Back in the summer of 2000, Bristol-based claymation studio Aardman Animations were about to take a bold leap into the dark unknown. Over the past decade, one Aardman employee, Nick Park, had attained breakout stardom with a trilogy of shorts about an absent-minded inventor named Wallace and his mute mongrel Gromit (and a standalone short,
Creature Comforts, which provided inspiration for a popular series of electricity ads in the early 1990s). After snagging three Oscars for Best Animated Short, Park had proven that he was no one hit wonder, and Aardman as a whole had caught the eye of a number of major movie moguls interested in turning their Plasticine craftmanship into gold. Now they would get to see if there was a market for their brand of tea-sipping whimsy in mainstream Hollywood, with their first ever feature film,
Chicken Run, directed by Nick Park and Peter Lord and co-produced with DreamWorks Animation, set for a major theatrical release. The BBC aired a documentary "Wallace and Gromit Go Chicken" as part of their late-night documentary series,
Omnibus, on Wednesday 28th June 2000 in anticipation of the film's UK release on 30th June (check out the genome listing
here). I happened to get the whole thing on tape and, thankfully, my recording survived the mold epidemic that wiped out most of the VHS tapes at my parents' house in 2005. I had the documentary transferred onto disc so that I could preserve it forever. And now, go through it with a fine comb, and eighteen and a half years' worth of hindsight, in order to reflect on how things have worked out for Aardman in the long-term, and where they presently stand in an animation industry that has expanded considerably since the dawn of the millennium.
"Wallace and Gromit Go Chicken" was narrated by a pre-
House Hugh Laurie.
Chicken Run was one of the early releases of DreamWorks Animation, which was founded in 1994 by director Steven Spielberg, former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen, and consisted largely of animators from Spielberg's previous, less successful attempt at creating his own major animation studio, Amblimation. The intention was to establish a Hollywood animation studio that could provide serious competition for Disney, who were currently enjoying immense success with their 90s Renaissance and had had the playing field pretty much to themselves for decades (Don Bluth's challenge to the throne in the mid-1980s being one of the few blips in the road). Katzenberg, of course, had left Disney on famously bad terms, and the box office warfare between
Antz and
A Bug's Life in 1998 was an an early indicator that the rivalry was not going to be an especially amicable one. In 1997, DreamWorks entered into partnership with Aardman Animations, whose profile had increased considerably in recent years thanks to the triple Oscar victories of the upstart Nick Park for Best Animated Short, and who were looking to secure financing for their first feature film, a love letter to
The Great Escape starring a plucky squad of captive poultry with their sights set on freedom. Katzenberg was professedly a great fan of Park's first Oscar-winning short,
Creature Comforts, and had long wanted to work with Aardman, although if he was hoping to establish the same kind of long-running, highly profitable symbiosis that Disney has with Pixar, it was not to be. The partnership was terminated in early 2007 after a total of three features -
Chicken Run,
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and
Flushed Away.
"Go Chicken" is an interesting documentary to watch now, not merely because of all the positivity it lavishes upon a professional relationship that ultimately proved to be quite ill-fated, but because it came out right before some very significant turning points within the Hollywood animation industry. The monster success of
Shrek in 2001 was obviously the major game-changer, both for DreamWorks as a studio and Hollywood animation as a whole. Before that, DreamWorks Animation were plainly struggling to find their niche - they were keen to establish themselves as an edgy contender to Disney's throne, one that made the kind of bold, subversive pictures the House of Mouse wouldn't touch with a fifty-foot pole, but at the same time they needed to remain close enough to the Disney model in order to exploit its commercial viability. And the early results were mixed.
The Prince of Egypt (1998) was well-made and well-received but
The Road to El Dorado (2000) was a confused and confusing mess, a film that just couldn't decide what the fuck it wanted to be. It didn't help matters that, by the time DreamWorks had set up shop and entered the fray, the Disney animation Renaissance of the 1990s was almost over. With hindsight, the success of
Toy Story in 1995 might seem like an obvious harbinger of doom for traditional animation, but truth is that Disney were already seeing a decline in box office receipts before 3D animation had really had the chance to cement itself as a cultural force in its own right. Their late 90s offerings still made money, but not as much as anticipated based on trends that appeared to be gathering steam around the middle of the decade. DreamWorks Animation was hardly unique in having gotten to the 2D animation party just a little too late - 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers had also established animation departments in the mid-90s only to find that, by the time their first features were ready for release at the back-end of the decade, the golden egg-laying goose was not looking so perky. The Hollywood animation explosion of the 90s looked as if it might crash and burn before it had even taken flight.
Then
Shrek happened, and suddenly we had the novel phenomenon of a non-Disney/Pixar animated feature that everyone was talking about.
