of animated performances. He defines animated performances as being either ‘embodied’, in the sense that animator and audience are asked to engage with animated characters as emotional and psychological beings, or ‘figurative’ in the sense that animators and audiences recognize and utilize archetypal forms and movements to generate meaning.23 Stop-motion special effects work can be seen to be bound in a similar way: materials can be presculpted to be identifiable as different phenomenon in a figurative sense and then can be manipulated by the animator through the timing of movement to give an audience a deeper sense of meaning and embodiment. Although there are still distinctions to be made, special effects elements can be seen to be what Crafton calls ‘avatars’,24 and are used to embody the internal motivations of animators, even though as simulations of natural phenomena they do not possess internal psychological or emotional motivations in the same way as a supposedly sentient character within a conventionally realist Aardman diegesis. The sculpted globules of goo slowly oozing from Gromit’s smashed marrow in Curse of the Were-Rabbit give rise to feelings of sadness and disappointment, even though real marrows do not possess the capacity to express emotional states. In their performance of the effect, an animator must negotiate a dialectic of science and representational artifice; an understanding of the physical properties of natural phenomena and how these might be caricatured as part of a dramatic representation. This simultaneous engagement with both science and representation can be explained in phenomenological terms as adopting two separate attitudes to the world. The first attitude is shared

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with what Schopenhauer calls morphological and aetiological sciences  – the science of categorization and description of causal relations.25 This attitude is what Husserl calls the ‘natural attitude’, which ‘is built around the tacit “positing of ” or “belief in” the world as an independent horizon of being’.26 In other words, the world is something external to be observed and quantified. Both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger have outlined the importance of the body in providing a set of originary coordinates for experience. According to Merleau-Ponty the body has ‘non-thetic awareness’, a sort of automatic orientation that helps us to negotiate the world, and this is important in constituting the natural attitude towards the world. This can help us to understand how the animator approaches objects to be animated as part of a production process, the extent to which they suspend their non-thetic awareness in utilizing objects as avatars in relation to a particular set of originary coordinates provided by a body. It is also useful in understanding the positon of an audience that relates to the animated image based on their natural attitude to the world and their own set of originary coordinates. In the absence of the psychological/emotional realism of character animation (which tends towards androcentrism, anthropomorphism and the originary coordinates of a human body), we might question how an effects animator relates to the subject/object of his study. If character animation is androcentric (embodying a subjective natural attitude to the world), can effects animation be seen to approach natural phenomena as ‘things-inthemselves’, and deploying a phenomenological epoché:27 the suspension of everyday assumptions concerning a world of things external to the self? If character animation is anthropomorphic, with constant recourse to allotted human form, can we examine the effect as metamorphic, constantly shifting and liberated from final form, as pliable as Aardman’s illusion of clay? On a pragmatic level, in the Aardman stop-motion feature film effects elements are planned and tested before their final performance on set. This process might involve other departments, such as model making who sculpt specific physical parts, and with the testing of materials and techniques at times undertaken by junior animators who will not be involved in the final performance on set. This leaves animators the task of reproducing techniques established in test footage as an adjunct to their own performance with character puppets. Arguably this model of reproducing techniques reduces the creative intuition and experimentation in relation to effects elements and allows such elements to be treated as a mechanical task on the periphery of character animation. However, this reductive approach to effects work in a stop-motion context is not always the case. Richard Beek states how the effect has to ‘work creatively in the context of the shot’,28 and this is a point

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taken up by animators themselves where the creative act lies solely in the movement of objects and not in their design or construction. As with other forms of commercial, realist-inflected animation, the stop-motion animator’s performance resides in the incremental distances that a still object must be moved which, when projected back at twenty-five frames per second, speaks to an audience’s phenomenological experience of being a three-dimensional object moving through a three-dimensional world, and subject to the laws of speed and inertia. This simulation of realworld physics draws from the natural attitude and originary coordinates of animators and speaks to the non-thetic awareness of audiences. For the Aardman animator in particular this pursuit of movement must also take place within a dramatic context as part of Aardman’s whimsical take on the ordinary.29 The behaviour of effects elements that resonate with an audience’s first-hand experiences of natural phenomena helps to reinforce a sense of ‘ordinariness’ as a counterpoint to the more fantastical nature of characters and dramatic situations, thereby playing an important part in generating what Wells calls Aardman’s ‘quasi-documentary style’ – the sense in which the Aardman film attempts to generate the sense of a real, mundane world.30 However, the animator can distort our perception of natural physical laws for stylistic and dramatic effect through altering the rate of change on screen. This is echoed in the experience of Richard Haynes, animator on Aardman’s The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! and Shaun the Sheep Movie. Haynes described animating a sequence in Pirates! involving bath suds, which resulted in a complex process using tacky wax, ali-wire and magnets, and described his animation as being more than just replicating the physics of the phenomenon, but also consciously using the timing of special effects elements to achieve the dramatic intentions of the scene, adding subtle exaggerations to enhance the ‘mood’ or ‘flavour’ of the shot, in this case a fast action sequence.31 The Pirate Captain, in his pursuit of the nefarious Mr  Bobo finds himself in a bath full of soap suds, bobsleighing through Charles Darwin’s house and picking up various members of his crew on the way. The effects in the sequence engage ‘optical’ viewing of movement (the reading of motion itself) and ‘haptic’ viewing of materiality (the reading of what the object is made of), both being experiences of viewing stop-motion imagery, as discussed by Cordelia Brown in relation to art historian Alois Riegl.32 In the particular case of bath suds, the effect has been achieved by sculpting plastic beads into ‘foamy’ looking mounds of bubbles. However, the uniform size of the beads does not quite achieve the organic qualities of real soap bubbles, even though the animation timing gives them a kinetic sense of being lighter than air. This mismatch of material and movement is

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a common element of stop-motion imagery, and gives it a sense of unease and uncertainty, which both confirms and confounds the audience’s a priori experience of natural phenomena, and thereby in this case infusing the physical effect with its sense of play, invention and joy. Throughout the sequence in The Pirates!, the secondary movement of bath suds is used to accentuate the primary impacts of the bath tub as it careens down a seemingly never-ending staircase and collides with walls and various pieces of Darwin’s collection of natural history curiosities. The spumes of suds act mechanically to give characters weight as they displace foam from the tub, and clumps of foam are whipped out of the frame to express the acceleration of the tub through the sequence. In terms of behaving in relation to the dramatic context of the sequence, the effects act as exclamation points to punctuate the energy of a descent through the house. As part of this dramatic punctuation, they are used in a humorous character reveal when the Pirate with a Scarf emerges from the tub wearing a tribal mask, and in the final denouement, a light smattering of suds generates a pregnant pause while marking the spot where an Easter Island head subsequently crashes to the floor. The contrast between the lightness of suds and heaviness of stone is communicated through an optical reading of weight-through-movement and haptic viewing of materiality-through-texture, and this helps to generate a satisfying punchline to the chase, and also expresses a sense of risk for our characters who have narrowly missed being crushed. A similar rollercoaster-style sequence opens Curse of the Were-Rabbit, where protagonists Wallace and Gromit leave their domestic environment and identities behind by descending through various trap doors and automated chutes. During this descent, the duo gradually adopt their alternate roles as Anti-Pesto pest exterminators and finally arrive in their pestcontrol van. Throughout this sequence the pair are flung joyfully through various mechanisms that help in their transformation, the synchronized choreography of movements and crossing of paths solidifying a sense of their camaraderie for an audience who might not be familiar with the characters and their relationship. Towards the end of the sequence their domestic world intrudes one final time when a celebratory clinking together of their mugs of tea forces large globules of liquid to launch into the air and land in the opposite mug. The effect is used to sum up the sequence: a synchronized choreography of movement and the switching of characters to opposite sides of the frame, thereby reinforcing the good-natured intimacy of their friendship. Although the dramatic needs of the shot provided the animator with some context in how they might approach the animation of the tea as it flies through the air, it is also possible to consider how the animator inhabits the tea as a non-sentient character in its own right, a thing-in-itself that

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partakes of the dramatic energy and flow of imagery to generate meaning for an audience. In phenomenological terms, character animation can be seen to preserve the originary set of coordinates of our human corporeality through acts of anthropomorphization. Without a recourse to androcentrism, the effects animator must develop a sense of ‘things-in-themselves’. As David Abrams points out, drawing on the writing of Merleau-Ponty, acts of perception go beyond the confines of the human body and are ‘an attunement or synchronization between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the thingsin-themselves’.33 Rather than the effect being anthropomorphic in its manifestation, at times it is metamorphic, where forms undergo constant change. In a stop-motion context, the character animator considers the energy of an action as a conceptual line in space, which is then clothed in the corporeality of volume and the stability of manipulating the character puppet. The animation of effects can be less constricted by stable volumes, especially when using clay or KY Jelly to mimic more fluid liquids such as water or tea, and the animator’s conceptual line of action is liberated through the constant rhythmic metamorphosis of forms in time. This returns us to Gromit’s sad marrow, and the pathos expressed in the metamorphosis of materials. The marrow’s innards, once released from  the vegetable’s tough exterior, lack defined boundaries and possess a more fluid plasmatic form. The marrow’s internal world has now been literally externalized, enabling the internal emotional state of Gromit to take on an external form, generating a sense of his perception of the world as a complex reciprocal relationship. In this instance the animator has expressed Gromit’s consciousness of his physical surroundings as being informed by less quantifiable emotional and psychological states and this suggests how consciousness in general is both structured by and structures acts of perception. The reminder of a lived body in acts of perception problematizes the primacy of the eye and notions of a Cartesian cogito that stands separate from an external objectified world. Husserl establishes a ‘prereflective Lebenswelt’ or Lifeworld in which we are embedded, and in which the boundaries between subject and object are occluded. Martin Jay points out that for Merleau-Ponty ‘the lived body was irreducible to a static image observed from without’,34 and the effects animator’s ability to enter into phenomena through the construction of a moving image is important in this regard. Jay points out how Husserl and Merleau-Ponty re-conceptualized perception as embodied and reciprocal, going on to explain: Perception, Merleau-Ponty implied, was intertwined not only with scientific and rational intellect, but also with the artistic imagination

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[…] the great artist does not negate perception; he or she renews it by returning us to that primordial experience before the split between imagination and sensation, expression and imitation.35

As described above, the effects elements in Curse of the Were Rabbit are not only used to establish the physics of the world for an audience in a scientifically rational manner but are also simultaneously used to express the internal emotional perceptions of characters and project them into the physics of their world. In moments where special effects animation engages more fluid materials, we can see how this type of animation draws on the primal plasmatic freedoms of early animation as described by Eisenstein.36 During these more metamorphic moments of effects animation, the Aardman film is allowed to approach the relationship between characters and natural phenomena at a more primordial level that at times crosses the boundaries between internal and external states, thereby expressing notions of the lived body as being a perceiving object but also indivisible from the world perceived. Gromit is the marrow, and the marrow is Gromit.

Conclusion The nature of effects performances in Aardman’s feature films has a dual aspect, where animators must find an aesthetic balance between expressing the physical nature of their fictional worlds on the one hand and supporting the dramatic and emotional content of their scenes on the other. The manipulation of actual physical materials on set to describe natural phenomena is helpful in finding this balance, allowing the animator to produce a more holistic performance as a lived body rather than supplementing the live performance on set with post-production digital effects. In the particular case of Aardman, the use of physical materials also allows for a preservation of ‘surface contact’ and a greater sense of a ‘handmade imperative’, both of which are seen as key aspects of the studio’s defining style. The pliable quality of clay, and the freedom it gives to morph one shape into another, is also an important aspect of Aardman’s distinctive style, even though contemporary production processes have moved towards greater use of sculpted silicone parts. The special effect is one of the final components  of the animation process where clay is still used to animate more fluid phenomena, thereby preserving the potential of metamorphosis as part of Aardman’s aesthetic. The potential for metamorphosis, and its resistance to final allotted form, in part embodies the inherent plasmatic nature of animation, but also can be seen to produce a flow of forms and

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images in a neo-baroque mode of cinematic image production that collapses the distance between perceiver and perceived. This lack of final allotted form expresses the relationship between the animator’s lived body and the natural world as one of diminished individualism, where the animator can experience ‘things-in-themselves’ beyond the imperatives of androcentric emotional/psychological verisimilitude. This in turn can engage a similar awareness in audiences through acts of both optical and haptic viewing.

Notes Donald Crafton, The Shadow of a Mouse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 40. 2 This notion of effects elements as an avatar for an animator’s performance is not necessarily limited to stop-motion animation, however, but might also be considered as an aspect of effects animation in other types of animation processes, including hand-drawn and ­computer-generated films. 3 The term ‘special effects’ will be used to denote physical effects animated in front of a camera as part of a production phase of a filmmaking process as distinct from ‘visual effects’, which are computer-generated elements added in a post-production phase. 4 Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 35–43. 5 For a further discussion of the relationship between physical and visual effects in Aardman’s feature films, see Wood’s chapter in this volume. 6 In his book The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), Sean Cubitt uses the term neo-baroque to describe a particular development in Hollywood cinema emerging in the 1980s and 1990s where earlier forms of cinema predicated on linear narrative, planar composition and realist representation were abandoned in favour of the dynamics of movement and a heightened sense of ­spectacle. Cubitt argues that this type of cinema engaged a mode of representation similar to that of sixteenth-century imitatio, where there is a heightened appreciation of technique rather than the accuracy of representation in realist terms. 7 Cubitt, The Cinema Effect, p. 244. 8 Richard Beek, interviewed with author, 22 June 2015. 9 Kevin Martin, ‘Poultry in Motion’, Cinefex 82 (July 2000), pp. 118–31. 10 Brian Sibley, Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie (Oxford: Boxtree, 2000), pp. 112–16. 11 Ibid., p. 30. 12 Rachael Bosley, ‘A Model Thriller’, American Cinematographer 86, no. 10 (October 2005), pp. 36–7. 13 Ibid., p. 36. 14 Ibid., p. 37. 1

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15 Andrea Comiskey, ‘(Stop)Motion Control: Special Effects in Contemporary Puppet Animation’, in D. North (ed.), Special Effects: New Histories/ Theories/Contexts (London: BFI Palgrave, 2015), p. 52 and p. 55. 16 Ibid., p. 52. 17 George Griffin, ‘Concrete Animation’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2, no. 3 (November 2007), p. 260. 18 Ibid., p. 260. 19 Cordelia Brown, ‘Flowerpot Men: The Haptic Image in Brian Cosgrove and Richard Hall’s Animations’, Animation Studies Online Journal (2007). Available at: ­https://journal.animationstudies.org/cordelia-brownflowerpot-men/ (accessed 21 February 2018). 20 Crafton, The Shadow of a Mouse, pp. 52–3. 21 Barry Purves, Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance (London: Focal Press, 2008), p. 16. 22 Ibid., p. 37. 23 Crafton, The Shadow of a Mouse, p. 23. 24 Ibid., p. 40. 25 Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Harmandsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 133. 26 Matheson Russell, Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 61. 27 Ibid., p. 66. 28 Beek, interview with author. 29 Wells, Understanding Animation, p. 60. 30 Ibid.. 31 Richard Haynes, interview with author, 8 January 2016. 32 Brown, ‘Flowerpot Men’. 33 David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Penguin Random House, 1996), p. 54. 34 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 310. 35 Ibid., p. 306. 36 Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, J. Leyda (ed.) (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), p. 21.

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Performing Authenticity through Clay in the Wallace and Gromit Films Laura Ivins

The first glimpse we get of our now-famous heroes – Wallace and Gromit – is a close-up of Gromit’s hand as he picks up a book, Where to Go. Small cracks are visible between the four fingers, making it readily apparent from the start that we are watching clay figures. It is common in narrative animation to disavow the hand of the animator, to create a world that feels self-contained and absorbing. Consider, for example, the smoothly sculpted, all-clay worlds of Will Vinton, which seek to minimize elements that take audiences out of the narrative,1 and favour tools over hand-sculpting ‘to maintain a meticulously clean, smooth texture’ on the puppets.2 Conventional wisdom dictates that the materials should not take us out of the story. However, when watching an Aardman film like A Grand Day Out (Nick Park, 1989), our eyes are drawn to the surface texture of Wallace and Gromit. Their clay skins bear the marks of their production process: fingerprints, dents, smooshes, folds and occasional cracks. The effect is similar to something like the Fleischer Studio’s Out of the Inkwell series (1918–29). Even though we do not literally see the animator, as we do with the Fleischer films, the fingerprints on Wallace and Gromit’s skin remind us constantly of Nick Park’s creative touch. The animator’s presence is literally imprinted on Wallace’s face. In this chapter, I examine the cluster of meanings created by the physicality of clay in the Wallace and Gromit films, arguing that the marks on clay serve as metonymy for authenticity for Aardman Animations. The qualities of clay animation impact performance meanings, and discourses about the clay characters’ surface texture work performatively to construct Aardman films as authentic, personal, artistic creations. As we will see in this chapter, Wallace and Gromit’s clay skin produces meanings about their characters, inviting audiences to engage in haptic heuristics during viewing. Critics writing about the Wallace and Gromit films make note of clay’s tactility, with cultural ideas about tactility infusing their understanding of Aardman Animations’ studio identity.

