Word: aardman
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...abductions, crop circles, Streisand jokes and familial reconciliation. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which extends Park?s Oscar-winning stop-motion short films to feature length, is about a creature that terrorizes townsfolk by eating their prize vegetables. With their usual precision and fey wit, Park and his Aardman colleagues have created a horror-romance that owes as much to Jane Austen's social comedies as to the Hammer monster movies of yore. In Millions, a sack of stolen money falls on 7-year-old Damian (adorable Alex Etel), and he thinks it?s a gift from heaven. Magical...
...feat that can’t possibly go unnoticed by the DreamWorks execs. Sadly, tragedy struck the very next day, as a warehouse fire destroyed almost all of the figurines Park had been developing since the eighties. What this means for the future of Park’s company, Aardman Animations, is unclear. Park has already started work on full-length CGI feature on sewer vermin in London, which he describes as “a kind of ‘African Queen’ with rats.” He says that he’s already discussed...
...Wallace and Gromit shorts were intimate affairs: the man, the dog and one or two other characters. Were-Rabbit creates a panorama of rural England: dozens of humans with the standard Nick Park facial expression (dazed) and eccentricities (too much mouth and not enough teeth). Aardman's feature films are sponsored by the Hollywood studio DreamWorks, but their tone and humor are totally, defiantly, blitheringly English, in a manner reminiscent of the classic Ealing comedies. Were-Rabbit is admirably old-fashioned in another way: while the rest of the animation world has gone to computer-generated (CG) features...
...rather, thumbmade, since the animators are encouraged to leave their personal imprints, literally, on the characters. "Wallace and Gromit are designed to be animated with your hands and your fingers as much as possible," says Teresa Drilling, an American who joined Aardman for Chicken Run. "They've got just the right sort of nooks for your thumbs, so that gives it a very specific organic feel--thumby but funny...
Drilling was one of the animators working earlier this year as the shooting of Were-Rabbit raced to its close in the Aardman sound stage, a huge warren of 30 curtained sets, some that could fit on an office desk, some about the size of the model-train layout in your loner uncle's basement. Following each of the 24,000 hand-sketched storyboards that illustrate the scenes, the animator dresses the set, puts in props (tomatoes made of wax, teddy-bear fur painted green for grass), gives each character the subtlest facial makeover and takes the picture. Animators must...