Shrek was a meaner, grosser creation than anything Disney would have dreamed up, and the movie-going public, bored stiff with Disney's McDonaldized treatment of its recent features (honestly, I think this was a far greater factor in the decline of 2D animation than Pixar's appearance, at least in the short-term) embraced the explicitly anti-Disney snarkfest with both arms. The wildly enthusiastic response to
Shrek was everything Katzenberg had ever dreamed of, and the film would prove to be arguably the most influential animated feature of the 2000s. Pixar may have been the animation studio with all the pedigree as we entered the age of the CG-animated toon, but
Shrek was the flick to whom the other studios looked for inspiration. The future was fart jokes. And Aardman, bless them, were maybe just a little too purposely quaint to survive in this increasingly perverse market. But
Shrek was still the better part of a year away at the time that "Go Chicken" aired. The future of Hollywood animation seemed a little more up in the air at this point and the UK was genuinely excited to see its major animation studio rubbing shoulders with the big boys in Tinseltown. We were all expecting great things, and the Omnibus documentary encapsulated the thrill of the moment, as well as some of the trepidation.
"Go Chicken" opens by acknowledging just how enthusiastically the world had embraced Park's signature creations Wallace and Gromit, who were now such an iconic duo on an international scale that they had even starred in a Japanese commercial for Glico pudding in 1999 - as such, Laurie comments on how surprising it is that the Yorkshire inventor and his nonplussed pooch "don't even get a walk-on" in Aardman's first shot at feature success. (Side-note: I recall reading an interview with Park from around the same time in which he confirmed that they did indeed consider giving Wallace and Gromit a cameo in
Chicken Run, but ultimately decided that they didn't fit with this particular world. Good call, although I feel they missed a trick in not giving Feathers McGraw, the thieving penguin who is able to masterfully disguise himself as a chicken, a background cameo.*) One of the funniest parts of "Go Chicken" is when Park admits that he finds it "very embarrassing" to compare the animation in the first W&G short,
A Grand Day Out, to their later adventures, and goes so far as to state that "I'd be hesitant to even hire someone who was of the standard of
A Grand Day Out now."
There's a lot of talk throughout "Go Chicken" about Park's animation, and Aardman in general, being so quintessentially British, although what does that mean, exactly? Peter Sallis, who gave Wallace his vocals and characteristic Yorkshire accent, and is otherwise best known for playing Norman Clegg in the long-running BBC sitcom
Last of The Summer Wine, is cited as one key ingredient in instilling the W&G films with their authentically English flavour. Park himself suggests that what makes his work so identifiably British is that "it's so expressive with the eyes." That and the characters drink tea.
Renowned film-maker and former Python boy Terry Gilliam has own his stab at defining the qualities that have made Park's creations so endearing to the world:
"There's an Englishness that I think the world wants, and it seems to be more cosy, more calm, more reflective, more - less frenzied, I think...maybe it's just a reaction to the frenzy that's around us. Everything in the world's getting faster and noisier and we're inundated with stuff. And if you then slide back to the teapot, an English teapot, or tea, or anything...aah, this is comfortable, this feels good, it's simple, it's quiet...and I think the way Aardman's work always functions is it's a small world with just a few little people, very simple problems and, er, it's not shrieking and shouting at you, it's very calming and funny."
Already I see a paradox shaping up. Gilliam suggests that the qualities that make Aardman so fundamentally Aardman are their simplicity and relatively small scopes, and yet Hollywood productions are traditionally the antithesis of such things. How were the calm tea-drinkers of Bristol to run with the big dogs of Hollywood without compromising everything that their fans had grown to love them for in the first place?
Park then takes us into his parents' attic, where he spent a lot of his childhood making a bunch of animated films starring a character named Walter Rat, whom Park states he'd always dreamed would be his Mickey Mouse (Walter has not appeared in any of Park's subsequent projects - unless he's one of the rats in Wallace's basement in
A Grand Day Out - but, hey, there's still time to give the angling rodent his turn in the spotlight). Says Park, "I always thought I'll never get anywhere if I watch telly all my life, so I used to force myself to come up here and carry on with all these projects." Ah, that's where the rest of us went wrong, then.
"Go Chicken" then gives us the obligatory run-down of the history of the studio as a whole. Park
is of course the most famous creative mind at Aardman, so a lot of
people assume that he founded the studio.
FALSE! In actuality, Aardman Animations was initially established by young animators Peter Lord and David Sproxton in 1972 (and named after the star of their very first commissioned piece, a 2D animated skit featuring an accident-prone superhero - I do not know if Aardman the character has appeared in anything since, but his legacy certainly lives on). Lord and Sproxton formally set up shop in Bristol in 1976, and Park joined as an employee about a decade into the Bristol studio's lifespan. Before Park, Aardman was most famous for a Plasticine character named Morph, and for various skits they did for
Vision On, a BBC series targeted at hearing impaired children, but
they also did a lot of experimental pieces for the then-fledgling
Channel 4 (back when the channel intended to establish itself as an avante-garde
alternative to the Beeb and ITV). Other Aardman projects in the 1980s included a variety of advertising assignments and the award-winning music video to Peter Gabriel's 1986 hit "Sledgehammer".
