The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #53: Serta Counting Sheep

Shaun and his brethren weren't the only flock to emerge from the Aardman fold and attain superstardom. At the break of the new millennium, the Bristol-based animation studio found great success on the other side of the pond with a series of ads promoting Serta-brand mattresses. The premise of the campaign, devised by advertising agency Doner, had it that Serta mattresses were so fabulously comfortable that kipping on one might earn you a visit from a very irate band of sheep who objected to your choice of pad. These were no ordinary field-dwelling ovine, but the Counting Sheep, the woolly jumpers whom, in more restless times, you might traditionally have summoned to aid you in accessing the land of nod. These sheep thrived on insomnia, and it was their mission to keep your nights from getting too cushy for their comfort. In Serta, they'd found a formidable adversary, one they feared could potentially make the practice of sheep-counting obsolete, and they weren't shy about barging into the bedrooms of former clientele to make their dissatisfaction known. An aggressive business model that seldom worked out for our flock, although hilarious antics often ensued.

How many Counting Sheep there actually were was anybody's guess - in theory, their numbers could have stretched on indefinitely, depending on the wakefulness of the client they were serving. Each sheep was distinguishable by their identification number, spray-painted onto their fleeces in the style of their barnyard counterparts, and various distinct personalities emerged across the series. 1 was naturally the leader, and the most officiously outspoken of the sheep. 13 was inevitably a magnet for physical misfortune, while 36 was a father whose offspring required orthodontic work, 8 was a ditz and 86 was the black sheep (although not literally) of the group, who in one commercial was caught partaking in an illicit relaxation session upon a Serta, and was defenestrated by 1 for his infidelity. For the campaign's initial run the sheep were brought to life with Aardman's signature stop motion, combined with footage of live action humans, although later installments switched to using computer animation - meaning that the sheep unavoidably picked up something of the uncanny valley that I find lurks in all CG Aardman productions made to replicate Nick Park's style, and which is absolutely all over the movie Flushed Away (not so much Arthur Christmas, which isn't as beholden to Park's look).

The campaign had a bit of an ongoing story for the sheep, detailing the impact the Serta scourge had on their livelihood and the various measures they took to combat it. We followed them as they attempted to find alternative forms of employment, sought legal advice from an unscrupulous lawyer (I'm not sure if this was ever followed up with any ads detailing the court case he assured them they had), traded tales of hardship with a hobo, protested outside a mattress sale and outright sabotaged a couple of others. At their most classic, though, the ads were centred around the core scenario of the sheep hanging out in people's bedrooms and berating them for wanting to cut ties. It's a charmingly absurdist means of getting across the intended message that Serta mattresses are pleasurable to sleep on, but you've got to love how counter-intuitive it is in-universe. Get a Serta and the upshot seems to be that you'll have an indefinite number of talking sheep amassing around your bed and keeping you up by belligerently challenging your consumer choices. You've effectively traded in one form of sleeplessness for another, unless you had the foresight to acquire a guard dog like an unnamed lady in one ad, or to change your locks like the Hendersons. And, even if you were resting upon a Serta, just how well were you going to sleep knowing that these vengeful sheep might be wandering in at any time and glowering all over you? Adding to the awkwardness was that the conflict was often framed as being akin to the breakdown of a sexual relationship as opposed to a professional one, with orgasm innuendo cropping up at least twice. In one commercial, a client breaks the bad news that she's been faking her sleeplessness for months in order to appease the sheep. And in the aforementioned spot where 86 is caught cheating with a Serta mattress, he brings attention to himself with his wildly ecstatic shrieks about its luxuriousness (giving the momentary impression that he's engaged in a threesome with the Kandinskys). In both cases, the Serta is the irresistible temptation that lures you into backstabbing your bedfellows.

Here's the great paradox with the Serta Counting Sheep - their business practices might be obnoxious, but they themselves end up being loveable underdogs. You admire their spunk, and their willingness to fight for their established domain. They are the downtrodden little guys daring to take a stand, and you're rooting for them to prevail against the mattress giant threatening to slap them with irrelevancy. The most satisfying campaign installments were the ones where they managed to scrape a rare victory - for example, when they get Tom banished from the Serta and onto the couch by blowing to his wife that he's been lying to her about being at work all day to cover up his clandestine golfing session. Serta might fix five of the most common sleep problems, but it won't cleanse a shady soul. That was pretty ingenious of the sheep, and I wish them nothing but luck in pursuing this particular recourse, although it introduces further unsettling implications regarding the sheep's ability to spy on us and harvest our dirtiest secrets.

It's perhaps in part because of the sheep's intrinsically sympathetic nature that more recent Serta ads have tended to downplay the antagonistic angle and instead show them cuddling up on their mattresses and tucking human occupants in. It's actually kind of surreal if you've been following the flock's history and know that their in-character inclination really should have been to turf those people out. In the end the sheep became synonymous with the brand (with Serta having established a neat sideline in sheep merchandising), so it doesn't matter how much sense it makes from a narrative standpoint, but I wonder what the explanation would be in-universe for this unlikely truce? Did the sheep and Serta finally figure out how to make their respective trades coexist? Is the implication that the sheep are actually working for Serta now (in other words, helping to feed the beast that killed them)? Or maybe the flock's suppressed love of the mattress's softness finally got the better of them. For that was the single biggest shame in the Serta Sheep's closet - they were latent Serta cheerleaders all along, as evidenced in all instances where they could be enticed into making physical contact with the mattress, and were immediately taken by how fabulous it felt. Fact is that 86 wasn't a lost sheep. He was just slightly ahead of the curve in making his Serta adoration explicit.

There couldn't possibly be anything more awkward and unfortunate in the Serta Sheep's closet, could there? If so, I'm not confident I have the spoons.

Never Say Pink Furry Die (aka Save It Till The Morning After)

Some Aardman productions are so obscure that they didn't even see the light of day in celebrations of the studio's obscurities.

The 2000 home media release Aardman Classics gave a comprehensive overview of the Bristol-based animation house's output pre-Chicken Run, but by no means a complete one. The DVD edition came with a booklet, Insideaard, offering a handy breakdown of the studio's filmography, and if you studied it extensively, you were going to pick up on a few glaring gaps here and there. The lack of Morph or Wallace and Gromit was self-explanatory, since this was intended as a showcase for the studio's assorted one-offs and oddities, with the Creature Comforts pieces as its obvious selling point. Other notable omissions included the preliminary Rex The Runt shorts (assuming you weren't counting Ident), the preliminary Angry Kid shorts, and any of the studio's advertising work outside of Creature Comforts. Also predominantly overlooked was the studio's music video credits, the only featured example being the quirky visual accompaniment created for Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me" in 1987. From a representational standpoint, the absence of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" (easily the most esteemed of Aardman's music video collaborations) seems hard to justify, but maybe there was an issue with licencing. The most mysterious of the snubbed items was a 1989 piece entitled Liftin' The Blues, credited to David Sproxton; to this day, the film continues to elude me, but I have gathered that it was an aviation documentary, which sounds intriguingly out of Aardman's wheelhouse. I fear that its hefty 52 minutes running time might have immediately precluded it from making this compilation, however. A more head-scratching omission would be the 1992 short, Never Say Pink Furry Die, which running at just shy of 11 minutes you'd think they might have squeezed into the mix. I wonder what the story was there? Was the implied sex scene considered a notch too ribald for the family audiences? It's not as though Aardman Classics was an overwhelmingly kid-friendly release anyway, what with the psychological horrors of Stage Fright and the apocalyptic visions of Babylon.

Never Say Pink Furry Die came about during the era when Aardman was regularly allowing its younger talent to create their own projects for Channel 4 - it's how Nick Park, Barry Purves and Richard Starzak were able to get their names into the limelight. This film's creator, Louise Spraggon, doesn't seem to have stuck with Aardman in the aftermath, which is a shame - partly because it is nice to see an Aardman project fronted by a female talent, but also because, while bedevilled with all the roughness of a first effort, it has promise, and I would have been interested to have seen how Spraggon's craft might have developed from here. The claymation visuals look considerably less refined than much of its contemporaries, but I quite like the homespun qualities, particularly the crudely-sketched, predominantly plain environments, which seem warmly nostalgic for the stop motion Paddington series from 1976.