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Performance and clay animation Performance is inherently physical. When we watch characters move on screen – whether human, puppet, drawn or digital – we interpret their intention by reading their bodily movement and vocal inflection.3 Although dialogue certainly matters, a performer can alter the meanings of words through embodied performance: gestures, facial expressions, movement through space and vocal intonation. Just think of how changes in a simple line reading – such as the phrase ‘I love you’ – impact how we interpret the words. If the actor’s voice breaks and if she makes sustained eye contact with her co-star, then we are likely to read the words as earnest. If her voice is flat and monotone, and if she barely looks at her co-star as she speaks the sentence, then we might interpret the words as disingenuous. In both instances, the actor utilizes her physical body (vocal cords, head and eyes) to inject complex meanings into the phrase, ‘I love you’. This is equally true for animated characters as it is for human, live-action ones. Although the animated figure relies on its human animator for its performance choices, audiences nonetheless respond to it using similar viewing heuristics as other fiction filmmaking. In Shadow of a Mouse, Donald Crafton argues, ‘Cartoon stars rival human ones as recognizable celebrities and in the avidity of their fans. As do human stars, cartoon characters create a sense of being live and present in the film experience.’4 Just like with live-action, when watching narrative animation, we immerse ourselves in the story on screen, interpreting characters’ motivations through bodily movement. However, although performance is grounded in the body, it does not create meaning on its own. Rather, performances are always culturally embedded. Actors and animators frequently draw from the dominant performance styles of their time period and culture in order to construct characters. For animation, this may also involve utilizing stylistic tropes from illustration or puppet theatre, as when popular Japanese anime appropriates manga tropes for facial expressions. Moreover, audiences’ interpretations of performances vary. ‘Historical consumers of these films, then as now, experience them within their own diverse and evolving understanding.’5 Donald Crafton uses the example of a Second World War cartoon, which was received quite differently by  1942 audiences than it would be today. What read as patriotic in one period might read as jingoistic in another.6 Furthermore, even within the same period, divergent receptions inevitably emerge, based on an individual audience member’s cultural context, their understanding of their personal identity and their individual experiences. Crafton writes, ‘Performance isn’t a sender–receiver communication model but rather a galaxy of relationships,  many of which remain unknowable.’7

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This galaxy of cultural relationships informing performance will be critical further on when we examine the construction of authenticity in relation to the Wallace and Gromit films. Still, certain modes of production do invite certain interpretative frames. One of the appeals of 3D stop-motion is its tactile qualities, since its characters and settings are actual things we can touch.8 This is particularly true of clay animation, where the physicality of the clay provides enjoyment for audiences. Michael Frierson writes, ‘Clay forms have a presence that is striking, no matter how crude the form, because they naturally cast shadows, exhibit surface detail, and create perspective.’9 For Wallace and Gromit audiences, the tactile qualities of clay animation emerge as a core source of enjoyment and further help distinguish Aardman Animations as creators of ‘authentic’, handmade films.

Performance styles in the Wallace and Gromit films As the first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out is the least polished, something that contributes to the film’s charm. The film began as Nick Park’s student film for the National Film and Television School, and he made it largely himself, though Aardman Animations helped him complete the short after David Sproxton and Peter Lord recruited Park to work for the studio.10 The figures of Wallace and Gromit display the marks of their sculpting and re-sculpting during the animation process: bumpy skin, folds, indentations, dirt, sags in the clay and of course, fingerprints left by Nick Park and his co-animators. Such marks have come to be thought of as charming imperfections, evidence of the loving labour that Park puts into Wallace and Gromit. In early films, they perhaps also indicate an inexperienced animator still learning how to sculpt. However, these charming imperfections – even in the first couple of Wallace and Gromit films – are balanced by finely crafted performances that show an animator who has an excellent grasp on his characters. Below, I give an overview of how Park and his collaborators approach performance, and then I analyse how the textual qualities of clay impact both performance choices and audiences’ engagement with Wallace and Gromit. Animators are frequently compared to actors. For example, in the 1930s, Disney created an in-house training school for animators that emphasized acting principles for creating believable movement. ‘This, in fact, was one of [founder Don] Graham’s refrains: that the animator must understand the character before drawing it.’11 Furthermore, Disney animators studied Stanislavsky and other acting techniques to improve their animated

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performances.12 Similarly, Aardman co-founder Peter Lord emphasizes the centrality of performance in the studio’s films, saying in one interview, ‘What I think’s the really important part of animation is the acting. The important part is how the character is expressing emotion and expressing, in the way he moves, what he is thinking about.’13 Character animators draw from the same gestural vocabulary as human actors, adapting gestures to suit their medium and expressive goals. In A Grand Day Out – which tells the story Wallace’s quest for cheese on a bank holiday, leading him and Gromit to a have a picnic on the moon – Nick Park’s initial choice of whether to have Gromit speak came down to expressivity. As Andy Lane reports, Park initially employed Peter Hawkins to give voice to Gromit, ‘but Nick eventually decided to drop the idea of Gromit speaking when it became clear how expressive the dog could be just through small movements of his eyes and brow. The voice was never heard.’14 Peter Lord echoes this sentiment, saying of Gromit’s brow, ‘A few grams of plaster speaks volumes, doesn’t it?’15 For example, during the first scene of A Grand Day Out, Wallace attempts to eat crackers without cheese, but finds the snack lacking. Then, he gets an idea for their trip. ‘Gromit,’ he says, waving his hands back and forth in one of his characteristic gestures, ‘that’s it! Cheese! We’ll go somewhere where there’s cheese!’ Gromit pushes the right part of his brow down and the left part up, giving the camera a sceptical look. The movement is subtle and brief, yet expressive. It begins to establish Gromit as the more thoughtful, clever half of the duo. We never have to hear him speak to intuit his intelligence. In interviews, Park demonstrates a keen attention to how the characters’ movement habits communicate personality. For example, he explains a key contrast in the movement patterns of his two heroes: ‘Wallace is pulled by his legs; he does everything feet first, literally. He heads into everything feet first  – he has an idea, sees something, and walks over without thinking. Gromit is probably more pulled by his eyes. He notices everything, and goes cautiously in.’16 It’s easy to think of examples of the intelligent hound looking around thoughtfully. In addition to the above example from A Grand Day Out, in A Close Shave (Nick Park, 1995) Gromit and Wallace discover multiple objects around the house that have been chewed on, including a television cable that’s frayed in the middle. Gromit raises his eyebrows as if to say, ‘What could’ve done this?’ Then, he scrunches his brow down before moving on to investigate further. As explained by Park, this furrowed brow frequently precedes movement for Gromit. However, I would argue that Wallace’s arm and hand movements are actually the central components of his character, rather than his feet. In fact, across the Wallace and Gromit series, Wallace frequently finds himself led

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along by his contraptions or some mishap, rather than moving intentionally. His inventions often go wrong, flinging him to and fro against his will. An example of this is in The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park, 1993), when the thieving penguin rigs Wallace’s morning routine so that the chute leading from his bed delivers him into a pair of mechanized Techno Trousers, rather than into his usual clothing. The penguin controls the Techno Trousers, forcing Wallace to march haphazardly around the neighbourhood. All the while, Wallace flings his arms around, expressing his powerlessness in the situation. In general, Wallace tends to hold his hands up around his chest, palms facing out and fingers curled over. He shakes them from side to side when he gets excited or nervous, such as in the above example from A Grand Day Out, and he stretches them and curls them back sometimes to express anticipation. An example of the latter appears towards the end of A Close Shave, when Wallace has decided to get over his heartbreak with a nice bit of cheese. He wiggles his fingers, saying, ‘All the more for us, and not a sheep to worry us!’ Wallace’s character frequently conveys emotion through the hands, and like Gromit’s brow, such expressivity is enabled through the malleability of clay. Clay can fold over and stretch back out, allowing for a high degree of articulation in the fingers, something that can prove more challenging with puppets made of other kinds of materials. With its high degree of malleability, clay also possesses qualities that could be perceived as limitations, in that its surfaces are easy to ‘mess up’. Dirt, fingerprints, dents or mistakes in re-sculpting all draw attention to the figure’s surface. ‘The sheer weight of the clay makes larger forms sag, sometimes imperceptibly, over successive frames during filming. When projected, such sagging is often clearly visible to the viewer.’17 This creates a tension between figuration versus texture and gives the Wallace and Gromit figures their ‘handcrafted’ look. Their skin bears marks that belie the process that created them, but instead of undermining an appreciation of the films, it enhances audiences’ connection to Wallace and Gromit. The fingerprints on Wallace’s nose draw attention to Wallace’s ‘thingness’. He is a puppet, made of clay, moved by a person we cannot see. This should take us out of the story, and yet audiences and critics often speak of the visible fingerprints in Aardman films as a source of charm. For example, one reviewer of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit writes, ‘The clay-crafted characters are incredibly detailed but still have a few visible fingerprints, a quaint hand-made touch held over from the shorts.’18 In The Skin of Film, Laura Marks draws a distinction between what she calls ‘optic visuality’ and ‘haptic visuality’. Optic visuality focuses on figuration, visual comprehension and character identification. Generally, it is this viewing heuristic that dominates narrative cinema, and it frequently

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depends on filmmaking techniques like continuity editing, high-key lighting and expositional dialogue. In contrast, haptic visuality focuses on surface texture and may eschew clarity or character in favour of intimacy.19 Films utilizing this heuristic may employ extreme close-ups that obscure the person or object being filmed, soft focus and expressionistic juxtapositions in editing. ‘Haptic cinema does not invite identification with a figure – a sensory-motor reaction – so much as it encourages a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image.’20 Marks uses haptic visuality to describe experimental cinema made by diasporic filmmakers who seek to create connections to cultural experiences that lie outside narrative constructs. The films she discusses differ significantly from Wallace and Gromit films, but her notion of haptic visuality importantly posits a viewing heuristic that emphasizes affect and is centred in the body of the viewer. What I suggest is that viewers of stop-motion engage in optic heuristics and haptic heuristics simultaneously. That is, optic visuality does not necessarily dominate when we watch the Wallace and Gromit films; instead, the two forms of visuality mutually reinforce each other in stop-motion filmmaking. At its core, haptic visuality is about undermining dominant visual strategies that privilege narrative clarity in order to promote heuristics that lead viewers back into their own bodies. However, cinema as a medium frequently promotes the haptic, as it so often records 3D space. Marks writes that ‘it is common for cinema to evoke sense experience through intersensory links: sounds may evoke textures; sights may evoke smells (rising steam or smoke evokes smells of fire, incense, or cooking). These intersensory links are well termed synesthetic.’21 As such, ‘Cinema is not merely a transmitter of signs; it bears witness to an object and transfers the presence of that object to viewers.’22 Stop-motion, as we know, is a form of animation that perpetuates cinema’s propensity to bear witness to objects, frequently drawing our attention to the physical properties of things set in motion. For theorist Jennifer Barker, the inherent tactility of stop-motion makes the viewer more aware of their own body, and she cites the visible fingerprints on Wallace and Gromit as one of her examples.23 She writes that ‘stop-motion animation even more so is a haptic art form, one that addresses itself first and foremost to the fingertips, provoking our desire to touch, caress, squeeze, and scrape the images before us’.24 The tactility of stop-motion creates intimacy – not just with the figures, but also with the filmmakers. Nick Park has remarked that ‘clay animation is so personal,’25 and he laments having to pass the hands-on animation to someone else as his projects grew more ambitious.26 Seeing Nick Park or his co-animators’ fingerprints evokes that personal connection with the filmmaker, and thus with the film. We can literally see evidence that a human being created this world. For critics and audiences,

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these fingerprints act as a metonymy for authenticity in Aardman’s clay animation films, creating cultural meanings around Wallace and Gromit that help differentiate Aardman from its Hollywood counterparts.

Fingerprints and the construction of authenticity ‘Authenticity’ is a contentious term, one that anthropology, performance studies and star studies have long grappled with. What makes a performance authentic? How can performers cultivate authenticity when building relationships with their audiences? When we critique the concept of authenticity, are we invalidating the credibility of audience experience? It’s important to note that authenticity is a construct, an effect that informs how audiences and critics react to cinema, and not an inherent quality of a work. Rather than considering whether Aardman Animations’ films are or are not ‘really’ authentic, I am interested in how authenticity is created and how it impacts audiences’ relationships to the films. In a  2001 special issue of Discourse Studies devoted to the subject of authenticity, Theo Van Leeuwen remarks that within the context of performance, authenticity depends upon cultural expectations.27 ‘If we exceed the norms valid in a certain context’, Van Leeuwen writes, ‘if, for instance, we use too wide a pitch range and too much dynamic variation in our speech, this may be seen as excessive and hence inauthentic, and not trustworthy.’28 He goes on to note, ‘It hardly needs to be pointed out that such norms are culturally specific.’29 Not only are they culturally specific, but constantly negotiated and thus changeable. What is considered authentic by one person might be interpreted as fake, false or too commercial by another. What we consider inauthentic in one cultural moment might be reinterpreted as genuine years later. So, when I say that authenticity is constructed, it is in the service of analysing the operative norms that produce it. This is not to invalidate viewer responses, since there can exist a weight of ‘truth’ and ‘fake’ that plagues critical discussions of the authentic, either implicitly or explicitly. Rather, I would agree with Van Leeuwen that ‘authenticity could be considered to be a special kind of modality’,30 one where particular mechanisms contribute to audiences’ understanding of a work. Within media industries, those mechanisms include public relations and marketing materials, interviews with filmmakers, critical reviews, gossip magazines and websites, and behind-the-scenes videos or articles. According to star studies scholar Richard Dyer, materials originating from the studio or the star intend to shape the public’s perception of a star as ‘sincere, immediate, spontaneous, real, direct, genuine and so on’,31 manifestations of authenticity

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that help sell the star persona as something more than a pre-packaged, commercialized construct.32 The authentication of the star occurs beyond the film itself, extending to extratextual representations of their ‘real world’ selves.33 Of course, Wallace and Gromit do not have the same kind of ‘real world’ existence as a human actor, but one can argue that they are stars, and they do exist in real physical space. If we visited Aardman’s studios, we could (if allowed) pick up the puppets and perhaps leave our own fingerprints on their bodies. Such real-world existence contributes to audiences’ perception of puppet animation’s authenticity, especially in contrast to larger-budget, Hollywood animations, which for audiences often lack such obvious, realworld referents.34 Similarly, what we might call auteur animation – films that seems to originate from an author who orchestrates the film’s content and production process – possesses that same connection to a ‘real’ self. With such animation, audiences identify a single person (or small group of people) who is responsible for envisioning the film. In contrast to films strongly identified with a large (Hollywood) studio, auteur films feel like personal expressions, connected to the ‘real’ self of the author. Such a fan conception of the animator is similar to fan conceptualizations of stars, since both encourage personal connections to a performer (with the animator as a kind of actor). Auteur animation might then be contrasted with what Paul Wells terms ‘orthodox animation’, in which individual artistic style is subsumed in favour of a consistent studio identity.35 While the divide between orthodox animation and auteur animation is not necessarily a tidy separation,36 reviewers and audiences often draw upon such a distinction, defining the positive aspects of auteur animation against the perceived negative aspects of industrialized, studio animation. Hollywood has commonly – though not exclusively – been framed as a significant example of the homogenizing effects of globalization,37 and while this narrative is simplistic,38 it contains elements of truth and proves powerful for how critics and audiences frame their experiences of animated film, with ‘local’ productions often discussed in terms that imply cultural authenticity. In her essay, ‘Framing National Cinemas’, Susan Hayward makes a case for retaining ‘national cinema’ as a critical concept, arguing that it does matter if one industry (i.e. Hollywood) holds hegemony over global media cultures. She considers national cinemas to be valuable articulations against hegemony, though national cinemas are never a simple thing, and can themselves have a homogenizing effect.39 A desire for a national identity distinct from and more genuine than Hollywood productions contributes to the appeal of the Wallace and Gromit series. Quigley writes about this in her article, outlining the localized elements of Aardman films. For example, ‘The

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quintessentially “English” characters and rituals of the Wallace and Gromit films draw on director Nick Park’s childhood experiences (his father’s toolshed, drinking tea) and evoke a more innocent age populated with simple people and problems.’40 We see here, the ‘quintessentially “English”’ qualities of Wallace and Gromit are inextricably tied to the aforementioned concepts of authorship and personal expression. The national identity expressed through the Wallace and Gromit films grows out of the personal experience of its creator, authenticating the genuineness of the films’ cultural perspective. In a feature on Wallace and Gromit for The Times newspaper, animation scholar Paul Wells extrapolates from Wallace and Gromit as a particular example to discuss the distinctness of British animation more generally. ‘As the new BBC Four series Animation Nation insists, British animation has always fought not to look and feel American. Where an American cartoon whizzes, bangs and wallops, its British counterpart dwells more on sly wit and subtle observation.’41 Note that American animation is implicitly synonymous with a particular style of commercial animation, described by Wells with colourful verbs describing on-screen action. To contrast, British animation is characterized with nouns denoting intellectual content and implying that such animation is more substantive than its American counterparts. Of course, we can easily think of exceptions to the above characterizations: American cartoons like Daria (created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis, 1997–2001) contain plenty of subtle wit, while British cartoons like Danger Mouse (created by Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall,  1981–92) pack plenty of wallop. (Wallace and Gromit, I would also argue, mixes plenty of wallops in with its clever wit.) However, pointing out those exceptions does not keep Wells’s statement from feeling true, just as Quigley’s discussion of the globalized elements of Aardman’s Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000) does not prevent that Hollywood-funded film from feeling like a local production. ‘The film, like the chickens, seems, at least on this occasion, to have overcome the threat posed by “imperialism” and technology.’42 In other words, Aardman’s animated films overcome cultural homogenization and retain a distinct, genuine voice associated with their local milieu. Quigley’s mention of technology introduces another aspect to Wallace and Gromit’s perceived authenticity. In addition to the implied cultural homogenization of Hollywood, technological homogenization factors heavily into narratives of authenticity within animation. Quigley even argues that ‘Park and Lord’s dedication to their traditional clay animation technique enables their maintenance of artistic freedom’.43 Similarly, reviewers writing about the Wallace and Gromit series repeatedly contrast the hands-on stopanimation process with computer animation. In his feature, Wells writes,

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‘Aardman Animation’s  3D stop-motion clay puppet films, for example, are almost a wilful riposte to the slick computer-generated aesthetics of contemporary American animation.’44 Using very similar language, recall the film reviewer, quoted earlier, who wrote about The Curse of the WereRabbit: ‘Their clay-crafted characters are incredibly detailed but still have a few visible fingerprints, a quaint hand-made touch held over from the shorts. The slightly rough edges are a refreshing change from the slick look of today’s computer-generated animation.’45 We see the word ‘slick’ used repeatedly as a pejorative for American (computer) animation, implying that such animation is so polished that it lacks substance, personality or other qualities connoting genuineness. One reviewer even refers to computer animation as ‘gimmickry’.46 In these reviews, we again find that the fingerprints on the clay figures act as powerful signifiers of the personalized labour involved in the Wallace and Gromit films.

