And now for something completely different…
Aardman Animations is a spectacularly successful British
film studio specialising in the "old fashioned" stop-motion clay
animation technique. Ostensibly their films and TV series are aimed at children
but their humour has universal appeal and they are very popular with adults.
Characteristically, many of the jokes are so quick-fire that it takes more than
one viewing to spot them all. Their most famous feature-length film is probably
the multiple-award-winning Chicken Run
(2000), but they were already very popular for their shorter films; Creature Comforts (1989) and, above
all, the Wallace and Gromit series
starting with A Grand Day Out
(1989), then The Wrong Trousers
(1993 – Academy Award winner), A Close
Shave (1995 – Academy Award winner), and A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008), plus a feature film: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the
Were-Rabbit (2005 – Academy Award winner). Wallace and Gromit have now
acquired the status of national treasures, with each new outing eagerly
anticipated.
One of the characters in A Close Shave is a small, mischievous sheep who loses most of his
wool after being shorn by one of Wallace's fantastic machines so was promptly
dubbed Shaun. This character proved so popular that in 2007 he was given his
own, long-running TV series Shaun the
Sheep (130 seven-minute episodes and counting) and this year has appeared
in a feature film with the same title. The setting for each TV episode is the
same: a small, bucolic farm in which Shaun and the rest of the flock are always
up to some mischief, despite the efforts of Bitzer the sheepdog and the
(nameless) Farmer to keep them in line. One unusual feature is that there is no
speech – neither dialogue nor voice-over – so the humour is entirely visual,
but there is usually at least one laugh-out-loud moment for adults in every
episode.
In the feature film, the Farmer is accidentally transported
to the big city where he loses his memory. Shaun, Bitzer and the flock chase
after him in order to rescue him but have to contend with Trumper, an evil
catcher of stray animals. Needless to say, after many bizarre and hilarious
adventures all ends happily with the recovered Farmer back on the farm and
Trumper receiving his just desserts (that really isn't a spoiler – all of the
Shaun series end in the same way!).
I was a bit concerned that stretching the adventure to a
feature-length 85 minutes wouldn't work as well as the brilliant shorts, but I
needn't have worried; the film maintains a high standard and has already
received the universal critical acclaim which has become almost routine for
Aardman's output. There is talk of a sequel, but the stop-motion technique is
so painfully slow to produce that it will be a long time coming.
******************
Race to Witch
Mountain is nominally aimed at somewhat older youngsters. The plot is
basically the same as Paul (reviewed
here in May last year): alien(s) loose on Earth are being hunted by evil-minded
authorities and recruit the help of ordinary people to escape and reach the
location from which they can be returned to their native planet. The difference
is that while Paul is an hilarious
spoof of the genre, RTWM takes
itself more seriously. Thankfully it does have some amusing moments, but the
plot and production struck me as very routine and by-the-numbers, and the film
was not really worth the time taken to watch it. Maybe I should have watched
this before watching Paul…
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