There's a protracted sequence where Lord talks about Morph and demonstrates his techniques for changing Morph's expressiveness by applying tension to different areas of the figure's body. I find it terribly hard to keep a straight face during this sequence as I'm reminded heavily of the "If I move his finger just a tiny amount..." sketch from that episode of
The Fast Show.
Lord acknowleges how indebted he and Sproxton always were to the reigning king of stop motion wizardry, Ray Harryhausen, who pioneered a technique known as "Dynamation" that allowed him mix up the backgrounds and foregrounds of pre-recording live action footage and give the impression that his stop motion models had been integrated into a live action world. Lord states that seeing
Jason and The Argonauts (1963) for the first time was a much more exciting experience for him personally than seeing
Star Wars for the first time, as he was fascinated by the stop motion creatures; they had presence and personality, and it was not immediately obvious how the effects were done (I would certainly agree - the Talos sequence from
Jason scared the snot out of me as a kid and I still think it looks amazing today). Harryhausen is interviewed briefly and talks about his techniques, including his remarkably articulate skeleton figures with all the ball and socket joints of a real skeleton. During this sequence, my eyes cannot help but be drawn to that tantalising VHS collection behind him, and I really regret that the resolution isn't good enough for me to zoom in and identify some of the titles.
The wittiest bit of editing in "Go Chicken" must be credited whoever had the idea to follow up footage of the skeleton fight from
Jason and The Argonauts with footage the more benign skeleton from the Scotch VHS cassette ads that were animated by Aardman in the late 1980s. The skeleton, who was voiced by Deryck Guyler, had a seriously catchy music routine in which he would strut up and down and extol the virtues of Scotch's Lifetime Guarantee, whereby every new recording would be as good as the last, or they'd give you your money back. Presumably, Scotch's definition of "lifetime" didn't extend beyond the lifetime of VHS as a format (thinking about it, 2000 might also have been the very last year in which you could buy VHS tapes over DVDs and not be viewed as some quaint old fogey), so don't bother sending them your degraded Scotch VHS tapes now.
It's also noted that Aardman were currently doing a series of commercials for Chevron in the US. Conceptually, these were quite similar to the
Creature Comforts ads, although nowadays they look like an eerie predecessor to that one Pixar franchise that no one likes.
I should admit at this point that there are a few areas in which "Go Chicken" really gets my hackles up - crucially, its ruminations on what Park's success did for the studio. "Go Chicken" might give Lord and Sproxton their due in terms of their importance to the history of the studio, but equally it seems all-too eager to impart the narrative that Aardman were headed down a dangerous path before Park came along and effectively "saved" them - namely, that they had fallen into the pitfall of trying to make their
animations serious ("increasingly downbeat", in the words of Laurie's narration). Serious animation, "Go Chicken" would have us
believe, is the stuff of artsy fartsy fantasy. It simply cannot be. Cartoons must all be manic and zany, as the gods intended. For this, whose expert opinion would they consult but that of Mike Scully, who was currently working as the showrunner of
The Simpsons, and chips in here to deliver easily the most enraging statement of the entire documentary:
"I think animation just really lends itself to comedy much more than drama, because you want to take advantage of the fact that you are animated. So you want to do things with the animation. If you want to have a character's head spin around or their eyes pop out or execute some crazy stunt that you can only do in animation, then funny is the best way to do it. If it's done right and you really know what the character is feeling and how important whatever is going on is to them, then that's where...I think the drama is in there. Kind of, you know, sneak it in. In between the laughs."
Ugh.
To put this into perspective, when Scully took over as showrunner for
The Simpsons, the series went from being one of the most innovative and intelligently-written of its generation to a pale shadow of its former self that couldn't make a hyena laugh, and I think his above words are actually very revealing as to what made his direction of the series so misguided. Under Scully,
The Simpsons lost all sense of restraint and subtly and took a deadly plunge into the maelstrom of the wacky. Apparently, Scully was a staunch believer that wackiness was animation's
raison d'être. I do not agree that animation is inherently better suited to comedy than to more dramatic material. I think the wonderful thing about animation is that you can do and create absolutely anything with it. You can have haunting, sombre animation, like Jimmy Murakami's
When The Wind Blows (1986), highbrow, experimental animation like Walt Disney's
Fantasia (1940), full-on horror animation like Dave Borthwick's
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) and mind-blowing, psychedelic animation like George Dunning's
Yellow Submarine (1968), to name but a few. I appreciate that early Aardman was so raw and experimental, and I regret that they ultimately abandoned that side as Park's aesthetic became the defining one.
Creature Comforts and the Wallace & Gromit shorts are great films, of course, and Park's breakout success was very well-deserved, and I'll certainly concede that Aardman would likely not have achieved mainstream success had they stuck with esoteric arthouse pieces in the vein of
Going Equipped (see below). All the same, I think it's a genuine shame that a project as ambitious and unreservedly desolate as
Babylon would probably not get made at Aardman today.