Conclusion Performativity is an utterance that enacts a reality. It arises in more than a single performance or a single-speech act, but is rather a matrix of utterances, both discursive and embodied, that create and modify cultural realities through their repetition. In the context of animation, Crafton refers to this matrix as the ‘Tooniverse’, which includes animated films, ‘but also implicates the responsive performances by the viewers as their reflections, conversations, affection for the characters, and other reactions develop over time.’47 This common space is our shared culture, which we all have a hand in negotiating, creating and modifying through our communicative actions. It is a performative space where cultural realities come to life. Through the tactile qualities of clay animation and through the cultural discourses surrounding the Wallace and Gromit films, Aardman films are posited as more genuine than US commercial animation. And yet, such authenticity is both real and a construct. That is, the clay performances are tactile and labour-intensive and do have that physical connection to the animator’s touch, but as Christopher Holliday’s chapter in this book demonstrates, Aardman’s CGI (computer-generated imagery) films also contain similar visual markers – namely fingerprints – that stand as a metonymy for authenticity for Aardman Animations. On the one hand, the perceived uniqueness of the films is based on properties inherent to the production process, and on the other hand, it’s a discursive construct that elides complexities in the post-production, financing and marketing of the films.

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Clay is certainly a tactile medium. But themes of ‘personalness’ and ‘handmade’ radiating out from that premise – especially when laden with judgements on the value of different modes of production – elucidate as much about how animation interacts with culture as it does about the inherent properties of a particular mode of production.

Notes Michael Frierson, Clay Animation: American Highlights 1908 to the Present (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), p. 136. 2 Ibid., p. 9. 3 See Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), p. 17; and Rudolf Laban, The Mastery of Movement (London: Macdonald & Evans, 1960), p. 2. 4 Donald Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and WorldMaking in Animation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 16. 5 Ibid., p. 18. 6 Ibid., p. 18. 7 Ibid., p. 18. 8 See Barry J.C. Purves, Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2008), p. 104. 9 Frierson, Clay Animation, p. 134. 10 Howard Walker, ‘David’s Big Risk Playing Chicken’, The Journal (Newcastle, UK), 10 July 2000, p. 11. 11 Crafton Shadow of a Mouse, p. 40. 12 Ibid., p. 38. 13 Michael Bodey, ‘More cheese Gromit?’, The Age, 5 April 1996, p. 19. 14 Andy Lane, The World of Wallace & Gromit (London: Boxtree, 2004), p. 43. 15 Bodey, ‘More cheese Gromit?’, p. 19. 16 Andy Lane and Paul Simpson, The Art of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (London: Titan, 2005), p. 37. 17 Frierson, Clay Animation, p. 2. 18 Brandy McDonnell, ‘Wallace, Gromit’s First Feature Film Full of Fun’, The Oklahoman, 7 October 2005, 7D. 19 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 162–4. 20 Ibid., p. 164. 21 Ibid., p. 213. 22 Ibid., p. xvii. 1

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23 Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 137. 24 Ibid. 25 Andy Klein, ‘Park: Oscar Shorts King’, Variety, 24–30 June 1996, p. 92. 26 Ibid. 27 Theo Van Leeuwen, ‘What Is Authenticity?’, Discourse Studies 3, 4 (2001), Special Issue: Authenticity in Media Discourse, p. 394. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 396. 31 Richard Dyer, ‘A Star Is Born and the Construction of Authenticity’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 133. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., pp. 135–6. 34 In fact, promotional materials for some animations highlight real-world referents as a means of forging audience connections with the film. One prominent example is the promotion of actor Andy Serkis’s labour in acting as the referent for the animation of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The connection to that actor assisted in constructing Gollum as ‘real’ (i.e. more than a cartoon). 35 Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 36–9. 36 In fact, Aardman Animations possesses some aspects of orthodox animation. They have a recognizable studio style and have grown increasingly industrialized since their inception. 37 See Marian Quigley, ‘Glocalisation versus Globalization: The Work of Nick Park and Peter Lord’, Animation Journal 10 (2002), p. 85. 38 Ibid., p. 86. 39 Susan Hayward, ‘Framing National Cinemas’, in M. Hjort and S. MacKenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 99. 40 Quigley, ‘Glocalisation versus Globalization’, p. 88. 41 Paul Wells, ‘Gromit Saves the Day’, The Times (London), 9 April 2005, p. 16. 42 Quigley, ‘Glocalisation versus Globalization’, p. 91. 43 Ibid. 44 Wells, ‘Gromit Saves the Day’, p. 16. 45 McDonnell, ‘Wallace, Gromit’s First Feature’, p. 7D. 46 Ong Sor Fern, ‘Chick Flick with Pluck’, The Straits Times (Singapore), 30 September 2000, p. 22. 47 Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse, p. 17.

14

Between Plasticine and Pixel: Aardman’s Digital Thumbprint Christopher Holliday

This chapter takes as its focus the two computer-animated films made by Aardman Animations during the studio’s ultimately short-lived digital phase: Flushed Away (David Bowers and Sam Fell, 2006) – the first computer-animated film produced as part of its twelve-year, four-film $250-million agreement with DreamWorks Animation – and Arthur Christmas (Sarah Smith, 2011), a co-production with Sony Pictures Animation released following the premature termination of Aardman’s multi-picture deal with DreamWorks in January  2007.1 Both Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas function as curious sites of negotiation, animated intermediaries that present a two-way exchange between computer-animated film aesthetics and the workflow of Aardman’s stop-frame processes. While Aardman’s familiar rough edges and visible indentations might have been threatened by the pristine illusionism of computer animation, the trace of handmade production and their labourintensive stop-motion processes were maintained as integral to the kind of compromise aesthetic developed by the studio across its two computeranimated features. This chapter argues that the self-reflexive narratives of technophilia and technophobia in Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas are supported by a mode of production and visual style momentarily suspended between the frames of digital and more ‘imperfect’ stop-motion animated forms. Through a consideration of animated character design, space and perspective, this chapter identifies how Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas complement their digital aesthetic with gestures to the more physical form of stop-motion animation and traditions of silicone-based plasticine synonymous with the Aardman studio. The aim of what follows, then, is to nuance this brief period of computer-animated Aardman, and to interrogate the varying textual and industrial terms of the studio’s conciliatory position between plasticine and pixel.

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Handmade Aardman Since they first ventured into stop-animation with moveable figurines (popularizing a process known as ‘claymation’) on British television with the character of Morph in the 1970s, the cultural imaginary of Aardman has been firmly rooted in the aesthetics and craft of silicone-based plasticine, a legacy that has continued to underwrite both critical and popular approaches towards the studio as purveyors of a material form of animation. Despite Aardman having already moved towards computer graphics during the late 1990s with short films Owzat (Mark Brierley and David Sproxton, 1997), Al Dente (Mark Brierley,  1998) and Minotaur and Little Nerkin (Nick Mackie,  1999), as well as in its range of computer-animated television commercials, the iconicity of its claymation animation strongly constitutes their public face. Even with the expansion of mixed media animated production at the Aardman studio – computer pre-visualizations, or the imbrication of claymation with digital imagery – there persists the common cultural consensus, particularly in the UK, that Aardman remains a stop-motion studio recognizable by the terms of its signature style. It is, as reviewer Tim Robey puts it, the handmade look of the studio’s stop-motion work that constitutes what ‘we’ve come to know and love from Aardman’.2 Claymation has therefore become the place where style conflates with ‘spirit’, expressing something of a quintessential ‘Aardman-ness’ denotative of a set of visual traditions and practical techniques that would ultimately prove  a particular lure for outside (US) distributors. Aardman’s unique claymation style was certainly viewed by many commentators in America as a ‘welcome anomaly’ within the DreamWorks production slate when the two studios’ distribution deal was signed in October 1999.3 Following the dissolution of the Aardman/DreamWorks partnership, and Aardman’s subsequent three-year arrangement with Sony Pictures Animation (announced in April 2007), Sony CEO Michael Lynton expressed a similar desire to maintain the British studio’s ‘distinctive animated voice’.4 Such comments anchor potentially abstract concepts of Aardman’s ‘charm’ and ‘beauty’ to the specificity of their signature stop-motion technique. The precise ontology of stop-motion animation as a handmade, tactile medium is fully entwined with Aardman’s specific production culture and set of associated craft practices. Strongly underlining the essentialist rhetoric of Aardman and fundamental to the craftsmanship of three-dimensional ‘clumsy’ plasticine models are the visible results of their own sculptural formation. Discussing what he terms the ‘handmade-ness of it all’ as the cornerstone of Aardman’s stop-motion technique, Aardman co-founder Peter Lord explains:

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To me, it’s very like a live performance by a live band, whether that be a classical orchestra or a Cajun band. Slightly inaccurate – like accuracy is not the most important thing – but full of life, and full of, everywhere, all the cues that tell you these are real people doing real things. So in the band, it would be the real sound of a string twanging and the real sound of wood vibrating. In artists, it’s the sight of fingerprints; it’s the slight inaccuracies; it’s the knowledge that it’s real, tangible, touched by hand, that I believe comes across onscreen.5

The animators’ fingerprints are as much a part of the design of Aardman’s characters as the furrowed brows, widened mouths and over biting teeth popularized by Creature Comforts (1989; 2003–07) and continued as a staple of the many Wallace and Gromit shorts and later feature films. Aardman cofounder David Sproxton notes of the studio’s synonymy with claymation that ‘there’s a texture that’s inherent in model work – the fingerprints on the clay. […] That look is distinctly Aardman. I would say it’s our trademark’.6 Fingerprints are visible marks that index the human labour of the otherwise ‘invisible’ artist both in and on the surface of the art, operating as a fundamental principle of documentation. The genesis of contemporary fingerprint systems, including the shaping of hands into an evidential process representing human involvement and bodily action, has been traced back through the history of clay as a pliable material. Harold Cummins plots a trajectory of ‘historical ceramic technology’ through the human handling of clay, from skin furrows found in Chinese clay seals to Assyrian tablets and coiled Pecos pottery.7 Drawing from Cummins’s typology of how fingerprints have been utilized and recorded throughout history, the traces of prior human activity found in the surface of Aardman’s animated figures can be aligned with what he terms ‘chance prints’. For Cummins, this label signifies that ‘as prints they were not applied purposefully, notwithstanding purpose in the act of grasping or modelling the soft clay’.8 Such ‘chance prints’ exist as accidental by-products of a process ‘designed for another purpose than to produce prints’ rather than appearing intentionally by design.9 Naturally arising from the energies and intimate labour of the artist, the resultant indentations recast the handled object as a fossilized mould that admits the process of its manufacture. Aardman’s animation therefore provides a more intimate re-evaluation of the ‘hand of the artist’ trope of early cinema described by Donald Crafton, in which the animators’ hands would interject into the animated image and corrupt the sanctity of its graphic space.10 Whereas this trope of artist self-figuration has extended the genealogy of animation to include the lightning sketch vaudeville tradition, the hands of Aardman’s animators

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are less audacious in their usually fleeting presence. Early animation’s sight of hand was frequently coerced into an autonomous exhibitionist display, with the animator always made available or ‘on hand’ so that early animated characters (including Koko the Clown and Felix the Cat) might impetuously leap onto the intruding artist’s appendage in the pursuit of entertainment. The hand of the Aardman artist, by comparison, becomes an abstracted or once-removed presence, metonymically re-presented on-screen as the unique spectral impression in the clay left by the peaks and troughs of friction (or epidermal) ridges present on human hands. The concave shallow trace of humanity left through digit transfer registers a presence/ absence of the artist geared less towards the comical spectacle of ‘impossible’ intermediality, but is instead anchored to its status as a physical imprint. This is what Annabelle Honess Roe means when she asserts that fingerprints in clay divulge ‘a physical connection between image and [the] profilmic’.11 Aardman’s animated objects announce through their very animation that they are under external manipulation and control. But the presence onscreen of ‘chance’ fingerprints reminds us of that physical proximity that exists between off-screen animator and on-screen animated, as well as the activity that occurs in between frames. Impressed upon the material substance of the plasticine, the visible fingerprints pushed into Aardman’s moulded clay models traditionally celebrate, rather than obfuscate, the spectators’ registration of the labour of stop-motion animation (sculpting, positioning, incremental character movement), and authenticate the animators’ workmanship by laying bare the trace of production through the truth of its surface flaws. Aardman’s subsequent shift to computer-animated film production for Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas, however, placed their historical associations with stop-motion as a labour-intensive ‘hands-on medium’ on a collision course with the ulterior ontology of digital media.12 Far removed from discourses of human intervention and the control of touch within animation production, contemporary digital imagery and computer-generated imagery (CGI) remains wrought with negative associations centred on its ‘flatness and unrealistic seamless perfection’, inferences that can be squared to the current industry standard of digital effects guided by the presumed teleology of convincing cinematic realism.13 For many theorists of animation, a weakness or fault of the ‘perfect’ digital image is the way in which the pristine sheen and persuasive aesthetic illusionism readily achievable in computer graphics erases the general indices of animation production (surface fingerprints, pencil marks, brush strokes). As Manohla Dargis explains in relation to Aardman’s stop-motion practices, ‘fingerprints whorls are reminders that these movies were made by people who molded clay with their hands instead

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of only manipulating symbols on computers. […] That’s partly why the movies seem more personal than many computer animations.’14 Computer animation has therefore been charged with removing evidence of the skilful artisan by easily effacing the lingering (and labouring) ‘marks of the maker’ so often visible in stop-motion processes, and replacing animated craftsmanship with the impersonal and indirect process of slick digital manipulation.15 Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas – as computer-animated films made by Aardman – would then appear to forfeit the tactile workmanship and materiality of physical effects that traditionally support the studio’s signature ‘handmade’ productions. Given the possible tensions between the handmade tactility of claymation and the digital’s computerized production, the playful addition of simulated ‘chance prints’ in Aardman’s first computer-animated feature Flushed Away therefore works to ground the trusted stop-motion studio in a familiar (public) discourse of the clumsy and the crude. The visual recollection of stop-motion processes through counterfeit fingerprints embedded into the surface of the film’s digital characters ultimately (and falsely) exploits the indexes of stopmotion animation to call into question the faultlessness of computer graphics through the recreation of visual imperfection. Accounts of the cinematic imperfect have suggested that such aesthetics of deficiency have historically occupied a position of opposition, one that resists conventional critical and cultural approaches to art and representation, whilst offering a form of provocative ‘counter aesthetic’.16 Yet what connects many notions of the imperfect across art and culture, which include the performative spontaneity of Jazz music and the more contemporaneous, technologically determined practice of ‘glitching’, is the appearance and appreciation of the authentic.17 Explored among philosophical ethics, theology and studies of spirituality, imperfection has often been conceptualized as a virtue and property of authenticity, just as authenticity makes allowances for the presence of the imperfect by rescinding, tempering or compromising culturally informed ideas of perfection. Signalled through retrospective and entirely false impressions of human touch, Aardman’s computer-animated films outwardly frolic in the realm of the flawed and mark a creative investment in the pleasurable deficiency of irregular, imperfect images. Yet the replicating of ‘on set’ plasticine puppets moved in profilmic space ‘by hand’ through fake prints is just one of the many ways that Aardman might be seen as inflecting, reshaping and deforming prior standards of computer-animated film production and aspects of its visual style. Arthur Christmas co-producer Chris Juen argues that ‘Because they [Aardman] work in clay, there’s an endearing imperfection to the characters. However, trying to make a computer image imperfect

