Word: lordly
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...while Hollywood goes mad for techno tricks, directors Nick Park and Peter Lord and their team at Aardman Studios of Bristol, England, are still crafting films by hand. Chicken Run is one of the few features made in the sublimely masochistic form of animation known as stop motion, in which plasticine puppets on miniature film sets must be adjusted 24 times for every second of film. A live-action feature has perhaps 500 shots; this 82-min. movie has 118,080. "The detail is astonishing," says Lord, still in awe of his colleagues' industry 28 years after co-founding...
...dominated by one style: Disney's. Now a diversity of techniques and styles are gaining acceptance. There are computer-animated features, such as Pixar's Toy Story and A Bug's Life. There is clay and/or puppet animation--and because of the artistry of Nick Park and Peter Lord, it is going to grab audiences. We are expanding the definition of the form. It's a brave new world in animation...
...Park, Lord and screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick stocked Chicken Run with a cross section of Brit types: Bunty (Imelda Staunton) is bossy; silly Babs (Jane Horrocks, who played Bubble on Ab Fab) is forever knitting--when she gets morose, she knits a noose. Mac (Lynn Ferguson) is the nearsighted soul of Scottish ingenuity. Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow), a crusty veteran of the RAF, says Yanks can't be trusted: "always late for every war." The hens' lines to the outside world are Nick (Timothy Spall) and Fetcher (Phil Daniels), two music-hall Cockney rats--larcenists with a soft streak...
...team of 25 animators toiled to achieve two or three seconds of footage a day, as Lord and Park patrolled the tiny sets like the barons of Brobdingnag. The Aardman shop buzzed with the work of painters, press molders and a gent known as the mouth-and-beak-replacement coordinator...
Childhood innocence doesn't crop up much these days in serious fiction. Perhaps Freud is to blame, or maybe William Golding, whose Lord of the Flies dramatized the pre-Romantic notion that young folks deprived of civilization will naturally turn into savages. Even children's books now tend to shun wide-eyed wonder and to feature instead little sophisticates dealing knowingly with various forms of family dysfunction...