Word: parked
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...that meticulous drudgery pays off in a sparkling finished product. Park and Peter Lord and the hundreds of other genial obsessives over in Bristol have crafted some of the loveliest comic films since Chaplin's. Creature Comforts, Park's day at the zoo with talking animals, and his short films with Wallace the cheese-loving suburban inventor and Gromit his mutely heroic dog, can match any animated films of the past 20 years. But the process cannot be delightful. Most American animators would say it's daft, all that precision-toying with clay, when, these days, computers...
...drifted over to Bristol. After two features and dozen of shorts whose wit and grace proved that stop-motion deserved to survive in the digital era, some of the Aardmanites agreed to go to California and make a computer-generated feature with the company's American partner, DreamWorks. (Not Park; he stayed home...
...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...
...traditionalist than the dear eccentrics in Curse of the Were-Rabbit, determined to celebrate their vegetable festival as they've done for 500 years. Aardman is a business, and with Were-Rabbit earning only half the box office cash of Chicken Run, DreamWorks will want to protect its investment; Park and Lord will have to listen more attentively to Katzenberg. (He is unlikely, for example, to approve another Wallace and Gromit feature after the first one tanked...