The first thing to be said about the set-up of Never Say Pink Furry Die is how reminiscent the central dynamic is of Wallace and Gromit. Once again we have a master/pet relationship in which the pet is visibly the brains of the operation, although in this scenario both characters are equally non-verbal. The plot follows a young woman who wakes up with the mother of all hangovers, on a Friday the 13th that, most inconveniently, happens to be the day she's scheduled to get married. She's supported through her morning preparations by her far more organised feline companion, who clearly has a greater determination to get her to that alter on time...I don't know about you, but I don't think that exactly bodes well for her future union with her unseen groom. The matter gets thornier still - nestled within the woman's cleavage is a most peculiar item, the titular pink furry die, stoking hazy memories about possible misspent passions that unfolded the night before. We get flashbacks depicting her on what I presume to be her hen night, only there doesn't seem to be anybody out celebrating with her; either her friends have all ditched her at the bar, or she's henning it up by her lonesome. There is, in fact, only one other character in the full short besides the central duo, and they don't show up until the climax. Such is the paradox of Never Say Pink Furry Die; at times it seems so very busy and stuffed with details (the array of food packages, shrivelling Venus fly traps and half-eaten fry-ups on the kitchen unit, the records and magazines strewn across the bedroom floor), whilst being pervaded by so much dead and strangely empty space. Which takes us into its obvious shortcoming - the pacing of the short is listless to a baffling degree. There doesn't seem to be much urgency in how the narrative progresses, which isn't exactly ideal given that our antagonist is a ticking clock. What plot there is could have been told in less than half the run time, but there are long stretches focussed on giving a slice of life glimpse into the daily living routine of this woman and her cat, with the ostensibly pressing matter of the wedding rising to the surface only intermittently, whenever the cat glances at his wristwatch and a ceremonial leitmotif obligingly sounds. Otherwise, it's almost comical just how lightly the wedding seems to weigh on the narrative, never developing into anything other than a vague motivation for the characters to (just about) keep moving. We don't get much indication that this woman's heart is really in it - to the extent that she might just as well be going to a friend's birthday party, not the supposed happiest day of her life. Or is her terminal indifference all part of the joke?

For as long as it takes for the narrative to get to the point, the ending comes oddly abruptly, and this is where the tone of the pieces shifts into something flagrantly more sinister. We never get to the wedding, and by the credits it's honestly hard to say if the characters are even headed there at all. Given the groom's total lack of corporeality, the betrayal that's ultimately felt comes not so much at the closing revelation that it was the vicar with whom our protagonist knocked boots the night before (presumably the same vicar who's going to oversee her wedding ceremony, though it's not made explicitly clear) than at the fade-out, for abandoning us at this point in the story, and in the company of such a skin-crawling individual. When the vicar enters the picture, to assist the main duo with their broken-down vehicle, he is an immediately unsettling figure, with his eyes obscured behind his glasses, although deceptively, his initial function is to dispense quirky sight gags, with his car boot-ready alter, cross that doubles as a spanner, and unintentional substitution of petrol with holy water. Once the woman and cat have joined him in his van, and the furry die has been slotted back into its proper place, along with the last remaining fragments of clarity as to what went on that fateful night, it comes together less like a wacky comedy reveal than a moment of genuine squeamish horror. The general emptiness that's pervaded the film up until now - the seeming lack of anyone in this world besides the protagonist, her cat and this mysterious third party - suddenly feels treacherous, as though the predatory vicar has been closing in on this woman the entire time and she has unwittingly been all alone in his presence. The final arrangement, which finds the duo stranded in the vicar's ever-accelerating van, suggests a situation hurtling ever more critically out of control. The closing image codes them as having entered into a twisted symbolic marriage, bound by their mutually scandalous secret, with the license plate of the towed vehicle trailing behind in the style of "Just married" signage, while Peter Brandt's hazy background score feels evocative of a nightmare unravelling. I don't know if I'd go so far as to conclude that the vicar has literally kidnapped this young bride and her cat, but it does seem evident that their tribulation is just beginning - that, despite the increased speed, they aren't getting anywhere fast, except ever deeper into the whirlwind of chaos.

BT '92: Get Through To Someone (Empty Nest Angst)

By late 1992, Frank the plasticine tortoise was already such a revered advertising icon that British Telecom (aka BT) saw fit to appropriate his electric (not gas!) powered charms into one of its own campaigns. Sandwiched somewhere between the Maureen Lipman and Bob Hoskins eras of British Telecon's advertising history was "Get through to someone", a series of adverts (at least seven in total) about the importance of everyday connections and communications. Each installment follows a different protagonist grappling with some form of overwhelming uncertainty, ultimately remedied with a simple telephone call - in one case, the mother of a university fresher fretting about how her daughter is coping in her new environs, until her daughter gets in touch to reassure her that things are hunky-dory. Before then, the mother looks to the television for a source of diversion, but every single item being broadcast reinforces her paranoia about the world her daughter is currently being inducted into, one of derelict kitchens and rambunctious rugby players. Failing to offer comfort is Frank, whose off-hand remark about how nice it is to come inside to warm abode after you've been freezing to death outside conjures up bleak, blue-tinted visions about the horrors of student accommodation - in which Frank's hyperbolic observation is snipped out of all context and echoes off the mildew-stained walls as the unremitting proclamation of doom. I gotta say, this freaked me out something nasty as a child. Like everyone else, I only ever knew Frank as an entirely genial presence, as a wide-mouthed tortoise who was apparently a proficient athlete off of screen (there was something vaguely sinister about the backdrops to his world, and those of all of the Creatures Comforts spots, but we'll get into that another time). BT's appropriation felt like a rotten bit of sabotage, a subversion of everything the Aardman tortoise stood for. They gave Frank a dark undercurrent by twisting his words, honing in on some grimmer subtext that would otherwise not have crossed my mind, and creating an association I was never quite going to shake. From now on, whenever I saw Frank in his regular presentation, I was going to have Sam the university fresher and her pallid, shivering form lurking somewhere within the same train of thought, reminding me of the chilling alternative to the perfectly-heated utopia the claymation reptile extolled.

That one upset aside, I'll admit to being inordinately fond of the "Get through to someone" series. In many respects, they are the perfect encapsulations of early 90s banality, but they're my kind of early 90s banality, brimming as they are with a beguiling nostalgia for a time when mobile phones were still the ugly toys of the business elite and all long-distance communication between friends and family was conducted via landline (and the occasional phone box), and when ads signed off with upbeat leitmotifs, this one delivered by harmonica. There are a so many details that are honestly catnip to me - the warm guitar strums, the overstuffed mise-en-scenes. Above all, I like how they mix the hokey prosaicness of each featured scenario with a prevalent sense of trepidation, so that the most everyday of banalities become portents of some impending catastrophe. Take what happens at the opening of the Sam spot, before Frank even enters the picture. We get an early indicator of the conflict in store with an overheard BBC announcer informing us that, "That was the last program in the present series." Ostensibly an entirely non-threatening detail designed to segue into a reminder that the Open University is starting in 25 minutes, and then on into the protagonist's own memories of having left her daughter at the university doors, its implications are frankly apocalyptic. The world the protagonist knew has reached a natural end; the television she turns to to fill the companionship void offers only a frightening portal into the new world she fears might be emerging in its place. The specific mention of it being the last program in the present series indicates that renewal is a possibility, but by no means a given, underlying the protagonist's uncertainty as she awaits confirmation that her bond with her daughter can be re-established and endure. The uneasy in-between state in which she's currently mired is amplified by the ad's somewhat exaggerated visual choices, imbuing it with an unsubtly that seems as cartoonish, in its way, as the one inhabited by the claymation tortoise athlete. In particular, there's the manner in which that framed photograph of Sam looms prominently over her mother's shoulder, as if to say, "In case you don't get it, she's feeling her daughter's absence." And there in between lurks the telephone, that vessel of communication that cold restore the ostensibly ruptured connection.

In truth, the creature that perplexes me most within the Sam spot is not Frank, but the clownfish seen swimming about above the BT logo at the end. It strikes me as significant that this final arrangement always showed the two conversing parties in boxes against a dark abyss, with the BT logo as the all-important connective tissue in between. Above it, some seemingly incidental detail from earlier within the ad was privileged with that same connective status, indicating that it was to be seen as somehow symbolic of the relationship being fortified and upheld by BT. This is the angle from which I really want to delve into this series - to assess them not merely on the strength of their paranoid fantasies, but on how much sense we can discern from their symbolism. In this case, the most prevalent symbol is Nemo there. Not only are fish seen in the aquarium the protagonist's husband is tending to as the ad opens (it was a common practice for each individual ad in this campaign to open with some close-up of an object tangential to the featured narrative), but the protagonist herself has them on her sweater. I can't quite make out the full design, but it looks to me like a school of fish swimming around...hmm, is that a jar of peanut butter? If so, then that's strange. From a narrative perspective, the husband's preoccupation with the aquarium accounts for why he's unreceptive to his wife's loneliness, but since fish images are all over the place, they obviously stand for a little more. A bird motif would have made immediate sense, but perhaps been a little too on the nose, even for a set-up as unsubtly laid out as this. Fish, though? They require more work.