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is a very complicated thing to do. We spent some time messing with the symmetry of the characters – as they become less perfect, I think people relate to them more’.18 The conciliatory ‘imperfect’ identity of Aardman’s computer-animated feature films can be understood through a series of significant creative compromises and approaches, which both acknowledged the landscape of digital animation whilst respecting the material physicality of Aardman’s own stop-motion tradition. In an era of computer-assisted effortlessness and precision, Aardman’s ‘imperfection’ of the image through faked fingerprints functions becomes one element of the wider compromise aesthetic present in both Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas that works to counter the digital’s ‘perfect’ illusionist credentials through a conciliation with stop-motion practices. The narratives of both Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas certainly share an apparent investment in the joy of objects created ‘by hand’. Flushed Away tells the story of Roddy St. James, a privileged society mouse who is accidentally ‘flushed’ from his affluent lifestyle in Kensington down into the subterranean sewers of London, where he discovers an underground micro city composed entirely of reclaimed junk. The technologies of this buried city identify its culture as one predicated on a discourse of sustainability. Salvaged washing machines, chipped porcelain mugs, phone boxes, discarded food, a jukebox and a portable toilet cubicle are all sculpted together by the inhabitants into handmade versions of famed London landmarks. The division that Flushed Away erects between the luxurious interior space of Roddy’s gilded cage (he is kept as a domestic pet by his owners above ground) and the reclaimed cityscape below narrativizes a tension between the plush architectural splendour of Roddy’s Kensington home and the ‘handmade’ reassembly of cultural detritus by resourceful amateurs. Arthur Christmas, however, more obviously trades on the reconciliation of old and new in its explicit opposition between technological modernity and ‘byhand’ traditions. The film reveals Christmas to be a highly technological operation conducted from a mission control base beneath the North Pole. At the centre of its apparent technophilia sits the S-1, a sleek spaceship/sleigh hybrid piloted at 1860 times the speed of sound by militaristic officer and heir apparent Steve Claus. The S-1 combines the shape of traditional sleigh replete with an interior of control rooms and computer stations, all in service of ‘Operation Santa Claus’ that is meticulously executed via satellite tracking, navigation and data analysis. Yet Arthur Christmas posits a phobia of yuletide technology at the same time as it embraces the spectacular possibilities of digital machinery. Not only does the S-1 fail by leaving one present undelivered (‘a child has been missed!’), but the film celebrates the handwritten personalized responses

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Figure  14.1  Arthur’s workspace emphasizes the diligence of attentive labour in Arthur Christmas (dir. Sarah Smith. Aardman Animations/Sony Pictures Animation, 2011).

written by the eponymous Arthur (Santa’s youngest son) to each child’s letter to Father Christmas. Indeed, the introduction of Arthur crouched over his desk as he formulates his messages (Figure 14.1) uses the character’s intimate artistry to challenge the mediation of Christmas through the multiplicity of computer screens adorning S-1’s luminescent control room. This perilous fallibility to the automated, impersonal delivery of presents is therefore set against Arthur’s tailored, bespoke treatment of children as names rather than numbers, which is marked through his custom-made handwritten letters rather than the anonymity of mechanical, computerized distribution. The vision of Arthur sitting alone within his darkened workspace additionally evokes many promotional images of Aardman animators, in which their attention, care, skill and precision is made central to the Aardman company brand. Echoing Roddy’s precariousness in Flushed Away between the modern technology (flat-screen television, sound system, microwave) of his Kensington townhouse and the functional junk art of the alternative rodent metropolis, the eponymous Arthur is likewise caught between two worlds: the hi-tech modernity of his parents and older sibling, and his personal space in which labour is conducted by hand. Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas  – as computer-animated films about differing forms of technology – can, however, be understood as mobilizing cultural conceptions of Aardman old and new, plasticine and pixel, as not necessarily

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in irresolvable conflict, but operating in mutual support of one another. In Arthur Christmas, the Claus family are ultimately forced to balance old and new festive protocols by delivering presents using both the S-1’s gadgetry and more old-fashioned methods (embodied by Grandsanta’s ‘relic’ sleigh ‘Evie’ that works without the trappings of ‘electrickery’). Behind such self-reflexive narratives of conciliation, however, lies Aardman’s own appeasement of technologies via the terms of a striking ‘compromise aesthetic’ that integrates the workflow and production pipeline of stopmotion together with the possibilities enabled by computer graphics. While Aardman’s previous feature films Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Nick Park and Steve Box, 2005) were already conjunctions of computer graphics and claymation, Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas are more overtly hybrid zones of intermediality that marry digital technology together with the specific stylistic and narrative traditions of Aardman. The composite and combinatory quality of these films operates not at the level of competing ontologies and the seamless integration of digital and non-digital effects (as in Curse of the Were-Rabbit). Rather, it is a feature that emerges out of the variant ways in which Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas articulate their own hybridity through character design, camerawork and the precise organization of their animated worlds.

A happy medium? A central component of Aardman’s compromise aesthetic – evident in both Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas and indebted to degrees of imperfection in the digital image – involved situating the possibilities of animated performance within the expressive freedoms afforded within stop-motion to re-conjure in CG the particular visual traditions of Aardman’s handmade heritage. As Juen’s comments on the ‘enduring imperfection’ of Aardman make clear, the ‘imperfect’ design of the characters in Arthur Christmas involved a conscious asymmetry within their expressive physiognomies, with ill-proportioned limbs and flawed features introduced to unbalance the CG perfection of their bodies. For Linda Sunshine, there was likewise ‘nothing perfect’ about the film’s ensemble cast, with particular textural details and stylistic variations ‘quite unusual for a CG film’ that intentionally crafted a rustic aesthetic of the handmade.19 Visually replicating the handmade materiality of Aardman’s silicone-based plasticine puppets in digital imagery, Flushed Away similarly combined complex facial rigging systems and all-digital wireframe models

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with Aardman’s character designs (borrowing heavily from Wallace’s widened ‘coat hanger’ mouth that had also been a staple of the character designs in Chicken Run). To support elements of character design, the computer as an animation tool had to provide the same procedural flexibility for Aardman’s animators experienced in moving plasticine faces and bodies incrementally by hand. This was because, as Character Technical Director Supervisor Martin Costello explains, ‘obviously we can’t just give the computer a giant thumb’.20 In order to emulate the plasticine aesthetic of its British-based partner studio for Flushed Away, the team of animators at DreamWorks used a stop-motion rig to transpose Aardman’s ‘unique performance style’ onto a computeranimated world.21 Rigged in Autodesk’s Maya software, the intention was to emulate the limited facial expressions and surface imperfections of their moulded clay counterparts, including the monobrow (normally overhanging plasticine above the eyes), frown lines and overall look of premodelled plasticine heads as if ‘sculpted with traditional modeling tools’.22 In Flushed Away, then, certain formal restrictions governed the expressivity of its characters to faithfully integrate the look of clay stop-motion puppets efficiently with the computer-animated feature film for the first time. Most notable was the scoring of replacement mouths, which were generated from ‘digital clay’ so that mouth shapes could be digitally changed in between frames, thereby replicating the labour-intensive stop-motion technique. Rather than the typical CG muscle-based systems and detailed articulation points driving digital performance, each character in Flushed Away had between ten and thirty replacement mouths, which could be swapped according to each phoneme or unit of sound spoken. This process was supplemented by bodies that likewise mimicked the skeletal structures and localized joint movement traditionally found in Aardman’s claymation style. The limited articulation of these puppets therefore had the counterintuitive effect of inaugurating new creative possibilities rooted in the expressiveness and acceptance of visual imperfection. The complementary – rather than adversarial – relationship in Aardman’s computer-animated films between stop-motion production and new digital processing is also reflected in the organization of space and distance. Stop-motion commonly involves theatrical tricks such as false or forced perspectives to craft the illusion of three-dimensional space through sets that gradually reduce in size and scale. As Brian Sibley explains with regard to the purposeful distortion in Aardman’s earlier Chicken Run: The countryside is constructed in parallel sections with access gaps running between this wall and that field, this fold in the valley and that

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steep incline. Walk back to where Mrs. Tweedy is parading up and down in front of the rows of terrified chickens and the scene recreates itself before your very eyes.23

Such optical effects falsely declare the dimensions of space through the violation of human depth perception that allows centimetres to stand in for miles. In this trick of spatial (mis)representation, objects diminish in size away from the camera, while perpendicular lines are replaced with angular geometry to exaggerate the spectators’ ‘true’ comprehension of otherwise ‘false’ spatial relations. All animation that is driven by the orthodoxies of realism fundamentally incorporates the ‘cheat’ of ‘forcing’ perspective into the design of individual shots. Horizon lines, linear perspectives and vanishing points can all be used to construct a believable relativity of sizes and positions, as well as presenting the illusion of a three-dimensional environment receding far into the distance. Stop-motion in particular coerces flatness into apparent depth. Dimensional cues are often used to counter logistical factors, budgetary constraints and the practicality of available filmmaking space given that vistas and panoramas are achieved within what is often an extremely limited space of table top production. Indeed, as Flushed Away co-director David Bowers put it when discussing the vast scope of Aardman’s first computeranimated film ‘[t]here just wouldn’t have been room in the studio to do it. And there wouldn’t have been enough plasticine or clay in the world to do it.’24 Sproxton similarly notes that with Arthur Christmas, ‘[t]here was no way we were going to build a million elves as individual puppets! We knew that the only way to do it was CG.’25 The challenge posed by scale and space – notably Flushed Away’s narrative predicated on Roddy’s spontaneous movement between spaces as he is ‘flushed’ from street to sewer – necessitated a turn to computer animation as a way of sidestepping physical constraints and creating the illusion of spatial expanse. This perspectival intrigue is played out during a comical sequence early in the film, one that reprises the Looney Tunes gag in which Wile E. Coyote paints a convincing tunnel onto a sheer rock face (only for the Road Runner to impossibly enter into this graphic subspace). When Roddy is flushed from the riches of Kensington to the depths of London, the camera discloses a cityscape panorama from a seemingly great height. It is only when the three-dimensional digital Roddy lands onto a flat cartographical image that the camera pulls back to reveal the latter as nothing more than a detailed pavement painting (Figure  14.2) aimed at ‘cheating’ the audience’s comprehension of animated perspective.

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Figure  14.2  Roddy’s fall into the underground ‘London’ in Flushed Away (dir. David Bowers and Sam Fell. Aardman Animations/DreamWorks Animation, 2006) manipulates animated perspective.

Despite this graphic deception, Flushed Away actually seems to register an understanding of space drawn less from stop-motion’s traditional creation of convincing spatial coordinates, and more from the conventions of liveaction filmmaking (albeit convincingly simulated by computer). Frank Passingham, Director of Photography on Chicken Run, commented that in Flushed Away ‘the perspective is “real,” unlike the false perspective we often have to use in a stop-frame animation studio’.26 The visual trick with the voluminous Roddy landing onto the flat painted image is therefore one not pursued by the film (only one shot in Flushed Away employs a painted matte backdrop of London). This is because digital imagery and green/bluescreen technologies have offered a viable replacement for false perspectives, with less need for multiple stop-motion sets (and characters) of variant scales. However, that is not to say depth cues and the illusion of dimension cannot be further exaggerated in CG in spite of its three-dimensionality. J.P. Telotte argues that the cartoonal stylization of recent computer-animated film space often exaggerates, distorts or ‘caricatures’ visual reality, and the technology evokes ‘a traditional filmmaker [who] might use forced perspectives or special lenses to create particular atmospheric or thematic effects’.27 However, the establishment of a compromise aesthetic in Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas can be further squared to the combination of spatial manipulation with virtual camerawork that equally reflects the push-pull relationship between two image-making technologies.

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In stop-motion, the inseparable alliance of camera with ‘character’ is, of course, integral to the illusion of movement. The registration of an object or puppet as sentient is entirely reliant on the veiling properties of editing, which hides the discontinuous, intermittent process of animation occurring invisibly in between the frames. The fixed position of the camera in stopmotion also makes available other forms of deception. For example, in Chicken Run, characters were often present as incomplete, partial models (headless, or even as simply appendages) depending on how much of their animated bodies would be visible on screen.28 The camera’s masking potential reduces the need for superfluous animator effort, whilst implicating the apparatus more readily into the stop-motion process. However, in CG animation such tricks are not required because, as for Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas, each digital character is modelled in their entirety as scratch rigs on a computer. Once placed inside the three-dimensional CG sets, the virtual camera is then able to rotate freely around the character to capture each gesture, compressed/expanded facial pose and sculpted bodily movement. Another logistical implication of the stop-motion camera is its operation as physical equipment. Barry Purves explains that ‘stop-motion sets are usually built with a “front” – this not only helps orientate the viewer, but it helps practically with all the rigging and the lighting’.29 The frontal position of the set housing the physical camera apparatus, lighting rigs and the animators ultimately comes to bear upon the movement of the camera that cannot move through the space with the same freedom as digitally assisted camera positions. When anchored in space, the stationary physical camera apparatus provides a counterpoint to the volley of swooping spectatorial viewpoints that have now become a staple of the untethered style of digitally enhanced camerawork. However, to replicate stop-motion production and aesthetics within computer animation, Flushed Away used regulated, ‘grounded’ camera movement that adhered to stop-motion’s ‘studio-based tracking and motion control systems.’30 This is most notable during the sequence in which Roddy encounters Rita’s parents and the trappings of working-class British domesticity (a moment that directors Sam Fell and David Bowers suggest through its interior detailing is the ‘most Aardman’).31 As Roddy is greeted by Rita’s many nieces and nephews, it is the camera position that remains fixed throughout the scene, while the home space tilts perilously back and forth as it seesaws atop a discarded oil drum. In its treatment of British eccentricity, the sequence reprises the observational, interview-style aesthetic of Creature Comforts, particularly in the way Roddy witnesses the family’s chaotic, quirky sensibilities. Yet the fixed, ‘grounded’ (rather than weightless) camerawork remains only one part of these films’ visual regime.

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Indeed, such shots coexist with more formally vigorous moments that are entirely accomplished through the possibilities of digital camerawork moving through virtual space. In an early action sequence from Arthur Christmas, Santa’s elf battalion parachutes down from the S-1 to traverse the snowy rooftops in a coordinated delivery of gifts undertaken with military precision. With its visual iconography borrowed from the contemporary spy thriller genre (notably the Mission Impossible film series [1996–]), this frenetic delivery of presents across horizontal and vertical planes is accompanied by a swooping camera that is always in service of the elves’ erratic, frenzied actions. The boat chase in Flushed Away through the cavernous underwater sewer rapids between Roddy, Rita, Spike and Whitey likewise employs roving, untethered camerawork to capture Roddy’s spiralling ascent and descent as he is pulled on a harness through (and above) this subterranean version of London. This particular sequence inverted the normal Aardman production pipeline, with a virtual set constructed around the characters that could be amended and altered as the chase progressed. Yet the desire for visual continuity with Aardman’s previous stop-motion features is indicated by the use of simulated 35 mm and 24 mm prime lenses for its virtual cinematography.32 This enabled not only the ‘material immediacy’ and ‘knowable quality’ of the stop-motion set to be re-conjured by cameras that often behaved with gravity as if moving through tangible space, but permitted the focus to be literally pulled onto CG and stop-motion cinematography in their alignment.33 Individual shots in Flushed Away ‘very difficult to do in the stop frame studio’ were allied with qualities more germane to ‘the Aardman feel’ from weighted cameras, deep space shooting to certain lenses that fully captured its textured ‘CG sets’.34 So just as Rita’s home in Flushed Away lurches horizontally on its unstable foundations, Aardman’s computer-animated features demonstrate the precariousness of their own stylistic balancing acts no less held in delicate compromise. The ‘pushing’ of credible representation ‘beyond the parameters of the real’ that Telotte argues has come to define recent digital animation bears out the increasingly important role of stylization against the false logic of technological determinism towards ever-increasing photorealism. Yet Aardman’s computer-animated feature films have stretched this relationship between aesthetic discourses of realism and illustration even further. Both Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas employ an aesthetic style and formal design that counter the digital’s illusionist credentials by respecting and reflecting the material physicality of the studio’s own stop-motion traditions and enduring handmade heritage. Aardman’s computer-animated films ultimately present a uniquely combinatory, conciliatory space that integrate

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traditions of stop-motion production and a visual style germane to the studio into a contemporary digital context. The outcome of such an arrangement of elements is that Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas creatively oscillate between the familiarity of Aardman’s house style rooted in discourses of imperfection and the affordances of digital techniques. This interrelationship ultimately positions Aardman’s CG image as somewhere between the claymation aesthetic of the studio’s past and its possible computer-animated future.