Babylon is not mentioned in "Go Chicken", as it seldom is in Aardman retrospectives. This might be because the project was conceived and written by an outsider, David Hopkins, who commissioned Lord and Sproxton to direct it as part of his
Sweet Disaster series, but I think it has more to do with the fact that the film is the complete antithesis of everything that Aardman eventually became. Odd then, that
Babylon is my personal favourite Aardman short, perhaps even my favourite Aardman film, period. I admire it for all the reasons that Aardman are probably quite reluctant to bring it up now - it's so dark, bleak and nightmarish, and it deals with the kind of knicker-wetting subject matter (an impending nuclear apocalypse) that I doubt the studio would go for today.
Going Equipped, Peter Lord's contribution to the 1989 Channel 4 series
Lip Sync, is singled out as an example of one of Aardman's near-fatal flirtations with the lure of solemnity. Lord talks about about this film (an animated monologue in which a young robber on probation reflects on how his life of crime has defined and entrapped him) and seems entirely willing to fall in line with the narrative that Aardman was on the wrong track before Park came along. He doesn't exactly talk up his work on this one:
"We'd made a lot of these films with characters talking that were really very naturalistic - especially the last one I made, which was called Going Equipped, which was highly naturalistic, where the figure was quite close to human proportions. Cartoony, but quite close. I kind of lost faith in it, because I thought that I was just moving closer and closer towards realism, which is actually fairly futile...what I wanted to do was to be expressive. I wanted characters that would act really well, and my solution was, if human beings act so well and so subtly, the smallest gestures, then the closer I get to that, the more expressive I could be. Which maybe is true, but it got to be a bit self-indulgent, I think, and wasn't communicating terribly well..."
Lord states that he felt Park landed on a winning formula with
Creature Comforts in terms of being both funny and subtle at the same time. In that respect he is correct.
Creature Comforts works precisely because it's such an eye-poppingly weird concept that, by its very nature, never explicitly acknowledges how eye-poppingly weird it is. We have one pygmy hippopotamus commenting upon the overall grottiness of their living conditions while another hippopotamus shamelessly unpacks its bowels before the camera. It's the perfect mix of the sublime, the absurd and the dirtily bestial. And it's poignant too. Many speculate that Park was influenced by Russell Hoban's
Turtle Diary (which was adapted into a feature film directed by John Irvin in 1985), in aligning the plight of captive animals with the restricted, highly artificial lifestyles of modern humans in their concrete jungles. Though a family of polar bears speculate that life in the wild would probably be a lot harder than in the zoo, the final word goes to a Brazilian feline, who insists, with barely-concealed desperation, that he plans to relocate to any part of the world with a warmer climate. "Name it, and I'll go." Ultimately,
Creature Comforts does leave you feeling quite a bit more unsettled than
Going Equipped (not
Babylon though!), despite its deceptively more cheerful exterior. Which is not to say that
Going Equipped doesn't have a lot going for it also. It is a wonderfully atmospheric piece; the tiny little nuances and painstaking attention to detail that Lord seems so down on are precisely what make it so rich.
Since "Go Chicken" is all about how Park's success revolutionised Aardman, not a whole lot is said about some of the other individual talents who have emerged from the studio over the years - the shorts of Richard Starzak (who created
Rex The Runt and went onto helm the
Creature Comforts and
Shaun the Sheep TV series and movie), Darren Walsh (the creator of
Angry Kid) and Steve Box (who would co-direct
Curse of The Were-Rabbit with Park) are restricted to a brief montage, although it must be said that these guys took Aardman to some gruesomely demented heights that may prove disorientating to those only familiar with Park's work. Box's short
Stage Fright (1997), for example, looks beguilingly like something Park could have put together but is actually a far nastier, more psyche-scarring piece than would ever have Park's thumbprints on (I sometimes wonder if that was Box's sick little joke all along). What Gilliam said earlier about Aardman being cosy and comfortable...nope, not here. I suppose what I'm getting at is that when Gilliam talks about all that simple, calm tea-sipping, he is specifically describing Park's work, as opposed to Aardman as whole. Anyone who owns a copy of the
Aardman Classics DVD from 2000 knows what a twisted grab bag of nightmarish delights it is. Aardman are a melting pot of talent, and their output can be sad, serious, vulgar, freakish, quaint, charming - the works. Park landed a formula that seemed to get the best of all possible worlds, the Wallace and Gromit shorts being tremendous hits with the general public while impressing film intelligentsia with their innovative techniques and loving tributes to suspense and action cinema (Leonard Maltin appears briefly in "Go Chicken" to praise
The Wrong Trousers for "using every conceivable kind of cinematic storytelling technique.") Somewhere along the line, Park's approach became synonymous with Aardman as a brand. To an extent, this is an inevitable part of Aardman's growth and expansion as a studio - as their projects have become bigger and more complex, they've become a lot more collaborative, more geared toward crowd-pleasing and less the passion projects of individual animators laboring to get their demented visions out on late-night TV. Still, since Aardman entered the feature film business, I'd argue that they've actually suffered from being too Boxed In by Park's aesthetic.** Of the seven feature films released by Aardman to date, only one -
Arthur Christmas (2011) - has a visual style that deviates significantly from that which is Park's signature. The others, even those that Park did not oversee, adhere very closely to his preference for characters with wide mouths and big toothy grins. There is often a drive to replicate Park's brand of cheese-and-crackers whimsy matched with zany action set-pieces. I get the appeal of having a unified look and feel to solidify the sense of an Aardman brand, but I don't think it would hurt the studio to diversify their approach a little, to give their films greater sense of individuality and allow directorial voices that aren't Park's to shine through. You get that with Pixar - Pete Docter's films have a very different tone and texture to Brad Bird's, for example. Disney has its own signature style, and yet they are usually careful to differentiate it according to the needs of each individual feature, eg: the characters in
Hercules have a very different visual flavour to the characters in
Mulan.