Two suggestions spring to mind. First, it might be a reference to the idiom about being a small fish in a big pond, with the protagonist projecting her own insecurities about the wider world onto Sam as she takes her first step into it. Both characters have their obvious vulnerabilities in the wake of change, and both are ultimately going to cope with these. Second is that it's not the fish per se that's of significance but the water. We refer now to the protagonist's second paranoid fantasy, which involves Sam making a literal splash with a bunch of rugby players in a swimming pool. As a kid, while the kitchen fantasy was always clear to me, I never had a clue what was supposed to be so upsetting about this one. Now it's obvious, water being the cliched metaphor for sex it is, that this is a family-friendly means of conveying the protagonist's anxieties about Sam getting it on with the entire student rugby team. In a broader sense, water indicates intimacy, both physical and emotional, and the scope of prospective human connections Sam has just opened up to, which the protagonist fears but which in actuality is something to be celebrated. At the end when Sam rings home to assure her mother that all is right in the world, we see how the affinity between Sam and her mother is still going strong, even as potential new avenues are suggesting themselves. She tells her mother that the food is great (we never had any paranoid fantasies about the food Sam was eating, but apparently it's the first thing she's asked about), that the university has central heating and that she doesn't much care for rugby...only for that last remark to catch the bemused eye of a rugby player standing adjacent to the communal telephone, and Sam to respond with a giddy flicker of the eyebrows that spells trouble on the horizon. It isn't presented as anything to be afraid of, though. Far from portending the incoming apocalypse, the end of a series merely signals that something else will be arriving to fill the vacant timeslot. Will it be a worthy follow-up? All you can do is stay tuned.

Humdrum (aka Fear of A Midday Shadow)

If you owned a copy of the 2000 home media release Aardman Classics, you might recall just how flat-out unsettling the compilation got the deeper you delved into its centre. For those who only knew the Bristol-based animation studio for the Morph skits and the creations of Nick Park, I'd imagine this would have been one heck of a bucket of ice water. Things got off to a deceptively genial start, with the original Creature Comforts short and the first of the spin-off ads for electric heaters featuring Frank the tortoise. Then Pib and Pog appeared, in all of their mean-minded, psuedo-educational glory, and things were thrown just a little off of balance. The Creature Comforts gang resurfaced, and for a fleeting moment we felt like we were safe again...right before were slap-dab in the middle of an incredibly fucked-up computer animated bit about a minotaur murdering a duck with the help of a severed hand. Sandwiching Minotaur and Little Nerkin in between the two ads about the dishwasher-loving pandas had the effect of making the pandas seem utterly false; going back to their smiling faces immediately after witnessing the horrors inflicted on that duck was like to having to resume your place at a dinner party after being privy to some enormously disturbing gossip about your host. There was some agreeable content ahead - War Story, Wat's Pig, a music video where a claymation cat with the vocals of Nina Simone performs "My Baby Just Cares For Me" - but "Heat Electric - Penguins 3 and Pablo" would be the last stop before a very disconcerting stretch throughout the middle, where we were basically leaping from one bite-sized nightmare to the next. Stage Fright, Pop, Ident, Loves Me, Loves Me Not - it was a non-stop parade of sleep-robbing freakiness. Obviously nothing else among them was as dark and sobering as the apocalyptic drama Babylon, but twisted psyches with full creative freedom clearly were endemic to the studio. The end of the compilation took us back into calmer territory, with the grimy realism of the Conversation Pieces and Animated Conversations, but even then they had to stick on one final scare to send us home with, in the form of Boris Kossmehl's Not Without My Handbag. In 2006 Aardman released another compilation, Aardman's Darkside, touted as a glimpse into the studio's nastier, more adult-orientated underbelly, but I personally saw very little difference between the films therein and at least half the line-up of Aardman Classics. Family-friendly was definitely not their default setting in the days before Chicken Run.

Lurking amid that sinister middle stretch was the 1998 film Humdrum - a short that, based on the opening credits, I had seriously expected to be a lot darker than it was. Everything about the title sequence - the deeply ominous musical notes, the black backdrop, the abrasive, jagged lettering -  suggests something truly terrifying is in store. Which may well be part of the joke; we enter into Humdrum prepped for a more dramatic affair than actually transpires. Instead, the key characters, two shadowy entities voiced by Scottish comedians Jack Docherty and Moray Hunter, are navigating a nightmare of a whole other nature, one that has less in common with the overt horrors of Stage Fright and Not Without My Handbag than the plight expressed by the verbose zoo animals in Creature Comforts. Stuck indoors and fed up of staring at the same four walls all day, the shadows spend the entirety of the six and a half minute runtime in search of alleviation from the stifling monotony. Their names are never disclosed, but I've taken the liberty of applying my own for the purposes of this review - Pawn, the thoroughly morose one (Docherty), and Rook, the intermittently exuberant one (Hunter), based on the chess pieces their heads resemble. This design choice strikes me as entirely deliberate, since the game of chess comes up explicitly in the dialogue, with Pawn recounting what happened on a previous and (we presume) equally boring occasion, when Rook made him eat all of the white pieces after losing a bet. He indicates that most of the pieces have yet to work their way through his digestive system (though he thought he saw a couple of pawns yesterday), a gleefully scatological gag that takes on added resonance if we view it as a mirror to the characters' own predicament, engulfed by a smothering monotony and desperately looking for an exit that never appears. The idea that the characters themselves are chess pieces also calls attention to their positioning for most of the film, perched at opposite ends of a table, suggesting that they are, whether knowingly or not, opponents and not allies in their ongoing entrapment. In the absence of any other distractions, they have nothing to gaze into except the dark abyss of one another, their every move a bid to keep not only the monotony from gnawing away them, but their companion's eccentricities too. Pawn is, unsurprisingly, the underdog in this equation, with Rook appearing to outmanoeuvre him at virtually every turn, and we sympathise with Pawn all the better for it.

Humdrum was directed by Peter Peake, the particular twisted psyche behind the aforementioned Pib and Pog, with a script doctoring credit for Rex the Runt creator Richard Starzak (then known as Richard Goleszowski). The film takes a unique visual approach - like your archetypal Aardman production, it uses stop motion figures, with the twist that the camera in this case is interested not in the figures themselves but in the shadows they cast. Seemingly detached from any corporeal bodies, Pawn and Rook exist only as murky, one-dimensional entities who nevertheless manage to be entirely fluid and expressive with the limited features they have. They seem at once alive and stranded in a ghostly state of only half-existence, distorted imitations of a full-bodied world that seems eerily unrealised. Meanwhile, the blistered backdrops onto which the shadows are projected take on a low-key life of their own, reflections of the protagonists' barren mental states that intermittently shift to signify the nascent traces of evanescent preoccupations. When the game of chess is mentioned, the wall assumes the checkered pattern of a chess board. When a cow is cited, the blotchy markings of a bovine's hide can be seen. The uncanniness of the visuals is buffered by the distinctly human warmth of the characters' banter, the dialogue between Pawn and Rook being both hilarious and natural. If you were watching it on the Aardman Classics compilation, then that warmth, coupled with the relative simplicity of the piece, came as a great relief following after the busyness and mean-spiritedness of the preceding Stage Fright. Starzak's playful touch seems particularly evident in the film's bluntly self-aware script, incorporating multiple barbs at its own nicheness. The possibility of turning to the television for escapism is dismissed early on, when we're told all that's on is "some weird animation thing". The major development that dominates the latter stages of the film - Rook's proposal that they entertain themselves by creating shadow puppets with their own hands - is met with weary disdain from Pawn: "I can't think of anything more boring that staring at some stupid shadows, for god's sake! Is this what happens when you don't have any friends?!" Elsewhere, Humdrum looks to be making some broader comment on our relationship with popular entertainment and the extent to which it alleviates or reinforces our monotony. The radio proves as futile a means of diversion as the television, bearing out Pawn's gloomy assessment that music "is all the same rubbish these days", with every station the characters tune into broadcasting some variation on "La Cucaracha".