Remoulding a reputation The received narrative concerning cinema’s relationship to technology is often one that unfolds along a teleology of acceptance and rejection, loss or gain, economy and aesthetics to articulate the manifold styles and practices brought into relief as a consequence of breaching new technological frontiers. The stable consolidation of film’s digital history and the acceleration of CGI as mainstream animation’s default language may have relegated stop-motion to a more marginal position, but this marks but one axis of debate among the many afforded by Aardman’s brief digital makeover. As the only two completely computer-animated features made to date by the studio, Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas function as lingering reminders (and remainders) of a fleeting period of the studio’s history, culminating the progressive absorption of digital technology into their stop-motion features in ways that hybridized elements of their production, design and composition. These consecutive films plotted a possible future for computeranimated filmmaking not governed by mimetic disguise and seamlessness, but by a compromise visual style that exploited computer graphics yet looked back to the workmanship and imperfect achievements of the handmade. While this expressive future for mainstream Hollywood animation has yet to be fully realized, the popular criticisms of a ‘chronic identity crisis’ levelled at Aardman’s computer-animated films anticipate the numerous bargains continually being struck between animated traditions within the contemporary digital animation landscape.35 Paying their respects to Aardman’s claymation ancestry, both Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas demonstrate their courage to be imperfect, seeking to promote the retention of the studio’s highly marketable house style whilst cloaking it in the expectations of an increasingly expanding computer-animated film context. An early shot from Flushed Away seems particularly playful in this respect. Hastily pulling garish outfits out of his wardrobe to try on at the start of the day, Roddy removes Wallace’s iconic

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Figure  14.3  Roddy’s wardrobe brings together Aardman past and present in Flushed Away (dir. David Bowers and Sam Fell. Aardman Animations/DreamWorks Animation, 2006).

green tank top, white shirt and red tie and positions it up against his body (Figure 14.3). Taken alongside the film’s many intertextual references to the Aardman oeuvre (e.g., a stuffed Gromit toy and bunnies from Curse of the Were-Rabbit sit outside Roddy’s cage), this image of the rodent dressed in familiar clothes briefly superimposes Aardman’s claymation past onto its computer-animated present in a self-reflexive gesture that dresses up new Aardman in old clothes. Embodying the studio’s rich formal precariousness between competing animated styles, Roddy’s attire momentarily points to Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas as curious meeting places for a divergent set of values that are always vying for visibility and ascendency. Following the release of Arthur Christmas, Aardman’s return in  2012 to stop-motion processes for the second film in their Sony distribution deal The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt, 2012) was, on the one hand, unsurprising given the post-millennial resurgence of the form from an earlier period of digitally induced dormancy. Corpse Bride (Tim Burton and MIke Johnson, 2005), Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009), Mary and Max (Adam Elliot, 2009), Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009), ParaNorman (Sam Fell and Chris Butler,  2012), Frankenweenie (Tim Burton,  2012), The Boxtrolls (Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi, 2014), Hell and Back (Tom Gianas and Ross Shuman, 2015), Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman, 2015), Kubo and the Two Strings (Travis Knight,  2016), My Life as a Courgette (Claude Barras, 2016) and Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson, 2018) all showcase the pleasures

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of object animation at a time when computer graphics largely dominates the English-speaking animation market. Advancements in 3D printers and rapid prototyping have enabled studios to produce variant models and body parts within the construction of characters, thereby ‘infusing’ in new ways the craft of stop-motion with digital technologies.36 Two recent computeranimated films, The LEGO Movie (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2014) and The Peanuts Movie (Steve Martino, 2015), also reflect a growing industry nostalgia for pre-digital, stop-motion techniques of animated image making. But within the specific production context of the Aardman studio, the turn back towards stop-motion marked something of a homecoming. Indeed, despite the assimilation of stop-motion foam latex and pliable silicone in its models with digital green screen effects, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, Shaun the Sheep Movie (Richard Starzak and Mark Burton, 2015) and Early Man (Nick Park, 2018) all resume the imperfect traditions of more ‘authentic’ Aardman true to their history in response to their momentary cessation of claymation techniques. Even the very production of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! marked, for many UK reviewers, a ‘return to form’ as it was the product of ‘painstaking processes concomitant with a high level of attention to detail’.37 These kinds of critical and popular perspectives further identify Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas as erroneous digital experiments that were designed to plunge Aardman headfirst into a lucrative computer-animated film market. But from a position of retrospection, these discourses add to the mythology surrounding the studio’s pixel-for-plasticine substitution. Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas persist as intriguing footnotes within both Aardman’s feature film history and the still-evolving history of the computer-animated cinema, exposing not just the studio’s mouldable history but also their significant, if only transitory, contribution to creatively compromising the computer-animated film’s visual language.

Notes 1

2 3

Matthew Garrahan, ‘DreamWorks Ends Tie-Up with Aardman’, Financial Times, 31 January 2007. Available at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ dd114c62-b0cf-11db-8a62-0000779e2340.html#axzz3pUpyDhxM (accessed 30 December 2015). Tim Robey, ‘Flushed Away’, Daily Telegraph, 1 December 2006, p. 33. Ben Fritz, ‘DreamWorks: Toons in Transition’, Variety, 25 September 2005. Available at: http://variety.com/2005/digital/news/dreamworks-toons-intransistion-1117929595/ (accessed 30 December 2015).

Aardman’s Digital Thumbprint 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

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Michael Lynton, quoted in Adam Dawtrey, ‘Aardman Signs with Sony’, Variety, 2 April 2007. Available at: ­http://variety.com/2007/digital/markets-festivals/­ aardman-signs-with-sony-1117962348/ (accessed 30 December 2015). Peter Lord quoted in Tasha Robinson, ‘Aardman Animations Co-Founder Peter Lord Reveals the Best Gag in His New Film The Pirates! Band Of Misfits’, A.V. Club, 25 April 2012. Available at: http://www.avclub.com/ article/aardman-animations-co-founder-peter-lord-reveals-t-72973 (accessed 30 December 2015). David Sproxton, quoted in ‘Flushed Away: Production Notes’ (2006). Available at: http://madeinatlantis.com/movies_central/2006/flushed_away. htm (accessed 30 December 2015). Harold Cummins, ‘Ancient Finger Prints in Clay’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 32, no. 4 (1941–1942), pp. 473–5. Ibid., p. 474. Ibid., p. 479. Donald Crafton, ‘Animation Iconography: The ‘Hand of the Artist’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 4 (Fall 1979), p. 414. Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 38. Andrea Comiskey, ‘(Stop)Motion Control: Special Effects in Contemporary Puppet Animation’, in D. North, B. Rehak and M.S. Duffy (eds), Special Effects: New Histories. Theories, Contexts (London: Palgrave, 2015), p. 52. Lisa Purse, Digital Imagery in Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 47. Manohla Dargis, ‘Swashbucklers Roiling Madcap Seas’, Variety, 26 April 2012. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/movies/thepirates-band-of-misfits.html?_r=0 (accessed 30 December 2015). Rachel Moseley, Hand-Made Television: Stop-Frame Animation for Children in Britain, 1961–1974 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 103. For a discussion of a ‘counter-aesthetic’, see David E.W. Fenner, ‘In Celebration of Imperfection’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38, no. 2 (Summer 2004), p. 68. See also Julio García Espinosa, ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’, Jump Cut 20 (1979), pp. 24–6. Greg Hainge notes that that the glitch is a ‘reminder of the imperfect, noisy, lossy nature of the machine […] [that] counters our contemporary digital culture’s positivistic faith in technology as providing order’. Greg Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 129. Chris Juen quoted in Anon., ‘Santa Goes High Tech in “Arthur Christmas”’, Computer Graphics World, 12 January 2012. Available at: ­http://www.cgw. com/Press-Center/In-Focus/2012/Santa-Goes-High-Tech-In-ArthurChristmas.aspx (accessed 30 December 2015).

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19 Linda Sunshine (ed.), The Art and Making of Arthur Christmas: An Inside Look at Behind-the-Scenes Artwork with Filmmaker Commentary (London: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 25. 20 Martin Costello, quoted in ‘Flushed Away: Production Notes’. 21 Martin Costello, ‘Stop Motion Puppets in CG’, SIGGRAPH (2006). Available at: ­http://staffwww.itn.liu.se/~andyn/courses/tncg08/sketches06/ sketches/0660-costello.pdf (accessed 30 December 2015). 22 Ibid. 23 Brian Sibley, Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie (London: Boxtree, 2000), pp. 135–6. 24 David Bowers, quoted in ‘Flushed Away: Production Notes’, p. 3. 25 David Sproxton, quoted in Anon., ‘Santa Goes High Tech in “Arthur Christmas”’. 26 Frank Passingham quoted in Anon., ‘Flushed Away’, British Cinematographer 19 (January 2007), p. 15. 27 J.P. Telotte, The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 166. 28 Sibley, Chicken Run, p. 139. 29 Barry Purves, Stop-Motion Animation: Frame by Frame Film-Making with Puppets and Models (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 138. 30 Brad Blackbourn, ‘“Flushed Away”: A Virtual Cinematography Dream Team’, Animation World Magazine, 3 November 2006. Available at: http:// www.awn.com/vfxworld/flushed-away-virtual-cinematography-dreamteam (accessed 30 December 2015). 31 Sam Fell and David Bowers, quoted in Flushed Away DVD [Audio Commentary]. 32 Blackbourn, ‘“Flushed Away”: A Virtual Cinematography Dream Team’. 33 Chris Pallant, ‘The Stop-Motion Landscape’, in Chris Pallant (ed.), Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 34. 34 Frank Passingham, quoted in Blackbourn, ‘“Flushed Away”: A Virtual Cinematography Dream Team’. 35 Catherine Shoard, ‘Flushed Away’, Sunday Telegraph, 3 December 2006, p. 21. 36 Matt Kamen, ‘How Boxtrolls Studio Revolutionised Stop motion Animation’, WIRED, 8 September 2014. Available at: http://www.wired. co.uk/news/archive/2014-09/08/boxtrolls-travis-knight-interview (accessed 30 December 2015). 37 Laurence Phelan, ‘The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, Peter Lord (U) Wrath of the Titans, Jonathan Liebesman, (12A)’, The Independent, 1 April 2012. Available at: ­­http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/films/reviews/the-pirates-in-an-adventure-with-scientistspeter-lord-u-wrath-of-the-titans-jonathan-liebesman-12a-7605929.html (accessed 30 December 2015).

15

Aardman! In an Entanglement with CGI! Aylish Wood

On its release in  2012, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! was widely promoted as an Aardman stop-motion (or stop-frame) animated feature film with the significant addition of visual effects (VFX). The Pirates! was not the first time the Aardman Studio used CG work in an animated feature. During its collaboration with DreamWorks, Aardman had produced Flushed Away (2006), and with Sony Pictures Animation Arthur Christmas (2011).1 The Pirates! was significant as a return to stop-motion, a return that was modulated by the combination of the tactility of handmade animation with the intangibility of digital work. The combination of handmade and digitalmade is where my interest lies, and in particular how The Pirates! negotiates a way through the dual prism of tradition and innovation. The negotiation is fascinating for what it reveals about two facets of The Pirates!: the ways in which Aardman’s stop-motion claymation tradition is invoked to disguise digital interventions, and how VFX create and activate a hybrid digital–physical space. Inherent to this negotiation is the extensive hybridity of The Pirates’ imagery. I approach this imagery via analyses of both the animation and the publicity materials. Like most feature films, The Pirates’ release was accompanied by a range of publicity materials, newspaper and magazine reviews. These are full of detail about the puppets and sets, costumes design decisions, actors and their voice work, as well as the stop-motion techniques. Even as these emphases draw attention to the handcraftedness of stop-motion and performance, explanations of digital techniques ensure the hybridity of the images also remains foregrounded. Publicity materials, then, explain the materiality of animation processes; as such they are discursive disclosures that negotiate the interplay of Aardman’s tradition and digital innovation. To make sense of this negotiation, I use an entangled perspective. An idea initially found in quantum physics, entanglement describes particles as understood through their interactions rather than their independent status. In the context of The Pirates!, a pirate character, when it appears as a moving figure on screen, can only be described as an interaction between handmade

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and digitalmade elements, it has no independent existence. Entanglement is not just a complicated sounding word for interaction, though. In the context of science and technology studies, entanglement refers as well to how those interactions are discursively understood.2 Taken at face value, the words stop-motion and digital VFX simply describe techniques. In marketing and publicity disclosures they come associated with other words, such as hybridity, tradition and innovation. These associations are not neutral, and an entangled perspective allows me to trace out the assumptions and implicit connections which accumulate around the seemingly transparent words handmade or digitalmade. These words, partly material descriptors, are not stand-alone but interrelated, shaped and contoured by their relations with other sets of ideas. Working with the term hybridity, I explore the entangled associations surrounding handmade and digitalmade in a range of The Pirates’ marketing and publicity materials and also the imagery in the feature. I first look at the hybridity of the puppet faces and how this generates a discourse about the traditions of the studio. Secondly, in the final section, I argue that hybridity enables a novel configuration of space that extends the actions of the puppets.

Hybridity and The Pirates! To begin explaining entanglement, I start from image hybridity. In Animation World Network, Bill Desowitz enthusiastically appraised the digital work evident in The Pirates!: One glimpse of The Pirates! Band of Misfits!3 and you can instantly tell that Aardman has gone way beyond Wallace and Gromit. The legendary Bristol stop-motion studio has fully embraced the digital age: the puppets are slicker and rapid prototyped with replaceable mouths, the sets are more lavish (the pirate ship is breathtaking and Victorian London is a marvel to behold) and the VFX is more authentic (the CG water is a revelation).4

Desowitz draws attention to the hybridity of the imagery as he notes the impact of digital techniques on stop-motion ones. Hybridity in animation is, of course, neither a new phenomenon nor a special feature of The Pirates!. Beyond examples associated with the technique of stop-motion, animations have often combined live-action footage and cel animation. Some very familiar examples include the Out of the Inkwell series (Fleischer Bros, 1918–29), the Alice Comedies (Disney, 1923–27) Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945) and

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Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988). Within the context of special and visual effects, animation techniques have frequently supplemented live-action, and in the current era of digital VFX, hybrid imagery is both prevalent and often unnoticed. Within this longer history, The Pirates! stands out as one of the first stop-motion animated features to use VFX in conjunction with handmade craft. Foundry, a London-based computer graphics development company who worked with Aardman on The Pirates!, reference an emphasis on stop-motion even as they celebrate the use of their software in the project. With the feature relying on 1,550 VFX shots, Foundry claim: ‘The studios’ latest film, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! is the most advanced yet, and is widely considered to be the world’s first full stop-motion visual effects movie.’5 As a stop-motion VFX movie, The Pirates! shares an approach to hybrid imagery found in VFX-based live-action filmmaking more widely: a tendency to map the overall look of the film to an aesthetic defined by live action or ‘shot on the studio’ footage. Lev Manovich suggests that though the emergent aesthetics of hybrid imagery exists in endless variations, it follows a logic where there is a: [J]uxtaposition of previously distinct visual languages of different media within the same sequence and, quite often, within the same frame. Hand-drawn elements, photographic cutouts, video, type, 3D elements are not simply placed next to each other but interwoven. The resulting visual language is a hybrid.6

Although such a range of possibilities exist, and these different opportunities can and sometimes are visibly exploited in making films, television programmes, animations or games, it is not always the case that such juxtapositioning is straightforwardly evident on-screen. Even though an image’s materiality may be hybrid, the potential of a hybrid aesthetic is only narrowly employed so as to match a live-action element. This is as true for the set designed in the production of The Pirates! as it is for a live-action film. Since an Aardman animation set and its puppets are scaled and styled to a particular look, I use the phrase ‘Aardman realism’ to describe the stop-motion animation associated with the studio and the way the VFX are matched to that look. Consequently, the hybridity of the image, though present, is less visible. The faces of the characters in The Pirates!, for instance, appear to be typical Aardman plasticene-modelled faces (Aardman realism), but they are also hybrid since they are modified by digital techniques used in post-production. Given its reduced visibility, revealing the hybrid materiality of The Pirates’ imagery relies on exploring the feature’s production culture disclosures. As

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noted already, production materials, especially those released as marketing and publicity materials, are a source of information about the production processes of any film. They are increasingly used as a starting point for pulling out the details of how some images are created, and for The Pirates! give insight into their hybrid materiality. To many people used to seeing Aardman’s stop-motion puppets, it might come as a surprise that the pirates’ faces were a combination of handcrafted material (plasticine, silicone and sometimes foam), 3D-printed pieces based on digital modelling and digital compositing in post-production. With such an explanation it is not only the materiality of a pirate puppet’s face that is mixed, but so are the meanings associated with it. Writing about entanglement in the theatre, Chris Salter asks, ‘how technology has mediated and scrambled meanings and categories,’7 and the explanations of The Pirates! production expose digital tools as having scrambled the meanings and categories of images in the animation. As we begin to understand a pirate puppet’s face to be both handmade and digitalmade, its material and discursive entanglements become visible. Entanglement takes things to exist relationally, only explainable as a set of interactions,8 and The Pirates! offers a ready opening for a discussion of entanglement because the images are materially entangled: trying to hold apart the physical and digital elements of the image only shows how far they are connected. At any given moment in The Pirates!, the Pirate Captain’s or Queen Victoria’s face is a combination of digital and handcrafted elements. At the same time, the surrounding publicity, ‘making of ’ and review material are consistent in calling into play a set of ideas about these faces, often referencing dualities around digital, stop-motion, tradition or innovation. So far, I have talked about how the materiality of a puppet face is understood relationally, through its associations with sets of ideas running through marketing and publicity materials. It is important at this point to also note that how we grasp materiality is not wholly set in place by social or cultural ideas. What can be said about a puppet’s face depends on the substance of its materiality, for instance, the malleability of plasticene. To explain, Michel Callon, when writing about scientific statements says of them that they are ‘entangled with the device that produced what it describes; the device and the series of actions undertaken are shaped by the statement, and vice versa’.9 Putting this another way, materiality provokes certain conditions and statements which then reveal and frame those conditions. Plasticine is soft and malleable, and visible traces of touch, such as thumb prints, provoke statements about handmade craft. Traces of touch are not framed as blemishes but as a link back to stop-motion animators as artists. Karen Barad makes explicit another dimension of framing: ‘Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define

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what counts as meaningful statements.’10 In this way, discursive practices can often be boundary making practices. In the material entanglements of The Pirates!, evidence of touch sets a boundary around which tradition and innovation are negotiated.

