Word: aardman
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...Aardman Studios they make art by hand, in a form called stop-motion animation whose history stretches back to the first days of cinema. It certainly goes back to the solitary youths of many Aardmanites. Nick Park, the studio's resident genius, was one of those kids who played with clay in a corner of his Lancashire home until, like Dr. Praetorius in Bride of Frankenstein, he made those little figures come alive...
...Could Aardman go to Hollywood without going Hollywood? The answer comes in Flushed Away, supervised by Lord and directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell. It's an entertaining comedy that vibrates with two kinds of tension: of antique artisans working in a new medium, and of English artists collaborating and colliding with American showmanship...
...When Aardman made Chicken Run, its first film sponsored by DreamWorks, Park and Lord talked about the visits Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks' animation chief, made to Bristol. Katzenberg would make his points, at an American force and volume, then Park and Lord would nod politely and continue doing what they wanted. Katzenberg basically bought the right to be ignored graciously...
...result is both slick and coarse-fine entertainment, as I say, but deficient in the comedy of reticence discouragement that is Aardman's (or maybe just Nick Park's) unique strength. I don't want to say the Englishmen were corrupted, but I think they allowed their strongest, quirkiest instincts to be tethered. The American movie industry is like that, and foreigners will have their hearts broken if they think they'll get bigger budgets and cooler tools without having to pay in some way for them...
WALLACE & GROMIT IN THREE AMAZING ADVENTURES NICK PARK The bard of Aardman Studios, Park is the gent who dreamed up Creature Comforts and the feature hit Chicken Run. But Park's signal contribution to stop-motion animation, as well as to an appreciation of the placid lunacies of the English middle class, is this trifecta of shorts about Wallace the inventor and his infinitely superior dog Gromit. The second film, The Wrong Trousers, is one of the great screen comedies and a tribute to man's dependence on animals...