Speaking of Disney, it's acknowledged in "Go Chicken" that they had also been eager to establish a partnership with Aardman, but it hadn't worked out. We all know that there was some serious bad blood between Katzenberg and Michael Eisner when the former went his own way, and that DreamWorks Animation was established with something of an agenda - not merely to challenge Disney's industry dominance, as Bluth had done a decade or so previously, but to really stick it to The Man (or Mouse). Katzenberg wanted to Disney to know that his middle finger was extended and perpetually pointed at them, and had
Shrek made just to prove it. Aardman had chosen to back DreamWorks' pony, at least in the short-term, and a bit of that anti-Disney sentiment appears to have wormed its way into "Go Chicken" - the House of Mouse is here brought up very briefly, but the vilification isn't exactly subtle. The specific analogy chosen to describe the failed negotiation tactics of "The Mighty Disney" was that it had "set its sights on swallowing Aardman whole." Sproxton states that Aardman were courted quite heavily by Disney after Park's Oscar success, but Disney's idea of what constituted a relationship had put them off: "We always felt they came in from a kind of, well, guys, you know, we're going to own you. Just sit back, relax and we'll just run the ship. And that's what we wanted to avoid happening." Lord seems more ambivalent on the matter. He admits that the deal Disney were offering was "perfectly respectable" and that a lot of Aardman were not against it, but that in the end, "the chemistry wasn't right." Laurie tells us that DreamWorks had more success because they were able to broker a deal that allowed Aardman to hold onto a greater sense of independence. All the same, the specific clip from
The Prince of Egypt selected to accompany this portion of the documentary - an extract from the "Playing With The Big Boys Now" musical sequence - seems both subversive and hilariously prescient, as if the BBC felt that Aardman were being slightly naive in assuming that Katzenberg's studio would treat them any better than would Disney. Yes, it was blatantly intended as a joke, but with hindsight it seems strange to have all this optimism about Aardman being granted the freedom to remain fundamentally Aardman when that plainly wasn't the case.
A commonly cited factor in the relationship's relatively speedy breakdown was that Katzenberg was actually quite a bit stingier with creative control than Aardman had hoped. I get the impression that Park did not particularly enjoy the process of making
Curse of The Were-Rabbit, if this statement he made
while promoting his fourth Wallace and Gromit short,
A Matter of Loaf and Death in 2008, is any indication:
"It's nice to be out of that feature film pressure now. I
don't feel like I'm making a film for a kid in some suburb of America -
and being told they're not going to understand a joke, or a northern
saying...I'm making this for myself again and the people who love Wallace and Gromit."
What made it tougher for Aardman to dig in their heels against this DreamWorksian tyranny was that their films post-
Chicken Run struggled to find an audience at the US box office (sadly, this has remained a constant since their departure from DreamWorks).
Curse of The Were-Rabbit may have been a smashing success at the Academy Awards, but it failed to turn a profit in terms of tickets sales. Audiences didn't take to
Flushed Away, Aardman's first stab at a CG-animated feature - Aardman purists were no doubt alienated by the studio's apparent abandonment of their trademark medium (it must be said that those faux-Park designs didn't look nearly so charming in CG, which is perhaps why
Arthur Christmas, their second CG feature, went for a different look altogether), while general audiences presumably figured that Pixar's
Ratatouille would clearly be the better film. Still, I suspect that the major factor in terms of DreamWorks and Aardman's strained relationship was the film that we'll never get to see (more on that below). Incidentally, we have heard that
Flushed Away was made in CG animation because the extensive amount of water-based action throughout the film would have been too fiddly to render in stop motion. All the same, I recall listening to a radio interview with Lord in 2007, shortly after
Aardman had entered into a new deal with Sony, in which he was asked to
elaborate more on the areas where Aardman and DreamWorks hadn't seen
eye to eye. He disclosed that DreamWorks weren't wild about Aardman's
Plasticine devotion, feeling that the future of feature animation lay
entirely with CG and that Aardman was merely wasting time with their painstakingly slow claymation process. No more surefire way to rob a studio of its
identity than to deprive it of the defining tool of its trade and make
it just like everybody else.
For now, Katzenberg seems more willing to feign enthusiasm for claymation, and its place within the future of Hollywood animation:
"They knew from the very beginning what they wanted to do, they knew what story they wanted to tell, how they wanted to tell it and, you know, it was great. And we wanted to do it with them. And as the first movie made in this form of stop motion animation, I think it really is a breakthrough moment, in just sort of the history of film-making. It's a first."