VFX and disguise Part of the charm factor of Aardman puppets lies in the range of expressions animating their faces. The greatest degree of hybridity in the puppets in The Pirates! is found on their faces, which makes them ideal as a starting place for exploring the entanglements between handmade and digitalmade elements. Touch, as in a physical connection between animator and puppet (as opposed to a digital manipulation sometimes referred to as touching a frame), both materially and discursively institutes a connection with Aardman tradition. As I describe below, in production disclosures material traces of touch and ideas about touch are entangled as they not only establish the presence of handmade craft but also disguise the presence of digitalmade work. In the book The Making of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists stop-motion animators are invited to talk about their craft. Through their words, Brian Sibley puts into play one of the corner stones of stop-motion tradition: touch.11 Evidence of touch and an appearance of touch is one of the key boundary terms in the negotiation between handmade and digitalmade images. Touch appears in explanations of how an audience is persuaded to accept a puppet’s performance. Just as in any kind of performance, the quiet moments of a stop-motion sequence are as consequential as those which are action packed. Discussing his work on The Pirates!, animator Lee Wilton notes the importance of ensuring audience recognition when crafting a convincing performance: ‘you might have a four-second shot of a character thinking, or giving a little look off-screen – it seems easy, but you have to make certain that the audience is interpreting it the way you’re intending’.12 Within the tradition of Aardman stop-motion shorts and features, there is a connection between touch, plasticine and crafting that little look offscreen. Loyd Price, Animation Supervisor on The Pirates!, makes this clear when he says: ‘You take a lump of clay … and you breathe life into it. People respond to it as if it’s a sentient being.’13 Breathing life into the lump of clay or indeed plasticine means shaping expressions to facilitate an audience’s way into the character of a puppet.14 Running across these explanations is an entanglement involving the tangible malleability of plasticine. Through these disclosures about touch, the material of plasticine facilitates two things: the performance of the puppets and establishing touch as a boundary term that

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is deployed as a means of validating the hybrid puppets as Aardman puppets, even when a print is digitally added. Making a puppet perform relies on an artist’s ability to convincingly manipulate a puppet’s features and operate within the conventions of an Aardman style of performance. A viewer with knowledge of the studio’s work is likely to anticipate expressions playing across a specific set of facial characteristics, the most familiar of which is the coat hanger smile with a mouth full of segmented teeth and simplified close-set eyeballs. In their discussion of how an audience makes sense of images, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuven say: ‘the dominant criterion for what is real and what is not is based on the appearance of things’.15 Kress and Leeuven are making the point that there is a correspondence between what is normally seen of an object in an everyday setting, and how it is seen in a visual representation. The point is also true of Aardman realism. The tradition of the studio can be invoked along as there is enough correspondence between the hybrid faces in The Pirates! and those familiar from the era of Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run. An important aspect of this correspondence is that it relies too on the apparent material of a puppet face looking like plasticine, even if silicone or foam is used. Questions of appearance are not limited to facial features and the subtle nuances of shifting expressions, the tiny details used to provide an evidential trace of hands touching plasticine are part of the entanglement too. These details and the materiality of plasticine provoke not only a performance but also the disclosures framing our understanding of the puppets. There is a recursive quality here, which is revealed through taking an entangled perspective. Plasticine is soft, fingers and thumbs leave indents that are easily visible to an audience when the image is projected on screen. The material evidence of touch frames disclosures around handmade work on the puppet faces, and therefore sets boundaries with which digitalmade work has to negotiate. At Double Negative, a visual effects company involved in the production of The Pirates!, the VFX supervisor involved in digital compositing decided how many stopmotion artefacts, such as thumb prints or random glue spots, were necessary on the puppet faces to maintain the handmade appearance of the work: In order to retain the hand crafted soul of the work, Jody Johnson (DNeg’s VFX supervisor) would study each frame and decide which of these errors to selectively leave and which to remove. It was important to Aardman that the work was finished to an incredibly high standard but still retained a hand crafted look.16

Entanglement here holds together the materiality of plasticine and statements such as ‘hand crafted soul’ and ‘hand crafted look’ by leveraging

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the evidential trace of touch. The comments by Jody Johnson quoted above reveal how entanglement runs out from handmade materiality, through a series of framing disclosures and turns again to frame The Pirates’ hybrid materiality. The presence of thumbprints and glue materially and discursively disguises the hybrid images in an entanglement that validates a connection to a handmade look. For the keen eyed, the design of Queen Victoria’s mouth is a good example of hybridity that slips beyond its disguise. Aardman’s stop-motion figures, such as Wallace and Gromit, have tended to have wide mouths with relatively few and largish teeth. In contrast, a puppet such as Victoria has thinner lips, smaller teeth and a range of more subtle expressions difficult for animators to accurately and consistently sculpt. To achieve these subtle expressions the production team turned to rapid prototyping (RP).17 The technique was developed at Laika Studio, first for Coraline (2009) and used again for the productions of ParaNorman (2012) and Boxtrolls (2014).18 Whereas Laika used RP to digitally print full-face resin models for the technique of replacement animation, Aardman printed only the lower sections of the face (mouths, tongues, jaws). In both cases, the resin model was not fully formed, but required significant intricate work from model makers to remove printing artefacts and paint the flesh tones and detail onto faces or face parts. In addition, for The Pirates!, post-production techniques were used to seamlessly integrate the plasticine (or silicone) pieces with the resin mouths and jaws. The hybridity of the imagery of The Pirates! is both most and least evident in the faces of all of the characters, not just Victoria’s. Some  80 per cent of frames in The Pirates! included digital work in post-production, and the facial work contributes to that number in a significant way as every set of actions in which lip-synch is involved generated post-production work. A deeper description of rapid protoyping reveals not only the digital process involved in animating the puppets faces, but also the interplay between the handmade and digitalmade technique, which Loyd Price describes as ‘a real mixture of model making and CG’.19 In this mixture, digital technology scrambles and mediates our understanding of the puppets.20 It scrambles our understanding by revealing the hybridity of the puppet’s expressions, and mediates by extending the range of subtle expressions available to animators for a puppet such as Victoria. Based on drawings of the figures, a sculpt (clay sculpture) of the model is made. Once approved, a second version of the model with articulated parts, including the head, is constructed. The heads were used as the model on which the rapid prototyping was based. With hair removed, they were scanned and the data imported into the  3D software Autodesk Maya, where digital

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modeller Helen Duckworth built a digital version of the head, and also the numerous mouths necessary for the lip-synch.21 Creating physical resin versions of these CG mouths meant using RP, which both sped up production and changed the available repertoire of expressions. Using these techniques, an array of mouths was generated for each character in the animation, and across the whole film some  6,818 were created.22 Consequently, for very many shots, the puppet had a join line just under the eyes. If it was not possible to hide these joins under a beard, glasses or clothing, removing the lines required a significant amount of compositing work, which was undertaken using the Foundry’s NUKE software. This technique generates a digital colour patch which was then added to the puppet faces in post-production. Along with composites using this patch, digital modelling and RP combine to scramble our understanding of the material nature of the puppets and mediate the  craft of stop-motion animators. The array of digital processes does not in the end simply copy the physical versions of facial expressions, but mediates as it modifies and extends the range of emotive responses available, something especially evident in Queen Victoria’s case. Peter Lord, co-founder of Aardman and the animation’s director, remarked: ‘Pirates! is faintly nostalgic sometimes,’ … ‘and we’re celebrating those Aardman things we love to do, but on an even bigger stage.’23 The production disclosures outlined above go some way in negotiating a way through nostalgia and moving towards the sense of a bigger stage. For Queen Victoria, the puppet’s hybrid materiality parlays into a wider range of expressiveness, and from these arise the nuanced performance of her varied machinations. In this example, entanglement goes from materiality to characterization, as handmade and digitalmade intersect to transform the expressive possibilities of stop-motion puppetry. But this move towards a bigger stage is always discursively constrained, again through an act of disguise invoking touch. The now mainly notional boundary between handmade and digitalmade never fully dissolves away, continuing because it serves the useful marketing purpose of framing a connection to Aardman tradition. For instance, commenting on the NUKE patch used to hide the joins between the resin mouths and the plasticine of the puppet, Loyd Price says: I don’t think people should be aware of it […] Nathan, who was our TD on the rapid-prototyping team, was able to make it so that we could put little fingerprints on the characters’ ears and textures on their noses, so that when you get in close on them, you have this textural feel.24

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As these comments reveal, a visible fingerprint turns out to not necessarily be an evidential trace of handmade work; instead, it can be a digitalmade disguise of hybrid puppet faces. This disguise discloses another dimension in the material-discursive framing of plasticine materiality, where entanglements with touch and Aardman tradition deflect attention away from digitalmade interventions towards handmade ones instead.

Making and remaking space Above I suggested entanglement connects between materiality and characterization, as handmade and digitalmade intersect to transform the expressive possibilities of stop-motion puppetry. In the following I take this idea to The Pirates! more widely and argue that connections run between materiality and the spaces of the animation when the hybrid possibilities of working in a digital environment are exploited to rescale the spaces of action. Some digital interventions are simply additions to an existing space, but others open up space in ways that are wholly dependent on the intersection of handmade and digitalmade space. The Foundry team involved in rescaling the spaces of action comment: One of the unique features of The Pirates! was the scale of the world that the Director, Pete Lord was looking to depict. A big part of the VFX challenge here was extending sets with matte paintings and CG models, and increasing the on-screen population with ‘digital extras’. Big sets and big crowds can be very expensive and time intensive for stop-motion. Furthermore effects like explosions, flames, oceans and splashes would have been either too crazy or simply impossible to attempt in pure stopmotion.25

Explosions, flames, wide open oceans and wave splashes are visible examples of CG extensions to the imagery of The Pirates!, as are the crowd scenes on Blood Island, the Pirate Awards and the Royal Society meeting of scientists. There are many examples of what might be called conventional set extensions in The Pirates!. For instance, in addition to the digitally populated crowd scenes already noted, digital mattes were used to create the background details of foliage in Blood Island, and also the rooftops of Victorian London. Extensions such as those to the set of Blood Island create a greater sense of place via an expansive terrain that contributes to the richness of the imagined location. Even so, these extensions remain a backdrop, a support to activities taking place in the foreground of the harbour. The addition of digital roofs to

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the set of Victorian London serves a different purpose by generating a hybrid space which in turn allows a camera to be arced over the top of the buildings. Because they facilitate a camera movement that brings into existence a more expansive terrain for looking, such extensions do more than fill space. Not simply the backdrop to action, they function to reconfigure otherwise unusable onset space into one where actions become possible. Without the set extension, the camera movement would be unfeasible. Playing a part in generating space, digital technologies mediate in making a hybrid space, which in turn facilitates a new location for action. Because of this, the added space is an entangled one, where hybrid materiality connects to the spaces of an animation. The post-production activity of wire and rig removal, often referred to as cleaning up, also has the capacity to reconfigure and rescale on-set space and so constitute action, again through the production of hybrid and entangled spaces. In live-action cinema, post-production wire removal is a timeconsuming necessity used to clear the imagery of details that might disturb the credibility of the fictional world. The same is true in The Pirates!. In stopmotion sequences that are not digitally manipulated during post-production, movements occur in a physical space in front of the camera. Any rigging needed to suspend a figure or move a vehicle can be hidden through careful alignments between figure/vehicle, camera, elements of the set and costume. The scope of movements within such a space is constrained by the fabric of the shot, which includes the limits of the rigging, availability of camera view angles through which to obscure rigging and the influence of gravity. If digital manipulation is also involved, movements again occur in front of a camera, their scope mediated by gravity-defying action sequences which rely on complex rigging subsequently digitally removed. Wire removal not only keeps imagery credible, but it generates hybrid spaces which add to the dimensional possibilities of an action shot, rescaling through an extended verticality in segments of the virtuoso bathtub chase and Polly’s the Dodo’s rescue from Queen Victoria. Animating movement through air in the absence of contact from the ground or another object is difficult when working with physical puppets and objects. Before digital techniques were available to remove a rig’s cables and wires, animators relied on nylon wires to create the least visible support for puppets in a scene. With the capability of removing the rigging via mediating digital technologies, Aardman’s animators have been able to exploit the possibilities of appearing to animate movements through air. David Vickery, a CG Supervisor at Double Negative, points to a difference that rigging removal makes when he suggests that for The Pirates! Aardman puppets are not as limited in their movements as other live-action puppets:

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They can fly through the air, jump, somersault, stand on one leg and defy gravity. Of course it requires a lot of clever rigging to achieve all this. Rigs ranged from exposed metal armatures supporting character poses to fine lines used to pull on sails or curtains. Shooting stop motion even gives you the freedom to completely swap rigs out from one frame to another.26

The rigging described by Vickery necessitates a complicated process of removal, and usually discussions of the imagery are left by simply noting how digital techniques clean up the shot. By taking more note of the hybridity of this space, we can also ask if space is able to do more as its materiality is reconfigured and activated through digital manipulation. A short moment in the bathtub chase of The Pirates!, which, despite its length (only thirty-one frames) forms a significant action showpiece, is useful for exploring this further. This sequence features the bathtub containing the Strangely Curvaceous Pirate, the Pirate Captain and the Pirate with a Scarf, still filled with foamy water, careening down the central stairwell of Charles Darwin’s mansion. Darwin has precipitated these events by getting his servant, a monkey called Bobo, to try and steal Polly. In the melee that follows, both the Pirate Captain and Pirate with a Scarf end up in the tub with the Strangely Curvaceous Pirate (who was already there having a bath). The moment of the chase which interests me is when the bathtub flies across the balcony space beneath a swinging dinosaur skeleton.27 The sequence links the motion of the dinosaur skeleton swinging left to right through the air, with first Bobo and then the bathtub containing the three pirates travelling in the opposite direction. A range of techniques were used to coordinate the movements of the different elements making up the shot. In keeping with the stop-motion work throughout the animation, each of the figures was manipulated by hand to animate their reactions as the tub nearly collides with the skeleton swinging through the air just above the bath. The swinging movement of the skeleton was controlled through a motorized metal rig, as was the trajectory of bathtub itself, with foam and water added using VFX. As a consequence, the space of the shot was remade, and areas unusable without digital interventions activated within the hybrid materiality of the shot. The rig moving the swinging skeleton was removed and so the space in which the action of the shot occurred was redefined through the intervention of technologies. What occurs is an animation of negative space, the space around the subjects of the shot (skeleton, bath and puppets), with an emphasis on the gravity-defying verticality of the shot. Two moments show this: Bobo swinging beneath the skeleton (in a side shot) and the bathtub flying into camera, again swinging beneath the skeleton. In

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Figures 15.1 & 15.2  The hybrid materiality of The Pirates!: In an Adventure with Scientists! (dir. Peter Lord. Aardman Animations/Sony Pictures Animation, 2012) enables the remaking of space.

both cases, there is a view of space beneath the lower figures, as well as the wider shot of the open interior balcony (see Figures 15.1 & 15.2). A similar moment occurs in the aftermath of Polly the Dodo’s rescue from the clutches of Queen Victoria’s chef on the QV1; Victoria tries to again abduct Polly via the hot air balloon. To thwart the Queen, the Pirate Captain climbs the balloon’s anchor rope, which Polly is then forced to peck by the Queen. Retaliating, the dodo attacks Victoria and in the following ruckus falls over the side of the balloon’s basket, where she is caught by the Pirate Captain. Polly’s additional weight causes the anchor rope to finally snap, and they both plummet downwards towards the propeller of the QV1. They are saved, we discover, by a human ladder of all seven members of the pirate crew. The camera movement revealing the seven pirates (together holding onto the eighth figure of the Pirate Captain) is a single movement, but such a movement would not be possible without a digital intervention and rig removal. As described by David Vickery:

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One shot featured eight characters dangling off the side of an airship, strung out hand to foot in a human ladder with every character requiring its own pose-able rig to hold it in place. The shot starts at one of the human ladder and tracks past each character to the top. There was rigging everywhere and the bright sunlight in the frame threw a perfect crisp shadow of the rigs right across the hull of the boat so all the shadows had to be repaired too.28

The digital technologies underpinning the camera movement not only erase the various rigs, but they remake the space. Now a shot with hybrid materiality, it has an added vertical dimension. Created through the removal of the rigging, at a micro level this dimension expands the story-world or diegetic space of the animation. The clean-up activity of erasing objects also remakes the materiality of shots, bringing with it the potential for space to do more. This is both invisible (digitalmade hybrid spaces) and visible in subtle changes to the array of handmade actions available to animators as they are given scope to reconfigure and reorientate visual cues. Polly’s escape and the bathtub chase, though fleeting moments, show a shot’s hybrid materiality contributing to the story-world. Despite the innovation on display, this opening out of space remains understated, achieved primarily at micro levels. Even with its potential for more expansion, the hybrid space is boundaried by Aardman realism and the physical dimensions set in the overall space of The Pirates! set.