The real purpose of the shadow world is to allow for a series of clever twists regarding the nature of perception. In the first half of the short, a momentary distraction arises in the form of a dog (or, more accurately, the shadow of a dog) barking at the protagonists' doorstep, which Pawn indignantly attempts to send packing. We think we understand what's going on, until Rook shows up and identifies the dog as a double-glazing salesman, who has apparently pestered the shadows on previous occasions. Our natural assumption would be that Rook is simply in cloud cuckoo land, until the door is closed and the dog, suddenly speaking in plain English, confirms his perception. It becomes even funnier when you rewatch the sequence with the knowledge that Pawn is always addressing the caller as a double-glazing salesman and not a dog; it makes me wonder, likewise, if the dog is actually barking from the protagonists' perspective, or if it's all just a comical means of conveying a particularly incessant sales pitch?

The interlude with the dog seems initially to be nothing more than a random sprinkling of absurdity, but later transpires to have laid the ground for the punchline of the short, once the game of shadow puppets has unfolded and become increasingly heated. As noted, the viewer's sympathies are invariably with Pawn, since he is the character with whom our perspectives are more firmly aligned. Odds are that we too would not recognise Rook's ridiculous attempt at contorting his digits into the shape of a cow, before he supplies the giveaway mooing (Pawn quite accurately observes that it looks more like he has his hands caught in a sandwich toaster). By contrast, Pawn's wizardry in creating an astonishingly fluid rabbit shadow is always painfully conspicuous to us, even when Rook insists that it looks more like an otter with two sausages tied to its head. It all climaxes with a deliciously cathartic moment where Pawn finally loses it with the hopelessly obtuse Rook: "I'm stuck indoors playing Guess The Misshapen Beast with someone who clearly wouldn't recognise a rabbit if it came to his house for tea, said "What's up, Doc?" and started burrowing into his head! There are blind people with no fingers who are better at shadow puppets than you! No wonder I'm a tad miffed!" All thoroughly just criticisms...except it's all tipped on its head in the closing moments, when a second caller appears at the door, a mooing shadow that perfectly matches Rook's prior attempt at creating a cow. Something even more shockingly unexpected then occurs - for the first time, we see a smile form across Pawn's face. "Not today, thank you," he says politely, before closing the door, seemingly unfazed by the irony of the situation. While it's certainly gratifying to see things end on a more buoyant note for the beleaguered Pawn, it's here that we also part ways with the character, seeing how our perspective no longer lines up with his. Suddenly, he seems at totally peace with the absurdity of his surroundings, and what's obviously normal to him has us scratching our heads with regard to what we're actually looking at. Is this hideously misshapen beast an accurate representation after all of how bovines look in this world? Is it another door to door salesperson flogging their unwanted wares? A grand cosmic joke at the expense of Pawn? A meta joke at the expense of the animators? All of those things at once? Has Pawn potentially been the daffy one all along, while Rook has a firmer grasp on the realities of the shadow world? After all, we never get any objective insight into how a rabbit even looks in this universe, outside of Pawn's projection - for all we know, his efforts really do look more like an otter with sausages protruding from its head. Or is Pawn simply calmly rejecting the film's final efforts to make a fool of him? All that matters is that Pawn is now in on something that we aren't, and it seems significant that he closes the door while facing the viewer, effectively ejecting them from the premises and leaving them out in the cold. The music heard during the end credits, yet another variation on "La Cucaracha", offers a striking contrast to the music featured during the title sequence and seems almost mocking of the viewer's confusion.

Humdrum was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, but lost to Aleksandr Petrov's take on The Old Man and The Sea - a film to which there was seriously no shame in losing. I'm just happy that it got some recognition, since like a lot of the studio's projects that weren't helmed by Nick Park, it remains something of a hidden oddity. It's disconcerting as hell, yet basically genial enough that it helped the psychological scarring from elsewhere on the Aardman Classics release to go down more easily, which speaks volumes to Aardman's character at the time.

Cadbury's Creme Egg: Float On (aka Creme, Get On Top)

Note: It was initially my intention to try working this in as another edition of "Horrifying Advertising Animals", but all the while I had the voice of David St. Hubbins from Spinal Tap bellowing in my head: "They're not animals, they're signs of the Zodiac!" Fine, it can stand on its own.

Somehow or other Cadbury's Creme Eggs managed to crank out an awful lot of UK marketing mileage from a question that I seriously doubt very many level-headed people cared to complicate: "How do you eat yours?" (or alternatively, "How do YOU do it?"). The implications of this campaign hook were both grotesque and banal. Banal, because how many variations can there even be when it comes to ingesting a piece of egg-shaped chocolate confectionery? The average consumer is either going to eat the whole thing together in bite-sized chunks like a civilised person (relatively speaking, given the product) or extract the fondant innards with their tongue or forefinger and then eat the chocolate shell; is there really a great deal else to be done with the thing? And grotesque because...do I really want to know some of the possible answers to the question I just posed? I think that forefinger option is frankly already pushing it. And is focussing on the various disgusting methodologies other people might apply to the act of eating likely to boost our own appetites? There reached a point, round about the new millennium, where the campaign started to lean quite heavily into those gross-out implications, with ads showing people dunking chips into the fondant and other mank images that I swear were only a step away from belonging in a John Waters movie (granted, IIRC the woman doing the chip-dunking was pregnant, which explains her oddball cravings, but I still can't say that I enjoyed the visual). Which, by coincidence or not, is around the time I went off creme eggs as a product. Possibly chips for a while, too.

The least repulsive campaign ever spun around the concept arose circa early 1990s, and hinged upon a cute idea - that the way you ate your creme egg, like your star sign, spoke volumes about your personality. What it was actually trading on, which meant absolutely nothing to me at the time, was 1970s nostalgia. The campaign was structured around a clever reworking of "Float On", a 1977 hit for soul group The Floaters, notable mainly for its spoken word interludes, in which each Floater gave his name, his star sign and his mating preferences in a style designed to recall the formalities of video dating. The TV ads mimicked this format in having a representative of each star sign step out before a microphone and deliver some slick statement on how they did it with their creme eggs, while the song's titular hook was modified into a jingle directly extolling the product. Having no prior reference for "Float On", my kid brain accepted it as an original tune, and to this day, whenever I hear the actual Floaters tracks my neurons are invariably wanting to work a "Cadbury's Creme Egg!" in there.

The campaign's real magic ingredient, though, was its visual wit. The characters in question were all claymation figures, courtesy of the ever-reliable Aardman and animated (I believe) by one of the studio's founding fathers, Peter Lord himself. The twist being that when they spoke about their respective pun-laden affections for creme eggs, they each morphed into the creature or item that symbolises their sign. As with Aardman production, even their advertising work, the amount of care, heart and craftsmanship that goes into the process is simply impossible to ignore. The ads had such a warmth and a vigor to them, and it's on that basis that they had me so enraptured as a small child...even when pretty much every other aspect of the premise was floating on right over my head (aside from the obvious - the pro-creme egg message). Astrology was not something I understood at the time; it was enough for me to think that the characters were turning into animals and other beings that somehow symbolised the quirky nature of their chocolate rapacity. Something else I was obviously not going to get was the very blatant sexual innuendo that permeated the campaign from top to bottom. Because yeah, that's the other thing that makes it an interesting series to revisit as an adult - it's hard to seriously entertain the notion that the characters are talking about creme eggs. Here, you get the impression that the eggs are really just the metaphor.

There exists a 90 second super-cut of the campaign combining all twelve star signs into one, but at the time I only ever saw these aired in three separate 30-second segments, with four characters apiece. Note that the ordering within the shorter versions differs from that of the full edit (and in neither case does the ordering align with that of the actual Zodiac). Here's a rundown of who appeared where, and what salacious quips they each came out with:

Ad #1: Leo/Gemini/Sagittarius/Taurus

• "Hi, I'm LEO! I eat the lion's share! Roar!" He has a rapacious appetite and he dominates.
  
• "GEMINI! And I like to slurp it!" "Bite it!" "Slurp it!" "Bite it!" I remain divided on whether these are actual twins we're seeing here or if the implication is that Gemini has something of a split personality when it comes to her mode of creme egg consumption. If the former, then they're licking/biting from the same egg, which is as gross-out as this campaign gets.
  
• "SAGITTARIUS! I could eat two or three on the trot!" Cos he's got hooves, see? Are centaurs known for their promiscuity or am I getting them mixed up with satyrs?
  