I have to stop you there, Jeff. Was
Chicken Run actually the first claymation feature film? I mentioned
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb above, and while that example is debatable, given that the film was a combination of stop motion and pixilation (a process by which live actors are shot frame-by-frame to give them the jerky mannerisms of stop motion figures), Will Vinton's
The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985) certainly beat
Chicken Run by fifteen years.
I brought up
Chicken Run, briefly, when I covered
Aardman's Oscar victory at the 78th Academy Awards, and described its tone as "weirdly compromised". Actually, I do think that
Chicken Run is a very strong animated feature and has a lot going for it. There are many respects in which it feels really atypical for a major Hollywood-backed animated feature of the time, not least its extensively female-led cast. The protagonist is female, the main antagonist is also female, and the majority of the supporting cast are female. Not bad when you consider that it took Pixar until 2015 to yield a film with a female-majority cast (and 2012 just to have a female lead, period). I suppose I should be upfront that the real sticking point for me would be Mel Gibson's presence, not just because of all the controversy he was poised to stir up a few years down the line, but because he struck me as too self-conscious an attempt to shoehorn in some A List celebrity voice talent in order to better market the film to mainstream audiences. There's something about Gibson's brand of brash, aggressive celebrity that strikes me as being inherently out of place in an Aardman project (even when the character he's playing is meant to be a bit of an obnoxious knob) and more akin to the kind of celebrity cast-whoring that would shortly become one of DreamWorks' trademarks. I can accept that as a necessary evil, however, given that it was Aardman's first film and they needed to win over a much bigger viewership than those who were already familiar with Wallace and Gromit, etc. (Gibson, incidentally, is the only cast member who's interviewed in "Go Chicken". He professes to be a fan of Aardman and to have been eager to work with them.)
Oh blech, I'd forgotten that Harry Knowles was in this. He shows up briefly at the end to express his concern that this might not end well for Aardman, as there was always the potential that they would become to DreamWorks what Pixar are to Disney (that didn't happen, for which I suspect Aardman and DreamWorks both feel quite sore). You might question what the problem would be there, given that Pixar have made many excellent and successful films under Disney, but it's worth keeping in mind that at the time that "Go Chicken" aired, Pixar had only released three feature films,
Toy Story,
A Bug's Life and
Toy Story 2, and it remained to be seen how their own gamble in Playing With The Big Boys would pay off in the long-term. Gilliam is similarly skeptical as to how this will ultimately work out for Aardman, and succinctly articulates the main concern that I suspect a lot of people with knowledge of the animation industry were feeling - "If it's Jeff Katzenberg they're working with, then good luck. Good luck, boys!"
Lord is asked what he thinks the outcome will be if
Chicken Run is not a hit. What does he anticipate DreamWorks asking them to do differently? Says Lord: "If a film flops, then I know there'd be pressure to change...they'd say, "never mind being so English and Aardman-ish, give us something commercial." So that's the danger that I am aware of, that obviously encourages us not to flop, basically." "Go Chicken" closes on an optimistic note, in pointing out that Aardman's next animated feature was already slated be a Wallace and Gromit one, so even if audiences don't take to the chickens, for the next round they'll have have familiarity on their side. The final word goes to Katzenberg, who muses that, "They make you care a lot about clay." (Not enough in your case, clearly.)
What "Go Chicken" doesn't explore, in a great deal of depth, is the inception and development of
Chicken Run as a feature. We get glimpses of the painstaking production processes that go into making a film of this nature, but there's little about how the characters came to be or what really attracted Park and Lord to telling this particular story. If you're interested in that, then you'd do better to read the official tie-in book
Chicken Run: Hatching The Movie, which was written by Brian Sibley and published by Harry N. Abrams in 2000. We learn there, for example, that in earlier versions of the story Ginger had a kid brother named Nobby who was axed at the insistence of Katzenberg, who stipulated that there be no child characters in the film for fear of diminishing its adult appeal (this is entirely consistent with the notes Katzenberg is reported to have left Pixar during the making of
Toy Story - apparently, he believed that adults would have an innate aversion to any film with the word "Toy" in the title). But by far the most fascinating nugget of information to be gleaned from this book occurs right in the final pages, when Sibley touches on what the future was set to hold for the boys of Bristol. Aardman's next feature film was to be a Wallace and Gromit movie (they were very upfront about this while promoting
Chicken Run, possibly to take the sting off for Wallace and Gromit fans still sour about Aardman's refusal to tip the hat to their signature characters in their very first feature) but Sibley sheds some extremely limited light on an additional feature they had in the works - a feature adaptation of the classic Aesop's fable The Tortoise and The Hare, which never completed the gestation process and wound up languishing in the annals of Aardman history as the studio's first vapor-movie.*** Aardman prefer not to talk about
Tortoise Vs Hare, so any little information that we can garner about the project is precious. Here's what's teased in Sibley's book:
"To begin with", says Nick, "we couldn't find a hook for it; we needed an original angle - then we found it." That angle was to recreate the well-known tale in an unexpected, but familiar format: an animated documentary with vox pops that looked back to those early Aardman series, like Conversation Pieces and Lip Sync that won Aardman much praise and - with Creature Comforts - their first Academy Award. (p.186)
The project was also referenced, briefly, in Andy Lane's book
Creating Creature Comforts, published by Boxtree in 2003. Lane confirmed that the project had been postponed and indicates that the staff at Aardman were unwilling to open up about it for his writing (p.78).