Conclusion This chapter has undertaken an exploration of production culture materials and shown how digital interventions contribute to the creative possibilities of animators. Production culture materials act in part as publicity for The Pirates!, the Aardman studio, stop-motion animators, VFX artists and production companies, as well as individuals such as director Peter Lord. Since their purpose is to market and attract an audience, I acknowledge they do not set out to provide complicated explanations about the hybridity of puppets or space. Even so, as they explain the materiality of stop-motion and VFX in The Pirate’s production, they give insight into the interplay of Aardman traditions and the studio’s willingness to innovate with digital techniques. Through a focus on two particular areas – puppet faces and configurations of space  – I explored two very different dimensions in the material and discursive entanglements of the imagery. In relation to

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the puppet faces, touch remains a corner stone in negotiations between tradition and innovation, even when in the form of a digital disguise. For configurations of space, the expansive possibilities of digital interventions remain boundaried by the physical space of a set. As an analytic approach, entanglement allows production culture materials to be taken as more than informative descriptions of techniques. They steer associations connecting handmade and digital materiality, marketing strategies  and studio history, putting into play interrelations which frame our ways of thinking. As I have done in this chapter, these framing ideas can be challenged and explored for what they reveal about the intricate ways materiality and discourse inform and push up against each other. Touch, evoked as a boundary deflecting attention away from the digitalmade qualities of The Pirates!, favours a link with Aardman’s tradition of handmade  stopmotion, with digital innovations qualified and tied back to handmade traces. The same is true of hybrid spaces, though rescaling at micro levels, these too remain grounded in the overall physical dimensions of a set. To find digital possibilities boundaried by physical dimensions is not in itself surprising, since that is the way of the world we inhabit. More interesting is how handmade or digitalmade cease to be straightforward words marking the presence of particular techniques. Even while acting as material descriptors, they are shaped and contoured through their relations with other sets of ideas. An entangled analysis draws out what is at stake in relations constraining or enabling the kinds of which can be said. For The Pirates!, the stakes revolve around promoting Aardman’s continuity with its tradition in stop-motion animation alongside its innovations with digital techniques, or doing the things they love to do, but on a bigger stage. With The Pirates!, the studio makes digital waves, but claims to only do so in an Aardman-like way.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See Chapter 14 in this volume (Holliday) on Aardman’s two fully CGI films. The studio also has a sustained track record for using digital animation in its commercials arm. Michel Callon, ‘What does it mean to say that economics is performative?’, CSI Working Papers Series 005 (2006). Available at: https://halshs.archivesouvertes.fr/halshs-00091596/document (accessed 7 December 2017). The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! was released as The Pirates! Band of Misfits! in the United States. Bill Desowitz, ‘A Pirates’ Life for Aardman’, Animation World Network, 26 April 2012. Available at: https://www.awn.com/animationworld/pirateslife-aardman (accessed 5 December 2017).

Aardman! In an Entanglement with CGI! 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

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Foundry, ‘It’s a Pirates! Life for NUKE and MARI’, Foundary [company website] (2012). Available at: https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/case-studies/ pirates/. Lev Manovich, ‘Image Future’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, no. 1 (2006), p. 26. Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. xxxv. See, for instance, Michel Callon, ‘Actor-Network Theory – The Market Test’, The Sociological Review 47, S1 (1999), pp. 181–95; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Tim Ingold, ‘Toward an Ecology of Materials’, Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012), pp. 427–42; and Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of Relations between Humans and Things (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012). Callon, ‘What does it mean to say that economics is performative?’, p. 12. Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003) p. 819. Brian Sibley, The Making of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Lee Wilton, quoted in Sibley, p. 109. Loyd Price quoted in Sibley, p. 102. Barry J.C. Purves, Stop-Motion Animation: Frame by Frame Film-Making with Puppets and Models, Second Edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 100. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Second Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 158–9. Ian Failes, ‘Band of Misfits: DNeg’s Pirate Adventures’, Fxguide, 22 April 2012. Available at: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/band-of-misfitsdnegs-pirate-adventures/ (accessed 6 December 2017). Stephen Holmes, ‘The Pirates! Aardman Animations and Stop-Motion’, 3D Artist, 27 February 2013. Available at: http://www.3dartistonline. com/news/2013/02/aardman-animations-interview/ (accessed 6 December 2017). For descriptions of the use of rapid-prototyping on Coraline, Paranorman and Boxtrolls, see Renee Dunlop, ‘Coraline: One Step at a Time for the Puppet of a Thousand Faces’, CG Society, 12 February 2009. Available at: http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/ coraline (accessed 6 December 2017); Caitlin Roper, ‘3-D Printing Goes Hollywood with ­Stop-Motion Animated Feature ParaNorman’, WIRED, 23 July 2012. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2012/07/ paranorman-3d-printing/ (accessed 6 December 2017); and C. Edwards,

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19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

Aardman Animations ‘How Laika Pushed 3D Printing to New Heights with the Boxtrolls’, Cartoon Brew, 13 August 2014. Available at: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/ feature-stories/how-laika-pushed-3d-printing-to-new-heights-with-theboxtrolls-101512.html (accessed 6 December 2017). Holmes, ‘The Pirates! Aardman Animations and Stop-Motion’. I use the term ‘mediate’ in the sense meant by Bruno Latour. In the context of Actor-Network Theory, he has argued that mediation occurs when something, including a technology, makes a difference to a process, potentially in positive or negative ways. RP mediates in The Pirates! because it transforms the options available to an animator, enabling a wider set of expressive possibilities. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Holmes, ‘The Pirates! Aardman Animations and Stop-Motion’. Desowitz, ‘A Pirates’ Life for Aardman’. Phil de Semlyen, ‘Aardman Set Visit: Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists’, Empire, 1 December 2011. Available at: https://www.empireonline.com/ movies/features/aardman-pirates-set-visit/ (accessed 6 December 2017). Quoted in Holmes, ‘The Pirates! Aardman Animations and Stop-Motion’. Foundry, ‘It’s a Pirates! Life for NUKE and MARI’. Failes, ‘Band of Misfits: DNeg’s Pirate Adventures’. Although I am only talking about the digital manipulation of this brief section, the chase was extremely labour intensive for the stop-motion animators too. The scene took over nine months to complete, with three teams of three stop-motion animators working in parallel on their specific sections of the chase. Failes, ‘Band of Misfits: DNeg’s Pirate Adventures’.

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Pallant, Chris, ‘The Stop-Motion Landscape’, in Chris Pallant (ed.), Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 33–50. Pallant, Chris and Steven Price, Storyboarding: A Critical History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Pasadeos, Yorgo et al., ‘Disciplinary Impact of Advertising Scholars: Temporal Comparisons of Influential Authors, Works and Research Networks’, Journal of Advertising 27/4 (1998), pp. 53–70. Payne, Alison Jane, “It Has Hit Us Like a Whirlwind”: The Impact of Commercial Television Advertising in Britain 1954–1964 [PhD thesis] (London: Birkbeck College, University of London, 2016). Pennington, John, ‘From Peter Rabbit to Watership Down: There and Back Again to the Arcadian Ideal’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 3/2 (1991), pp. 66–80. Perrins, Barrie, Brass Band Digest (Baldock: Egon, 1984). Petty, Richard E. and John T. Cacioppo, Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change (New York: Springer, 1986). Petty, Richard E. et al., ‘Central and Peripheral Routes to Advertising Effectiveness: The Moderating Role of Involvement’, Journal of Consumer Research 10/2 (1983), pp. 135–46. Preston, Ivan L., The Great American Blowup: Puffery in Advertising and Selling (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975). Priebe, Ken, The Advanced Art of Stop Motion Animation (Boston, MA: Course Technology/ Cengage, 2011). Purse, Lisa, Digital Imagery in Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Purves, Barry, Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance (London: Focal Press, 2008). Purves, Barry, Stop-Motion (Basics Animation) (Lausanne: AVA Publishing, 2010). Purves, Barry, Stop-Motion Animation: Frame by Frame Film-Making with Puppets and Models (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Quigley, Marian, ‘Glocalisation versus Globalization: The Work of Nick Park and Peter Lord’, Animation Journal 10 (2002), pp. 85–94. Rabkin, Eric S., The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003) Russell, Matheson, Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2006). Salter, Chris, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Schubert, Christoph, ‘Identity and Dialects in the North of England’ in C. Ehland (ed.), Thinking Northern: Textures of Identity in the North of England (New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 73–92.

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Index Aardboiled 20 n.33 Aardman (company) box office returns 2–3, 18 n.13, 73–8, 80–1, 85 n.37 brand identity 4–13, 23–5, 30–4, 56–7, 63, 66, 170–3, 177–8, 211, 229 brand licensing 2, 4, 9, 23, 171 charity work 20 n.38 commercials / advertising work 4, 6, 8–9, 12–14, 18 n.15, 20 n.34, 23–37, 120, 135 n.5, 137 n.25, 162, 169–70, 224, 254 n.1 company ethos 1, 10–13, 66, 73, 106, 122, 176–8 ‘cosiness’ 2, 6, 8, 15, 106, 142, 146, 150, 178 critical reception 6, 30, 33, 73–5, 77, 82, 211, 215–20, 224, 236, 238, 241, 244 ‘darkside’ 8 employee ownership 2, 13, 18 n.10 paratexts 4–5, 9–13, 217–18, 241–56 (see also behind-thescenes material) sensibility 4–6, 10–11, 49, 73–8, 105–16, 119, 142, 170–3, 175–8 (see also ‘Aardman-ness’) technical innovation 10, 16, 25, 31–4, 119–20, 156, 177, 241–2, 244–5, 253–4 typical visual style/ aesthetic 5–9, 11–13, 29–34, 41, 55, 63, 66, 75, 108, 120, 134, 142–3, 175, 177, 196, 198–200, 207, 220, 222 n.36, 223–5, 227, 230–1, 235–6, 246 Aardman: Art That Takes Shape (exhibition) 18 n.21

‘Aardman-ness’ 4–6, 12–13, 224. See also Aardman, sensibility Aardstore 20 n.38 acting, animation as 57, 184, 186–91, 213–14, 218. See also performance, animation as acting out animation 159, 167 n.18, 187, 192 n.32 Adam (1992) (film) 17 n.6, 60–2, 65, 67, 120 advertising. See Aardman, commercials / advertising work Al Dente (1998) (film) 224 Alice novels (1865 and 1871) 121, 141 Aliens (1986) (film) 149 Allied Films 72 Amazing Adventures of Morph (1980–1) (TV series) 17 n.3, 89, 169 androcentrism 195, 203, 205, 208. See also anthropomorphism Angry Kid (2009–15) (TV series) 8, 23, 179 n.17 Animal Farm (1946) (novel) 63 Animated Conversations (1978) (film series) 6, 17 n.4, 59, 89–90, 101 n.1, 107, 109 Confessions of a Foyer Girl 17 n.4, 59, 96–8, 101 Down and Out 17 n.4, 59, 90, 92–4, 101 n.1 animated documentary 53 Annecy International Animated Film Festival 113, 120, 135 n.3 anthropomorphism 123, 139, 143–7, 150, 183, 187, 195, 202–3, 206 Arcadia 145–6 Arthur Christmas (2011) (film) 3, 5, 8, 11–12, 16, 76–8, 223–40, 241 Arts Council 90 auteur animation 218

268

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authenticity 140, 211–22, 226–7, 238, 242 Autodesk Maya 231, 247 awards 1–2, 17 n.6, 25–6, 29, 33, 53, 105, 111, 113, 135 n.3, 169 Babylon (1986) (short) 8, 101 n.1, 105–13, 116, 117 n.8 Barker, Jennifer 216 bar sheets 188, 192 n.38 BBC 1, 9, 17 n.2, 17 n.3, 17 n.4, 53, 56, 91, 106, 107, 137 n.25, 171–3, 175 Beano, The (comic) 141–2, 149 Beckett, Samuel 54, 60–1 Beek, Richard (‘Beeky’) 160–2, 168 n.27, 197, 203 behind-the-scenes material 3–4, 10–13, 139–41, 217–18. See also DVD extras; making-ofs Bergsonian theory of the comedic 148 Bergson’s theory of laughter 49 Blatter, Janet 163–5, 168 n.36 Boddy, Ashley 162, 165, 168 n.25 Box, Steve 7, 8, 105, 111–12 brass bands 39–41, 44–50 British animation 3–4, 16, 63, 90, 109, 142, 219 British cinema 6, 19 n.23, 71, 81–2 New Wave 91, 99, 102 n.16 Britishness/ British national identity 5–6, 14–15, 34, 39–40, 45, 50, 75, 77, 79, 107, 139–52, 170, 218–19, 234 British social realism 89–103 bucolic 6, 75. See also rural Bullough, Miles 173 Burton, Tim 57, 130 Cambridge Animation Festival 90 camera movement 143, 160–2, 250, 252–3 virtual 233–5 caricature 97, 130–1, 139, 199, 200, 202, 233 Carroll, Lewis 121, 141

Cartoon Network (TV channel) 174, 176 CBBC 171 CBeebies 175 cel animation 197, 242 CGI (computer-generated imagery) 8, 64, 75, 77, 113, 119, 131, 197, 200, 208 n.2, 208 n.3, 220, 226. See also computer animation; computer graphics Channel 4 (broadcaster) 1–2, 8, 9, 17 n.4, 24, 29, 30–1, 90–1, 106–7, 109, 111 Chaplin, Charlie 49, 63, 181–2, 185, 187–9, 191 Chicken Run (2000) (film) 1–3, 5, 23, 62–3, 71–4, 83 n.7, 89, 196–9, 219, 230–4, 246 Chop Socky Chooks (2008–10) (TV series) 175 Clarke, Sean 13 class, social 45–8, 62, 65, 102 n.21, 108, 145, 147–8, 234 clay 58, 61, 120, 122, 134, 195, 197–9, 203, 206–7, 211, 213, 215, 221, 225–7, 232, 245. See also fingerprints; plasticine; silicone animation (claymation) 6–9, 14, 24, 26, 31, 33–4, 58–9, 92–5, 96–8, 100, 211, 212–13, 216–17, 219–20, 224–5, 227, 230–1, 236–8, 241 puppets / models 93, 97, 106, 108, 198–9, 211, 215, 220, 226, 231, 247 (see also models; puppets) Close Shave, A (1995) (film) 17 n.6, 33, 43–5, 48–9, 80, 108, 111, 144–6, 148, 171, 214–15 Cockle, Jackie 173–4 comedy 40, 42, 44, 65, 95, 139, 147–9, 176–7, 183, 185–7, 189–91. See also humour physical 174, 181, 185–6, 191 silent 15, 42, 60–1, 171, 173, 181–92 situational 42, 60, 65, 93, 171, 198