• "TAURUS! And I go at it like a bull in a sweet shop!" This is an odd one, for multiple reasons. Obviously it's a play on the expression "bull in a china shop", referring to a person who behaves gauchely in a situation that demands subtly or delicacy, with the words tweaked to make it more pertinent to the product being touted. Bovines aren't exactly renowned for being sugar addicts, but I suspect it was also intended to play as an amalgamation with another expression, "like a kid in a candy store", meaning to be overwhelmed by the array of wonderful options before you (now, that's a pun that might have worked a treat for Capricorn). That in turn makes me conscious of the fact that Taurus, like most of the swingers on parade here, has an American accent, so is he likely to say "sweet shop" instead of "candy store"? I guess what he means to convey is that he's going to throw his weight around with sheer excitement. Taurus wears a leather jacket, which is appropriate to his bull motif, although it's maybe a little morbid for him to be wearing the skin of the animal he ultimately morphs into.
  

Ad #2: Pisces/Aries/Libra/Cancer

• "PISCES! And I dive right in!" I'm a Pisces, and I find my sign's representation a bit on the mixed side. Visually it's great; I like how Pisces' sparkly sequin dress transforms into fish scales, and I absolutely dig how, as a fish, she's got both eyes on the side of her face like a flatfish (even if her overall design seems to be based more on a swordfish). But the innuendo's not the most tantalising, and I'm a little hung up on the fact that Pisces is represented specifically by TWO fish swimming in opposite directions - was there no way of working that concept in here? Or did they feel that the split personality motif would get too repetitive alongside Gemini? Incidentally, Pisces is the only female character to undergo any kind of beastly transformation (since Scorpio is a no-go in that regard - see below).
  
• "ARIES! I give it a good battering!" This ad so makes me want to be an Aries, given that sheep boy gets by far the sauciest innuendo. Fun fact: a snippet of his dialogue was also sampled in the Gorillaz track "Aries". His attire is, naturally, wool-themed - he wears a woolly sweater AND a jacket lined with wool. How is he not boiling under those stage lights?
  
• "LIBRA! I like to weigh up the alternatives! Weigh-hey!" I've seen a lot of speculation that Libra was voiced by Danny John-Jules, who is best known for playing Cat in Red Dwarf. I've yet to find any official source on the matter, but yeah, it certainly sounds like him. Libra seems like a tough sign to incorporate into this particular premise, since it's represented by an inanimate object, not a creature, but they managed to have him embody those scales in a way that feels slick and not excessively goofy. He holds an egg in each hand in a weighing motion, and his eyes turn into the dials. Gotta love the bonus pun he signs off with too.
  
• "CANCER! And I'm a shell man myself!" Nice crab nod, but unless I'm missing something, not much in the way of innuendo. And why is he wearing a hoodie and not a shell suit? If you ask me, Cancer got the most short-changed by this campaign. His sideways scuttling exit in the 90-second version looks cool, at least.
  

 

Ad #3: Aquarius/Scorpio/Virgo/Capricorn

• "AQUARIUS! And sometimes I get carried away!" Yeah, I'll say. Aquarius gets the kinkiest visual of the lot, in that she pours the contents of the egg all over her face and proceeds to lick it off. It's worth noting at this point that the creme eggs seen in this campaign are ALL disproportionately large, but Aquarius's really takes the cake. Hers is an ostrich egg edition.
  
• "SCORPIO! One nip from me and it's history!" Scorpio is, strangely, the only animal sign who doesn't morph into the critter in question. Instead, her pigtail rears up behind her in the manner of a scorpion's tail and slashes the creme egg open. She looks properly badass, but if you were hoping to see an actual scorpion then it's an anti-climax nevertheless.
  
• "VIRGO! Ah-hem. This is my first one..." For a while, Ad #3 was the only installment I was having difficulty locating on YouTube, and a large part of what was stoking my curiosity in the meantime (besides completism) was wondering how on earth they were going to represent Virgo. It's an awkward concept to have to work with in this context, more so than Libra. What they came up with was definitely clever - this girl's never had a creme egg before, and she's understandably nervous about putting something this dubious-looking into her mouth. Virgo is, unsurprisingly, the least sexualised of the bunch, with plain clothing that's supposed to convey a mix of chasteness (the collar blouse) and girlish innocence (the bow in her hair). For some reason she's also the only character to not speak with an American accent. I guess the idea was make her sound a less sultry than the others; she's out of place within the soul music ambience.
  
• "CAPRICORN! Mind if I butt in?" So Capricorn's style is that he's a thief. He steals Virgo's egg, in the only instance of two signs interacting, thus forcing her to retain her creme egg virginity. Capricorn wears a turtleneck sweater (presumably made out of mohair), has a goatee and also two weird bumps protruding from his head that I guess are supposed to be his hair? Dude comes off as somewhat of a creep (stick a pitchfork in his hand and in his human form he could pass for your archetypal cartoon devil), but he does make one heck of a charming aqua goat. In fact, if I'm applying to this fictional dating agency, then Capricorn's the one I'm coming away with, just on the basis of his winsome goat grin.
   

Live Earth '07: Unravel (featuring Two Young Girls From Burundi)

Unravel, directed by Sarah Cox, was the shortest contribution to Aardman's Live Earth trilogy of 2007, at only 92 seconds long, although probably the most starkly harrowing in its message. Unlike its two sister installments, which both leaned heavily on the humor angle, Unravel approaches its subject with an earnest, elegant simplicity, in evoking two almost oppositional connections - the technological connections that make the world seem closer than ever from a dimensional/communicative standpoint, and the extent to which all life on Earth is inherently interconnected - and how the former, while ostensibly uniting the world, is having a disastrous effect on the latter. The Earth is depicted as a ball of yarn, with various patterns intricately interwoven into its surface, representing an assortment of plant and animal life and their corresponding habitats. A trio of aeroplanes encircle the globe, each pulling a thread behind them; we see the far-reaching impact of their movements, as the threads continue to unwind and the habitats and the chains of life they support are gradually depleted. Finally, the pulled threads reassemble to form the following words: DON'T LET IT ALL UNRAVEL.

The first observation that has to be made about Unravel is that the animation is beautiful. It is a truly enchanting piece to look at. The various figures, woven out of fabric, emit a warm, handmade quality; lush greens and blues in which everything seems alive but also delicate, all of which makes its ceaseless destruction all the more distressing. The second observation to be made is that, for as wonderful a short as it is on the visual front, it wouldn't pack half as weighty a punch without the sonic factor. The most intriguing thing going on in Unravel is the beguiling choice of audio accompaniment, credited in the closing titles to "Two Young Girls From Burundi". Rewatching it over and over, I couldn't pinpoint quite what it was about this track that made it so haunting - it seemed to convey both the beauty and the elegance of this fragile world but there was a cry of despair in it too. It felt like the rhythm of the Earth, a hum or a heartbeat, desperately trying to preserve as the odds grew increasingly stacked against it. I went in search of this recording in the hopes of gaining greater context, and eventually managed to locate it on an LP, An Introduction To Africa, released by WOMAD in 1985. There's no specific information on who the two young girls really were - their names and their stories remain a mystery - but the accompanying booklet had this to say about the nature of the song:

"On this opening track, two young Burundi girls sing Akazéhé which is a song of greeting. This type of song is recited everywhere - from large celebrations to when people visit each others homes. This style of singing is not only common to Burundi, but can be found all over Africa. It requires a highly accurate breathing technique as there is little room for pause. This song, recorded in 1968, displays the curious ululating voices which create a polyphonic effect."

It seems that this recording was culled from an earlier release, Musique Du Burundi, put out by Ocora records in 1968, in which the girls are credited under their French moniker, Deux Jeunes Filles. There, it's preceded by an Akazéhé from just one girl, which itself sounds strangely familiar; I can only presume that it was incorporated into some Deep Forest remix.

What is it about the recording that makes it so powerful in this particular context? The knowledge that the song in question is a greeting certainly makes it all the more ironic that it accompanies images of life being slowly erased. But I think it also has to do with the song's unassuming nature, and the anonymity of these two small (yet compelling) voices, calling out from a planet where everything is ultimately interlinked. They become the vitality, and the helplessness, of every individual living thing adding up to one.

Live Earth - Unravel a from dg andson on Vimeo.

Live Earth '07: Gridlock (aka We're All In A Flippin' Jam)

On 07/07/07, a series of benefit concerts was held across the globe under the banner of Live Earth, with the intention of raising money and awareness for the battle against climate change (following a similar model to the Live 8 concerts that had been held a couple of years prior) - an event that I think now is largely remembered, at least to those who saw the Wembley concert, for the controversy generated when Phil Collins sang "Invisible Touch" with colourful new lyrics. But there was also some interesting stuff happening on the animation front, with Aardman Animations having been commissioned to make a series of environmentally-themed shorts to screen in between footage of bands performing. A total of three shorts were produced, Can One Person Make A Difference?, Gridlock and Unravel, none of which were even half as traumatic as that Turtle Journey film Aardman made for Greenpeace in 2020, but hopefully they still helped in getting the message across. Of the trio, Gridlock was the only one that dipped into Aardman's well of established characters, by having Angry Kid weigh in on the problem of traffic pollution.