Despite the early success of
Chicken Run, DreamWorks seemed to figure out very quickly that Aardman would not become their Pixar and were keen to cut ties with them. The split was officially announced in early 2007, but rumours of the breakup had begun circulating before
Flushed Away was even released. There were a number of probable factors in the relationship meltdown, including the lacklustre box office of
Curse of The Were-Rabbit and the rising industry dominance of CG animation at the expense of other forms - the fact is that claymation will always be a slow and costly process, and at the time DreamWorks were gravitating toward a "more is more" strategy of releasing multiple pictures a year (a strategy which wound up hurting them in the long-term). A further factor would have been the troubled production of
Tortoise Vs Hare, which was put on hold in 2001 due to script issues,
resulting in 90 staff lay-offs, bruised morale at Aardman and who knows how much lost money. Despite early indications that the project would be resumed after a thorough retooling, the Aesopian mockumentary ultimately vanished without a trace.
We don't have a lot to go on where
Tortoise Vs Hare is concerned, but my gut instinct tells me that a feature film based on the
Creature Comforts format was never likely to work. As hilarious, wonderful and inspired as
Creature Comforts is, it's the kind of thing that really needs to be partaken in bite-sized chunks. The original short is five minutes long. For the TV series made for ITV in 2003, episodes were no longer than eight and a half minutes, which is about as long as you could reasonably hope to extend this kind of vox pop spoof before the central gag begins to wear thin. Aardman learned this the hard way in 2007 when they tried their hand at a version of the series made specially for American audiences,
Creature Comforts USA, which adhered to a more conventional 22 minute run time per episode and suffered a quick but painful death in the ratings war, being slapped with cancellation after just three episodes (I tried watching
Creature Comforts USA; the animation and sight gags are as sharp as anything in the ITV series, but you just get so restless and bored eight minutes in). There's also the problem that Aesop's fables are probably no better suited to prolonged storytelling forms than is
Creature Comforts. There's not a whole lot to your typical Aesop's fable, which is part of what makes them so evergreen - they're so short, elegant and to the point, offering little ambiguity when it comes to their obligatory morals. Aesop's fables do not make great foundations for feature films. "But Pixar's
A Bug's Life was based on the Aesop's fable of The Grasshopper and The Ant," you might be inclined point out. In response, I would quote Niles Crane - "I believe that's what's called the clincher!"
Which leads me into another question that's been lingering at the back of my mind this entire time - were Aardman ever that well-suited to being contenders in the cutthroat savannah of mainstream Hollywood? We've heard Gilliam argue that their strengths lay with smaller, simpler productions, which would suggest that Aardman were always going to struggle to make the transition and keep all of their trademark charms intact. And yet, where Aardman's forays into feature films have worked, they've typically worked very well. Despite Park's comments on the matter, I personally think that
Curse of The Were-Rabbit is a great film, and as faithful to the spirit of Wallace and Gromit as one could realistically hope under the circumstances (for one thing, Sallis was allowed to stay on as the voice of Wallace, which DreamWorks must have had some reservations about, given that he's not exactly a multiplex-filling name). Conventional wisdom would have dictated that the small screen adventures of Shaun the Sheep might have trouble translating to a theatrical format, being as short and devoid of dialogue as they were, and yet
The Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) wound up being their best film in a decade. Aardman have demonstrated that they can tell a larger-scale story and retain their whimsical sense of humour, their witty use of mise-en-scene and their sharp eye for minute character details. Still, Aardman have likewise demonstrated that their approach isn't terribly commercial, at least where US audiences are concerned. What made
Chicken Run the one exception? A mere case of beginner's luck, or a testament to the star power of Mel Gibson back in 2000? Is it the case that Aardman's films are simply too quaint, too quirky and, above all, too self-consciously British to resonate with American audiences? Ray Bennett of The Hollywood Reporter suggested as such when he remarked,
while reflecting on the US box office prospects of
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (2012), that, "unless there's a key American character in one of their animations - Mel Gibson was the main voice of
Chicken Run back in 2000 - I'm not so sure American audiences respond to it, except in niche fashion." (He could be onto something, although a lack of key American characters didn't prevent the recent
Peter Rabbit film from doing surprisingly good business at the US box office last year). Perhaps audiences were a bit more open to Aardman's brand of quaint British whimsy back in 2000, then
Shrek came along and zeitgeist did not swing in Aardman's favour. I'd also keep in mind that Aardman aren't the only purveyors of stop motion animation in the feature film biz right now - Laika Studios, the modern incarnation of Will Vinton Studios, have a lot in common with Aardman, in that their films have consistently netted praise from critics and animation fans and been regularly nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (in Laika's case invariably, although unlike Aardman they have yet to win even once - such is the dominance of Pixar and Disney in the category), while at the same time never presenting much of a challenge to the major studios in terms of box office grosses -
Kubo and The Two Strings (2016) went down like a lead balloon at the box office, despite being Laika's most powerful and accomplished film to date. Tim Burton's stop motion animation films,
Corpse Bride (2005) and
Frankenweenie (2012), likewise didn't exactly set the multiplexes on fire (although in their case the sinister subject matter and Tim Burton brand name might also have been a turn-off for family audiences). Like it or lump it, CG animation still rules the roost in the Hollywood animation; stop motion, by comparison, is much more of a niche market all-round.