Index slapstick 60, 111, 171, 173–6, 181–2, 189, 191 compositing 119, 196, 244, 246, 248 computer animation 11–12, 16, 176, 195, 198, 200, 219–20, 223–38. See also CGI (computergenerated imagery) computer graphics 224, 226–7, 230, 238, 243. See also CGI (computer-generated imagery) computer animation Confessions of a Foyer Girl (1978) (film). See Animated Conversations (1978) (film series) contraptions 5, 63, 215. See also inventions; Wallace and Gromit, Wallace as inventor Conversation Pieces (1983) (film series) 17 n.4, 24–5, 30–1, 59, 89–91, 95–6, 106–7, 109, 111 Early Bird 17 n.4, 59, 92, 94–5 Late Edition 17 n.4, 59, 92–4 On Probation 17 n.4, 59, 90, 92–4 Palmy Days 17 n.4, 59, 92, 95 Sales Pitch 17 n.4, 24, 59, 92–3 Cook, Luis 15, 105, 113, 115, 119–39, 159, 161 Coraline (2009) (film)17 n.7, 237, 247, 255 n.18 Corpse Bride (2005) (film) 17 n.7, 106, 130, 237 Cosgrove Hall (studio) 7, 142, 187 Cox, Sarah 177–8 Cracking Animation (book) 3, 9–10, 23, 34 n.2, 42, 158 Crafton, Donald 181–2, 185, 187, 191, 202, 212, 225 Creature Comforts commercials 29–30, 53 (see also Heat Electric adverts) short film (1989) (see Lip Synch) TV series (2003–7) 30, 225 Croods, The (2013) (film) 73 Cubitt, Sean 197, 200, 208 cut-out animation 120

269

Dahl, Roald 9, 121 dance, animation as 185 Dandy, The (comic) 54, 141 Danger Mouse (1981–92) (TV series) 219 Defoe, Gideon 64 diegetic sound 43–4, 49, 148 digital effects. See visual effects (digital) (VFX) Disney Channel 171 Disney Junior (TV channel) 175 Disney Pixar. See Pixar (studio) Disney studio 57, 62, 156, 170, 187, 192 n.32, 213 Disney, Walt (person) 157–8, 182 diversity 90, 174 lack of 19 n.22, 149–50 documentary 23, 57–61, 89–101, 204. see also animated documentary; British social realism; realism sound 6–7, 14, 60, 89, 92–6, 110 Dot (2010) (film) 12 Dowling, Patrick 1 Down and Out (1978) (film). See Animated Conversations (1978) (film series) drawn animation 7, 120, 128–32, 167 n.23, 184, 195, 208 n.2, 212, 243 DreamWorks (studio) 8, 11–12, 63, 71–5, 82 n.1, 223–4, 231, 241 DVD extras 5, 11–12. See also: behind-the-scenes material; making-ofs Early Bird (1983) (film). See Conversation Pieces (1983) (film series) Early Man (2018) (film) 5, 18 n.13, 18 n.14, 80–1, 165, 238 effects. See: special effects animation; visual effects (digital) (VFX) Eisenstein, Sergei 207 11–11 Memories Retold (2018) (video game) 9

270

Index

embodied animation 182, 186–7, 202 embodied character 187, 191 fantastical 95–6, 121, 123, 131, 138 n.27, 139–51, 198–9, 201, 204 fantasy 15, 64, 106, 134, 139–51 Farmer’s Llamas (2015) (TV special) 173 Feathers McGraw 44, 111, 146, 215 Felix the Cat 182, 185, 226 figurative animation 191 figurative character 15, 182, 184–7, 191, 202 fingerprints 10, 16, 106, 122, 211–21, 225–8, 245–9 Fleischer Studio 211, 242 Flushed Away (2006) (film) 8, 11–12, 16, 73–5, 223, 226–38, 241 forced perspective 231–3 gags 48, 55, 63, 157–60, 165, 183, 186–90, 232. See also: comedy; humour gender, representation of 65, 113–14, 125–7 gesture 58, 96, 182, 184, 212, 214, 234 Going Equipped (1989) (film). See Lip Synch Grand Day Out, A (1989) (film) 1, 17 n.6, 40, 43–5, 48, 143, 147, 199, 211, 213–15 Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman, A (2015) 23 Gulliver’s Travels (1726) (novel) 124, 141 Gulp (2011) (film) 12 hand-drawn animation. See drawn animation handmade 7, 10, 14, 16, 24, 31, 64, 198–200, 207, 211, 213, 215, 220–1, 223–4, 227–8, 230, 235–6, 241–9, 253–4 ‘Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, The’ (1999) (short story) 127–8, 130

haptic viewing 196, 201, 204–5, 208, 211, 216 Harryhausen, Ray 141, 149 Hartbeat (1984–93) (TV series) 17 n.2 Hart, Tony 1, 17 n.2 Haynes, Richard 15, 204 Heat Electric adverts 6, 8, 29–30. See also Creature Comforts, commercials Higson, Andrew 99–100 Hollywood 11–12, 14, 39, 53, 71–82, 91, 99, 181, 208 n.6 Aardman as ‘anti-Hollywood’ 10, 72, 75, 77, 217–19 creative approach 5, 11, 59–60, 62–3, 66, 219 music 14, 41–2, 50 horror 111, 114, 141, 147–9 Humdrum (1999) (film) 17 n.6 humour 5, 34, 40, 49, 53–4, 65, 68, 75, 77, 147, 172–3, 176–8, 182, 185– 7, 191. See also: comedy; gags Husserl, Edmund 196, 203, 206 hybrid, digital and analogue animation 131, 196, 230, 236, 241–54 Ident (1989) (film). See Lip Synch industrial revolution / industrialization 41, 44, 46–50, 99, 145–7 inventions 41, 48–9. See also contraptions; Wallace and Gromit, Wallace as inventor Isaacs, Jeremy 90 Jackson, Mick 121–6, 128–9, 131, 138 n.27 Jones, Chuck 42, 182, 187 Katzenberg, Jeffrey 72, 75, 83 n.7 Keaton, Buster 15, 60, 171, 181–91 Kitson, Clare 30, 90, 106–7, 109 Kung Fu Panda series (2008–16) (film series) 76

Index Laika Studio 57, 247 Late Edition (1983) (film). See Conversation Pieces (1983) (film series) Laurel and Hardy 181, 183, 191 LAV (live-action video) 159, 167 n.18 Lear, Edward 121, 130, 147 Lewis, C.S. 140, 142, 146, 151 n.10 Lionsgate 80, 84 n.34 Lip Synch (1989) (film series) 7, 17 n.4, 29, 33, 53, 89, 101 n.1, 109, 111 Creature Comforts 1–2, 7, 17 n.4, 17 n.6, 29, 30, 33, 89, 92–3, 95–6, 101 n.1, 105, 115, 120, 142, 170, 188, 225, 234 (see also Creature Comforts) Going Equipped 7, 15, 17 n.4, 60, 62, 96, 98–101, 102, 105, 109–12, 116, 120 Ident 7, 101 n.1, 120 Next 7, 101 n.1 War Story 7, 60, 92–3, 96–8, 101, 101 n.1, 120 live-action 6, 8, 29, 42, 57, 73, 84 n.29, 90–2, 94, 96–8, 100–1, 113, 168 n.25, 168 n.27, 197, 199, 212, 233, 243, 250 Looney Tunes 51 n.17, 188, 232 Lord, Peter 1–3, 6–8, 12–14, 17 n.3, 18 n.10, 25, 49, 53–68, 72–3, 89–90, 101, 102 n.18, 105–6, 110, 113, 115, 120–1, 130, 135 n.5, 213–14, 224–5, 248–9, 253 Madden, Paul 107, 109 making-ofs 3–4, 11–13, 18 n.11, 53, 166 n.5, 244, 245. See also: behind-the-scenes material; DVD extras marketing 4, 24, 29, 39, 74–7, 79, 81, 217, 220, 242, 244, 248, 254 Matter of Loaf and Death, A (2008) (film) 17 n.6, 18 n.18, 40, 43, 45, 48–9, 53, 144, 149

271

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 196, 203, 206 metamorphosis 96–7, 159, 203, 206, 207 Minotaur and Little Nerkin (1999) (film) 224 mise-en-scène 128–9, 143 models 7, 10, 12, 13, 16, 58, 97, 131–3, 172, 192 n.36, 203, 224, 225–6, 230, 234, 238, 247, 249. See also: clay; puppets model sheets 184 Modern Times (1936) (film) 49, 63 Morph (character) 1, 4, 17 n.2, 17 n.3, 23, 26, 58, 61, 65, 67, 170, 224. See also Amazing Adventures of Morph (1980–1) (TV series) YouTube channel 9, 17 n.3 mouths, replacement 7, 188, 231, 242, 247–8 MTV 24–5 music videos 4, 8, 23–5, 30–2, 34 n.1, 120, 135 n.5, 176 Nathan Love 34 Next (1989) (film). See Lip Synch Nickelodeon (TV channel) 175 Northernness 5, 14, 39–50, 57, 140, 145. See also: Britishness; regional (British) identity nostalgia 5–6, 39, 41, 43, 47–50, 54, 67, 93, 101, 105, 109, 111, 145–6, 149–50, 238, 248 Nott, Julian 41–2 O’Brien, Willis 201 Ogilvy, David 26–7 On Probation (1983) (film). See Conversation Pieces (1983) (film series) optic visuality 204–5, 208, 215–16. See also haptic viewing orthodox animation 196, 218, 222 n.36 Orwell, George 44, 54, 63 Out of the Inkwell (1918–29) (film series) 211, 242 Owzat (1997) (film) 8, 224

272

Index

Palmy Days (1983) (film). See Conversation Pieces (1983) (film series) Park, Nick 1, 6–8, 29, 32–3, 39–41, 43, 45, 49, 52 n.31, 53–5, 57, 59, 63–4, 66, 68 n.4, 72–4, 80–1, 83 n.7, 89, 95, 108, 111, 139, 141–2, 149, 159, 188, 198–9, 211, 213–16, 219 parody 48, 56, 65, 111, 148 Pathé (studio) 72, 78 Pearce Sisters, The (2007) (film) 8, 16, 105, 113–16, 119–35 performance 55, 61, 63, 185, 191, 212–13. See also acting out animation; embodied animation; figurative animation animation as 15–16, 65, 101, 181–91, 195–208, 211–21, 225, 230–1, 241, 245–6, 248 vocal 42 Phelan, Richard 160–1 phenomenology 16, 58, 196, 203–4, 206 photographic images 42, 122, 129, 133, 138 n.28, 243 Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, The 5–6, 10–11, 16, 17 n.6, 17 n.7, 56, 64–5, 76–7, 80, 84 n.24, 196, 204–5, 237–8, 241–54 bathtub sequence 11, 204–5, 250–3 Pixar (studio) 3, 34, 53, 57, 63 pixilation 12, 32, 120 Planet Sketch (2005–8) (TV series) 175 plasmatic (nature of animation) 199, 206–7 plasticine 7, 31–2, 40, 57, 89–90, 119–20, 122, 134, 171, 175, 192 n.36, 198, 223–4, 226–7, 229–32, 238, 244–9. See also: clay; silicone post-production 42, 162–3, 196–7, 199–201, 207, 208 n.3, 220, 243–4, 247–8, 250

profilmic space 196, 200–1, 226–7 puppets 6–8, 57–8, 64, 92–3, 160–2, 167 n.23, 185–7, 195–9, 203, 206, 211–12, 215, 218, 220, 227, 230–2, 234, 241–54. See also: clay; models Purple and Brown (2005–8) (TV series) 175 Purves, Barry 7, 53, 158, 201–2, 234 Quay, The Brothers 112, 116 Quigley, Marion 40, 47, 50, 218–19 rapid prototyping 238, 242, 247–8, 255 n.18 realism 50, 91–2, 94, 97, 99–101, 130, 141, 144, 199, 226, 232, 235. See also British social realism ‘Aardman realism’ 243, 246, 253 documentary 99–100 poetic 15, 99–101 psychological 202–3 regional (British) identity 5, 39. See also Britishness/ British national identity; northernness replacement animation 12, 247 Rex the Runt (character) 19 n.31, 23 Rex the Runt (1998–2001) (TV series) 8, 179 n.17 rural 43, 46–8, 58, 75. See also bucolic Sales Pitch (1983) (film). See Conversation Pieces (1983) (film series) satire 48–9, 141–2, 147–8 Shaun the Sheep (character) 4, 6, 23, 33, 89, 108, 145, 171–4, 181–91 Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) 5, 17 n.6, 78, 80–2, 89, 181, 204, 238 Shaun the Sheep (2006–16) (TV series) 5–6, 15, 79, 161–2, 169–71, 173–6, 178, 181–91 Shaun the Sheep–VR Movie Barn 9 Shrek (2001–10) (film series) 64, 73, 76

Index silent film 42, 51 n.13, 111, 134, 171, 181–2, 191. See also comedy, silent silicone 7, 10, 198–9, 207, 223–4, 230, 238, 244, 246–7. See also: plasticine; clay ‘Sledgehammer’ (1986) (music video) 8, 24–5, 30–2, 135 n.5 SMart (1994–2009) (TV series) 17 n.2 Smith, Sarah 76 Sony (studio) 8, 10–11, 63, 71, 76–80, 223–4, 237, 241 sound effects 42–4, 181 special effects 16, 195–208, 227, 230, 232–3 Sproxton, David 1–3, 7–8, 10, 13, 18 n.10, 31, 33, 49, 53, 56, 58–9, 64, 74, 76–8, 80, 89–90, 101, 106, 120–1, 130, 213, 225, 232 Stage Fright (1997) (film) 7, 15, 105, 111–13, 116 Stahl, Matt 157–8, 164 Starzak (Goleszowski), Richard (‘Golly’) 7–8, 53, 171–3, 179 n.2, 181 Sterne, Laurence 54–6 stop-motion. See also clay, animation (claymation) as labour intensive 10, 12–13, 71, 155–6, 162, 165, 166 n.6, 213, 220, 223, 225–7, 231, 249, 256 n.27 process 10, 90, 138 n.28, 160, 165, 201, 223, 227, 228, 231, 234–7, 241–2 storyboards / storyboarding 15, 62, 155–65, 187–8, 197 Studiocanal 14, 71, 78–82 Švankmajer, Jan 57, 108, 112, 116 Sweet Disaster series (1986) 106–7, 117 n.8 Swift, Jonathan 124, 141, 147 Take Hart 1, 17 n.2, 58 Tati, Jacques 54, 60

273

technology, representation of 146–7, 150, 219, 228–30, 233 technophilia 223, 228 technophobia 223 Telotte, J.P. 139, 233, 235 Ten Sorry Tales (2005) (short stories) 121–4, 129–30, 134 Thatcher era 89–90, 109–10, 145 Thomas, Frank and Ollie Johnston 157–8 Timmy Time (2009–12) (TV series) 15, 169–78 Tolkien, J.R.R. 140, 142, 146, 151 n.10 Tortoise and the Hare, The (unmade film) 73–4 Twit or Miss (2015) (app) 9 2D animation 7, 113, 119, 131, 138 n.27, 160, 167 n.23, 168 n.36 Two Sisters (1990) (short) 136 n.12 uncanny 105–6, 108–11, 113, 115–16, 122, 133, 146 Under the Oak Tree commercial (2011) 12 verisimilitude 131, 208. See also realism Vision On (1964–76) (TV series) 1, 53, 58, 135 n.5 visual effects (digital) (VFX) 99, 196, 199–200, 207, 208 n.3, 226, 230, 238, 241–54 voice casting 75, 77, 79, 214, 241. See also performance, vocal Wallace and Gromit 1–2, 4, 6–7, 10, 13, 23, 33, 39–50, 57, 80, 89, 105–6, 108, 115, 139–51, 169–71, 199, 205, 211–21, 231, 235, 242, 246 short films 5–6, 12, 39–50, 74, 89, 139–51, 169–71, 198, 211, 213–16, 219–20, 225 (see also Close Shave, A (1995) (film);

274

Index

Grand Day Out, A (1989) (film); Matter of Loaf and Death, A (2008) (film); Wrong Trousers, The (1993) (film)) theme tune 39–41, 44–7, 52 n.31, 143, 148 Wallace as inventor 41, 44, 47–50, 146–7, 215 (see also: contraptions; inventions) Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) (film) 5, 17 n.6, 17 n.7, 43, 45, 48, 73–4, 80, 106, 108, 111, 140, 144, 146–8, 172, 195–6, 199, 202, 205, 207, 215, 220, 230, 237

War Story (1983) (film). See Lip Synch Watership Down (1972) (novel) 143, 145, 152 n.14 Wat’s Pig (1996) (film) 17 n.6, 62 Wells, Paul 14, 48, 98, 142, 149, 159, 163 Wind in the Willows (1983) (TV series) 7 Wiseman, Alix 176 Wrong Trousers, The (1993) (film) 17 n.6, 30, 33, 41–4, 48–9, 105, 111, 143–4, 146, 147–8, 215 Zagreb Animation Festival 68 n.5, 113, 135 n.3