Angry Kid, a strong contender for the title of least cuddly Aardman creation, was the brainchild of Darren Walsh (who also provides the voice of the titular character) and took an irreverent, puckishly grotesque look at teenage angst, curiosity and alienation. In a nutshell, it's best recommended to viewers who thought that Kevin The Teenager was an inspired caricature, but too genteel. It follows the adventures of a snot-nosed (literally and figuratively) adolescent brat with a cocky inquisitiveness and a vulgar, somewhat twisted sense of humor. A large number of  shorts involve Angry Kid coming to blows with his Dad, who is frequently heard (voice courtesy of David Holt) but always stays out of the camera's view; he gets understandably exasperated with his son's awkward questioning and behaviours, but his periodically vindictive reactions suggest that Angry Kid's mean streak could well be genetic. Other shorts involve Angry Kid tormenting his younger sibling, Lil' Sis, who is regularly able to one-up him, and his best friend/chew toy, Speccy, who isn't. The series had a unique, distinctly off-kilter look thanks to its complex production - originally, Angry Kid was brought to life through the process of pixilation, with a live action actor swapping out masks in between frames, while Lil' Sis and Speccy were portrayed by life-size puppets. It would be wrong to suggest that pixilation is inherently ill-suited to whimsy (A Chairy Tale, by Canadian film-makers Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra, is pretty firm evidence to the contrary), but there is nevertheless something so much more uncanny about the results than regular stop motion (note: later installments forgo the mask process and use CGI to animate the characters' faces, which pulls off the incredible feat of looking even more unsettling while perhaps lacking the same degree of personality). Unlike Rex The Runt, which wound up being pitched to essentially the wrong audience when it debuted, I don't think you were likely to mistake Angry Kid for anything overly kid-friendly. It looked way too nightmarish from the outset - a quality that made it perfectly apt for delivering a cautionary tale about the planet being taken down a drastically wrong path. If there's an Aardman property that nails down the messy self-destructiveness of the human condition, it's Angry Kid.

By 2007, Angry Kid's grisly features were a familiar sight among animation fans wont to straying from the beaten track, with two series and a 23-minute special under his belt. This latest installment, Gridlock, saw Angry Kid and the rest of the cast recount the experience of being trapped in a traffic jam of apocalyptic proportions...in song form. Gridlock is a full-blown music video, pivoting on a pop-rap comedy number that, much to my chagrin, was not actually released as a single in any form. Not even a crummy download. Although, oddly enough, Angry Kid had only released a record the year prior, "Handbags", another pop-rap comedy number that was ostensibly about some amalgamation of football and handbag-wielding but was (I presume) all a metaphor for masturbation. I happen to think that "Gridlock" was better. When you hear it, you'll understand why I'm so bummed that it didn't strive for greater exposure - it is gloriously infectuous. Most of the rapping is provided by Angry Kid himself, although Lil' Sis, who seldom speaks at all in the series proper, here gets a surprisingly generous number of lines, courtesy of Beth Chalmers.

Gridlock uses the series' then-trademark combination of live action, pixilation and puppetry (and some 2D animation) to create a disorientating picture of the world going to Hell as viewed from the backseat of your daddy's car. It's unsparing in its depiction of the uncomfortable realities of road travel, and there's a harrowing moment with an asthmatic Speccy facing the build-up of exhaust fumes, although the eco themes become most explicit in the final verse, when Angry Kid references the looming climate catastrophe: "Now I've been told/Soon it won't be cold/Can't wait, I'm gonna buy a ton of lotion." Which sounded like a farcically bone-headed response to the environmental crisis, until that horrifying day when we woke up and discovered that Angry Kid and people of his mentality were now running BBC Bitesize. At the end, he concedes that, "We should have heard the boffins and their warning", but professes that he's enjoying the calamity of seeing the world come apart at the seams (a metaphor evoked directly in one of its sister shorts, Unravel). He scoots off through a smoggy playground where the children are decked out in gas masks, before finally getting his comeuppance via the wrath of Dad.

There are obvious visual nods throughout to Bob Dylan's proto music video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues", but overall I'm tempted to theorize that Walsh set out to create an inversion on the music video to R.E.M's 1992 single "Everybody Hurts", which also involved a traffic jam and climaxed with all of the occupants abandoning their vehicles and walking away in unison. Gridlock takes things in a slightly different direction, with everybody leaving their vehicles and turning on one another in their carbon-addled rage - which, in all honesty, seems like a much more credible outcome. More than just the story of a bog standard traffic jam, doesn't the whole thing play like a convincing metaphor for the Earth teetering over the brink of catastrophe? Congested, stinking and with nowhere else to go, odds are that we won't be feeling a whole lot of patience or empathy for one another.

Ident (aka Maybe I'm A-mazed...)

There can be few talents at Aardman more under-championed than Richard Starzak.The Bristol-based studio is so synonymous in popular consciousness with the work of Nick Park that it would be quite accurate to describe just about any of its non-Park talent as under-championed - not least studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton - but Starzak has always struck me as a particularly fascinating example, in part because he can be readily posited as a freakier, more sour-tasting counterpart to Park, epitomising the weirder body of work taking place at Aardman as Wallace and Gromit were winning the public's hearts. Back in 1989, when Park was preparing his breakout short Creature Comforts, Starzak (or Goleszowski as he was known at the time) was another rising claymation whiz getting the chance to flex his idiosyncratic muscles. Both had earned their stripes by working as animators on Aardman's most ambitious project to date, the apocalyptic Babylon, and each was given the opportunity to create their own five minute piece for the upcoming Channel 4 series Lip Synch, an anthology of five shorts designed to showcase the studio's individual talent. From the start, Starzak established himself as a darker, more surreal voice than any of his peers - his contribution, Ident, was by far the strangest of the five, an absurdist fantasy charting a day in the life of a beleaguered everyman as he navigates the walls of a maze and the dystopian society housed within, modifying his identity in an effort to blend in with the various social pockets he encounters, before his dog finally shows him that there may be a better way (maybe...).

Naturally, Ident didn't receive half the attention that Creature Comforts did, which is not say that it made no impact whatsoever. Like Creature Comforts, it did eventually lead to its own spin-off series...of sorts. Ident boasts the very first appearance of Rex the Runt, the two-dimensional plasticine hound who would go onto become Starzak's signature character throughout the 1990s, here featured as the pet of our chameleonic protagonist. It was followed by a trilogy of shorts exploring the further adventures of Rex, once he'd slipped the maze and learned to talk and walk upright - How Dinosaurs Became Extinct (1991), Dreams (1991) and North By North Pole (1996). Rex finally received his own full-fledged TV series in 1998, which the BBC bizarrely attempted to market as a kind of fill-in Wallace & Gromit, airing it in various lunchtime and early evening slots across the Xmas/New Year period. Brilliant though it was, Rex was never destined for the same kind of mass appeal as Wallace & Gromit - again, I fear that Starzak's humor was always too random, unsettling and off-the-wall compared to the altogether warmer eccentricities of Park's creation. This was 3 AM student insomniac television, awkwardly shoehorned into the niche of festive family entertainment; I'm not sure what stuffing-addled viewers made of it in the dying embers of 1998, but whenever Rex was repeated the BBC typically tended to squirrel it away in the late late hours.

Before he teamed up with Wendy, Bob and Vince, Rex led a humbler but stranger existence as the loyal companion of a phallic plasticine being living inside a labyrinthine dystopia. Compared to subsequent incarnations, this Rex is less anthropomorphic and largely behaves like an ordinary dog. He does not possess the gift of the gab, although in that regard he's at no more of a disadvantage than any of the maze's "human" inhabitants. Lord has stated that Aardman never settled on a unifying theme for Lip Synch, although the title suggests that dialogue and communication are of significance to all five shorts, and Ident is unique among them for containing no discernable dialogue (Barry Purves' contribution, Next, is an almost completely dialogue-free experience, but not quite). The characters all speak gibberish, although the nature of the gibberish changes according to the speaker. One character, who may be the protagonist's girlfriend, communicates by reciting letters of the alphabet in sequential order (although she skips the letter "g" for some reason). Another, presumably his boss, haughtily regurgitates the word "blah" over and over. The climax of the short has the protagonist head to the nearest watering hole, where he engages in drunken blather with its patrons (albeit before he's even touched a drop himself). Clearly, nothing of substance is communicated in their garbled murmurings, but the characters engage in rituals designed to give off the appearance of interchange, all the while revealing the fundamental disconnect between the participants. The failure of the protagonist and his girlfriend to see eye to eye results in both parties coming out worse for wear (and the possible breakdown of their relationship). The protagonist's display of over familiarity with his boss results in reproach. Masks are a recurring feature of interaction in the maze; the protagonist both annoys his girlfriend and appeases his boss by donning a mask and obscuring his true face. The backdrop his work environment consists of an assembly line of identical masks, suggesting that the protagonist is either involved in their manufacture, or (more likely) signifying the erosion of individual identity amid the capitalist grind.