Still, I would go back to what I said earlier about Aardman being Boxed In by their need to always cater to the exact same elements - that quaint, quirky cheese-and-crackers Englishness that Park perfected in his early films. As such, I have to question if Aardman have really grown or developed much since
Chicken Run in terms of their narrative aesthetic? An important factor in why industry juggernauts Pixar stayed ahead in the game for so long is because at their peak they were able to keep on pushing and challenging themselves, and consistently surprising audiences with the directions in which they were willing to go - for example, the incinerator sequence in
Toy Story 3, the first third of
Wall-E and the first several minutes of
Up (I'd say that the opening portion of
Up goes a long way toward single-handedly refuting Scully's ridiculous comments that animation isn't as well-suited to drama as comedy). How many of you would like to see Aardman step out of their comfort zone and do something on a par with that opening sequence from
Up? There's an extent to which Aardman seem so wary of their avant garde Channel 4 roots that they come off as almost afraid to be serious.
Pirates! especially was wild, zany and nonsensical to the point that it never seemed particularly sincere about anything - the film's big "emotional" sequence was accompanied by "I'm Not Crying" by Flight of The Conchords, for eff's sake. I think, certainly, that Aardman are at the point where they'd benefit from doing something more out of left field. Aardman's most recent feature,
Early Man (2018), which was also Park's first directorial stint in years, presented a paradox, in that it was technically something new and at the same time marred by a heavy sense of deja vu. Many viewers noted that Dug the caveman might as well have been a younger, denser Wallace while Hognob the boar was basically Gromit all over again - it felt like Park working squarely within his comfort zone as opposed to bringing anything amazingly fresh to the table. Of all Aardman's features,
Early Man felt as if it had benefited the least from being told at feature-length - it is a little, unassuming film, and not in the best of ways. Perhaps the idea would have worked better as one of Aardman's thirty-minute television pieces. Or maybe it was just the wrong film for the wrong time - the film's celebration of a little English tribe endeavoring to preserve its little, English ways in the face of foreign encroachment rings entirely hollow amid the present atmosphere of non-stop Brexit debacle. And yet, such is the immense craftmanship and dedication that goes into the entire claymation process that it's hard not to be endeared by it. You can't watch an Aardman claymation and not marvel at the love, heart and soul manifesting in the visible thumbprints of the people who moved those infernal puppets.
And finally, what of the future for Aardman?
A Matter of Loaf and Death was the last Wallace and Gromit film to date. Following the death of Sallis in 2017, who knows if there will be any more? But then again, perhaps Aardman no longer regard Wallace and Gromit as their flagship characters. Shaun the Sheep may well have usurped them as Aardman's superstar, his second big screen outing being set for late 2019 with
Farmagaddeon: A Shaun The Sheep Movie. It looks as if Aardman are about to begin digging out the old brand familiarity guns elsewhere -
Chicken Run 2 was announced in April
2018, with
Flushed Away co-director Sam Fell attached to direct. The original
film has been around for just shy of two decades, so perhaps Aardman
are also banking on the nostalgia factor, which has proved quite
lucrative in Hollywood in recent years, but can also be quite hit-or-miss. They aren't the only ones returning to familiar territory in an effort to win over audiences who may have passed by their more recent output - Aardman's former bedfellows at DreamWorks have been talking about reviving
Shrek for some time and are apparently now very serious.
Shrek may have revolutionised the Hollywood animation industry back in 2001, but a glut of diminishing returns sequels resulted in it being good as booed out of the arena by 2010. Since then, DreamWorks have discovered what a fickle bunch audiences are, with many of their recent films failing to turn a profit and Illumination recently displacing them as Disney and Pixar's big industry rivals. Will the gambit pay off? Is the world ready to fall in love with fart jokes all over again? Okay, so that is undoubtedly the silliest question I've raised thus far - when did the world ever stop being obsessed with farts?
* Although I can't claim to have gone through every scene in Chicken Run with a fine enough comb to say definitively that he's not there. If you see Feathers, then by all means let me know.
** If you get the pun, then I love you.
*** I specify first because it appears that The Cat Burglars, first announced in 2007, might have vanished down the same alley. Anybody want to fill me in on what happened there?