In creating Ident, I strongly suspect that Starzak was influenced by Jan Švankmajer's 1983 film Dimensions of Dialogue, a collection of grotesque visual metaphors on the damages dealt by the inadequacies of human communication, particularly the manner in which the speakers aggressively distort one another's appearances as part of their pseudo-conversations. In Švankmajer's film, a succession of humanoid figures constructed from various household objects (vegetables, cooking utensils, office stationary) devour and regurgitate one another, grinding each other's basic components down until all differences are completely eradicated. The characters in Starzak's film endure a more comical but no less devastating evisceration, the emotional toll of all this assimilation being reflected the various scars accumulated by the protagonist throughout the course of the day. The discord with his girlfriend causes his face to be smeared with clown make-up (literally making a fool of him), while the mask he puts on for his boss appears to be altering the basic shape of his face, as his identity becomes conflated with the outward guise he is forced to assume for his daily survival. The characters do not literally consume one another, as in Švankmajer's film, but there is nevertheless a sense of them preying on one another's vulnerabilities in order to assert their own supremacy, with characters physically shrinking after enduring a particularly withering personal blow. Our protagonist is not an innocent in this process - in addition to the damage he unintentionally inflicts on his girlfriend by failing to understand her, he takes out his anger on a maze denizen significantly smaller than he; a denizen who approaches him to ask a question (he holds up a card with a question mark, which seems an appropriate reaction to the general situation), bringing an opportunity for connection and the sharing of knowledge, but whom the protagonist would sooner antagonise than attempt to understand. The inhabitants are a motley collection of figurative Minotaurs, brutally goring one another at evert turning, the grey, oppressive walls of the labyrinth signifying that they are all prisoners of their own conformity (entrapment and isolation are also central themes to at least three of the five shorts in Lip Synch).

As a counterpoint to the gloomy conventions of life within the labyrinth is the character of Rex, who does not exactly accompany the protagonist on his journey throughout the day, but the two of them have a tendency to keep running into one another. Rex is a faithful friend (although there are limits to his loyalty, as we see at the very end of the film), constantly seeking out his master and appearing to speak to some kind of latent urge that is contrary to the will of the maze. It could be because Rex is a dog, and therefore entirely lacking in human pretension. I suspect, though, that Rex is a largely symbolic character, a manifestation of the independent self our protagonist is repeatedly required to suppress in order to blend in inside the labyrinth. Rex signifies the protagonist at his purest and most honest toward himself. Significantly, the dog's appearances are usually heralded by the protagonist taking the time to examine himself in the mirror, reinforcing the idea that Rex "speaks" on behalf of his master's reflection. At the start of the short, Rex objects to the protagonist's (relatively low-key) efforts to smoothen out his wrinkles; he later barks aggressively when his master returns from his dispute with his girlfriend in full clown make-up, signifying the disparity between his inner and outward identities - he has become unrecognisable to himself. Although the dog and protagonist frequently appear to be at odds with one another, there is a surprising display of tenderness between the two when the latter is inebriated. He induces inebriation as purely a defence mechanism, to emulate the rituals of his peers, but just for a moment he lets his guard down and shows a smidgen of affinity for his overlooked friend.

It is ultimately through a mirror, and the guidance of Rex, that our protagonist is able to exit the labyrinth altogether. Rex demonstrates to him that the mirror is actually a portal to another world, if he can muster the gumption to cross through it. There is a strange duality to the very concept of a mirror providing the means of escape - the function of a mirror, after all, is to reinforce the concreteness of whatever environment is juxtaposed with it, the ubiquitousness of mirrors around the maze suggesting that they, like the masks, are tools of oppression, reflecting only the greyness of the walls and the inhabitants' inevitable slide into debasement. Rex's demonstration of what lies beyond the mirror is naturally a call to look past surface appearance, but also evokes the importance of self-empowerment and of taking charge of one's own destiny. Earlier in the film, we saw the protagonist pass a window revealing only the unending passages inside the maze, and obscure it with a picture of an altogether different world, a sunlit one with greenery and open spaces; a perfunctory and seemingly futile gesture of escapism, yet in the end he discovers that such a world was lying in wait for him the entire time. All that was keeping him boxed in were the limitations of his own mind. His earlier action constitutes a rejection of the maze, but in the most superficial way possible; the potential for ingenuity is in him, but at first fulfils no greater function than the masks, as a defensive means of covering up what is undesirable while leaving it fundamentally unaltered. At the end of the film, he finds a way out by acknowledging and fully embracing his potential as an individual, not simply as a means of escapism, but of empowerment to go against convention and change his circumstances.

Unfortunately, the basic limitations that have dogged him all the while are not so easily overcome. For all the beauty of that final revelation, Ident reaches a humorously - and disturbingly - pessimistic conclusion. The protagonist leaves the maze behind him and sets out in a new direction, only for the same cycle of hectoring and alienation to continue beyond its walls. He meets another figure who his double in almost every way, an encounter that at first appears to bring both parties joy, before they suddenly turn on one another. Given that the protagonist has seemingly escaped into his own psyche, this lashing out against his own doppelganger can be interpreted as an expression of self-loathing, a sign that he will never be contented with any reflection that he sees, and effectively always banging his head against the walls of a maze, whether literal or metaphorical. In the background we see the silhouette of Rex watching the entire sorry exchange play out, before he finally decides that his master is a hopeless case and goes his own way. Unlike Park's signature canine, Rex doesn't have the infinite amount of patience required to play guardian angel to an obtuse human (or whatever our protagonist is) and would sooner go and seek out his own pack.

As an endnote, when Creature Comforts received a spin-off television series in 2003, it was ironically Starzak, and not Park, who was the main driving force behind the project. While for the most part Starzak was able to keep his more acidic sensibilities to the sidelines, it seems that he had been interested in taking the concept in a darker direction; apparently, he wanted to do an episode based around animals in a vivisectionist lab, but the higher-ups talked him out of it.

Logo Case Study: Aardman, Meet Pandaman (aka Mommy, What's Wrong With That Man's Face?)

Aardman aren't typically renowned for being the kind of animation studio to propagate childhood nightmares (whether rightly or wrongly), but they made a solid (if largely unsung) contribution to the pantheon of disturbing production logos just around the point that their time in the sun was getting underway. This is what served as the company's logo during its breakout era, between the smashing success of Creature Comforts in 1989 and their initial efforts to ride the shoulders of the Hollywood giants at the dawn of the new millennium. This was the era that gave us the early Wallace & Gromit shorts, Adam, the Creature Comforts electricity campaign and a variety of strange and demented animated pieces from the increasing multitude of individual talent at the studio, and Aardman certainly weren't averse to scaring the wits out of their ever-expanding legions of fans. If you stuck around to the very end of The Wrong Trousers (as I made the mistake of doing), your reward was to be greeted with a smirking claymation face, about which there was something distinctly, unsettling, immediately wrong. I call this one "unsung" because I rarely see it featured in lists of scary production logos, but it passed the test as far as I was concerned.

The face in question had a large dotted bow-tie, a toothy, lopsided smile, and no discernable eyeballs, features that combined to make it look unspeakably uncanny. My initial assumption was that this mysterious figure was intended to be the "Aard Man" referenced in the studio's moniker (in actuality, the eponymous Aardman was an accident-prone superhero created by studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton for a skit they made for Vision On). For a while, I was in the habit of calling him "Pandaman", simply because the dark patches on either side of his nose reminded me of the eye patches on a giant panda, and from a distance I presumed that those curious features were supposed to be his eyes. All the same, I never really settled on how to make sense of this face, and it perturbed me so. Something about the smile struck me as downright unwholesome; the apparent lack of eyes gave the form a distinctly inhuman edge, as if some monstrous being had attempted to mimic human form and not quite managed to master the eyes. Instinctively, I always knew that Pandaman wanted to devour me whole; that an encounter with him would invariably result in winding up on the wrong side of those horrifying gnashers. In other words, he was right at home among the studio's output for the era, which was all about giving a beating heart to the weird and the eerie - check out the 2000 VHS/DVD release Aardman Classics to see what a diabolical little chocolate box it was.

Emphasis upon that beating heart, because as with many of Aardman's freakier pieces, its freakiness goes a long way in bolstering its charm. The fact remains that this is a deeply charming logo, although its charms are more apparent in the full animated version than in the still version that tended to bite the ankles of most productions. In the animated logo, we see the landscape from which Pandaman emerges coming together, and it's a green and vibrant land, brimming with all of the hand-crafted warmth one would expect from the claymation legends. As we encircle the plasticine grass, various cranes and pillars in the backdrop end up forming the frame around Pandaman and the Aardman lettering, when viewed from the pivotal angle, while Pandaman's uncanny mug and various two-dimensional clouds on wires drop down from above to complete the image. In a particularly endearing touch, that garish bow-tie transpires to be a butterfly that flutters gracefully toward his shirt. The accompanying music is a tad ominous, but also stirring, as if something wondrous is taking place. A particularly neat variant is featured at the beginning of the 1991 VHS release Aardman Animations Vol 1, which includes time-lapse photography of an animator putting the numerous components into place, before we zoom in and Pandaman gets to work his typically unearthly magic.

So far as I can tell, the Pandaman logo originated from the titles used for Aardman's series Lip Synch, a collection of five short pieces commissioned by Channel 4 in 1989 (in addition to Nick Park's Creature Comforts, by far the most famous and influential of the five, there was also Ident by Richard Starzak, Going Equipped and War Story, a couple of animated monologues by Peter Lord, and Next by Barry Purves, who at the time was working as a freelance animator on various Aardman projects). Each short was preceded by the unnerving image of a mouth appearing in a small beige frame and growling the words "Lip Synch", while one of the red spots from his conspicuous polka dot bow-tie rolled out and created the corresponding lettering. Many of Pandaman's characteristics were carried over from this face, including the bow-tie and the shadowy blotches around the jaws. Given the title of the series, the focus on the mouth makes total sense, although here the frame is so tightly boxed around the feature in question that his uncanny lack of eyes goes unrevealed. Which is not to say that the Lip Synch titles are any less unnerving than the Pandaman logo; the snarling, disembodied mouth is still pretty freaking monstrous, its enormous teeth no less carnivorous, the guttural manner in which it spits out the title appropriately inhuman.

By the late 1990s, Aardman were seeking a new look, and what's interesting is that they did initially appear interested in retaining Pandaman as a long-term emblem and incorporating his terrible form into future branding. The closing titles for the 1998 series Rex The Runt feature a different, two-dimensional logo, in which Pandaman is depicted shouting through a megaphone (although the logo is rendered in such a way as to downplay his monstrous features, so that he just looks like any regular human with a bow-tie). This was not to be, however. Pandaman disappeared shortly after and was long out of the picture by the time Chicken Run, Aardman's first theatrical feature film, debuted in 2000. Aardman presumably wanted their signature image to herald the bold new era they were currently entering, and subjecting mainstream family audiences to the delights of Pandaman in a theatrical setting was possibly deemed a step too far. Instead, he was replaced by a completely new concoction, in which various two-dimensional figures are shown rotating around the gears in a great machine, only to come to an immediate halt when a hand reached in and presses the central figure, a small black box with limbs and a head, and on its torso, a bright red star which was to serve as the company's new trademark going forward. There are few forms less objectionable than that of a star, but also few more generic, and the demented character of Pandaman is very much missed. Not that the gears logo (which itself appears to have fallen by the wayside) doesn't have a likeable ingenuity all of its own - it is, after all, more benign than Pandaman only so long as you don't focus on the tortured faces of the various forms trapped within those rotating cogs. There's a childhood nightmare to be derived from that, I'm sure.

Aardman and The T-Birds (A PG Tip For The Ages)

If, as we've established, one of Aardman's claims to being a very British institution is the obvious appreciation displayed by its most famous characters for the joys of the traditional English teatime, it seems only natural that they would make the transition into selling tea, having already animated campaigns for everything else under the sun - most famously its "Creature Comforts" campaign for the Electricity Board in the early 1990s.

Back in January 2002, PG Tips attracted some media attention when they announced that they were finally retiring their long-running Chimpanzee Tea Party ads after more than 45 years. By then, the chimps had been going long enough to have secured a record as the UK's longest-lived advertising campaign - despite increased concerns about the ethics of a campaign which revolved around making chimpanzees exhibit highly unnatural behaviours while dressed up in human clothing, for an entire generation of tea drinkers, PG Tips just wasn't PG Tips unless it was being rattled at you by an ape in a dressing gown. A new millennium was dawning, however, and cultural taste was finally shifting. The formal reason for the chimp ads getting the boot was that contemporary twentysomethings weren't responding to them, dismissing them as this antiquated circus show that their parents were weirdly besotted with. Hence, the T-Birds were conceived as a way of making the brand more accessible to the Friends generation, with the intention of moving away from the family sitcom stylings of the chimp ads and into the flatshares of 21st century Britain. The new campaign followed the slice of life adventures of a tetrad of anthropomorphic avians living underneath the same roof and facing everyday problems that modern young people could relate to - crummy apartments, dodgy roommate applicants, neighbours angling for their precious Tips teabags, etc.

The original advert introduced three of the four birds - Maggie, a London pigeon, Pete, a Geordie starling, and Tom, an Irish owl. Maggie and Pete have a tendency to butt heads and get into flaps over the most mundane of life's problems. Tom, by contrast, is stoic to the point where he could be mistaken for idle, but the fact that he's an owl, that eternal companion of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, is our subtle indication that he's actually the smart one of the group. Sure enough, it's usually Tom who has the answer whenever things look overwhelming - that is, to pull out the teabags and encourage his friends to have a "PG moment". I get the coding behind making the character who directly endorses your product an owl, although it must be said that Tom feels vaguely out of place in this particular dynamic, in that he's so much stouter and brawnier than the other birds and I'm constantly reminded of the fact that he's a bird of prey and would therefore be feasting on the smaller birds he's shown cosying up with.

The first two ads had an arc that showed the T-Birds moving into their apartment and acquiring a fourth tenant, Holly the blue tit. Holly was chosen over numerous other applicants because she shared the T-Birds' love of PG and didn't seem too strange (although from my perspective Holly is the kind of garrulous roommate who would unquestionably drive me mad. Should have gone with the guitar-strumming chicken). After that, the ads became more episodic, showing tiny snapshots of the T-Birds' day-to-day lives. Which frankly weren't that interesting, although I suppose that was the whole point. Once you get past the fact that the characters are birds, there's not a lot to these ads and what little there is is kind of mundane - which I suspect was a deliberate tactic in order to keep within the notion that the birds faced only relatable, everyday problems (certainly, nothing encapsulated the banality of 00s living quite like Maggie's suggestion that they deck out their new living room in Aztec Sunrise). Tone-wise, the ads were clearly going for genial over laugh out loud funny, presumably to simulate the calming effects that drinking tea is touted to have on the drinker; the results are entirely agreeable, although the witty visual panache of the Creature Comforts and Scotch Tape Skeleton ads is largely lacking (for one thing, the ads seldom, if ever, do anything interesting with the central concept of the characters being birds, to the point where they may just as well be humans).

The prosaic nature of the ads could be the reason why, despite the initial media interest, the T-Birds never really left much of a dent in popular culture and the campaign proved relatively short-lived, lasting out until only the middle of the decade. The first characters to displace them as PG shillers were Aardman's own Wallace and Gromit, who had a new feature film to promote and ran a tie-in offer with PG where you could get your own Gromit shaped-mug complete with thermostat feature (Gromit's nose turned red when you put the water in; it was way cool). After that, PG Tips decided to go the simian route once again and enjoyed success with a rather bizarre case of mascot recycling - they acquired Monkey, a puppet character who'd served, briefly, as mascot for the ill-fated ITV Digital before the service went bust in 2002, and even went so far as to reunite him with his former co-star, comedian Johnny Vegas. Monkey had more luck in his second lease of life, and continues to endorse PG Tips to this day.

Honestly, my main takeaway from the T-Birds series is that the other birds are kind of jerks to Tom, despite his being at the top of this particular food chain. I am not one to indulge in dark, morbid theories about innocuous characters, but I occasionally entertain the idea that the ads came to premature end because Tom finally tired of having to stick the kettle on every time the other three blew their tops and scarfed the lot of them down whole. PG moments are all well and good, but sometimes an owl's just got to be an owl.