Issue #3: "Poultry in Motion" — Aardman Animations Retro

Also: Notes from an early screening of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget with director Sam Fell Q&A

I’ve been an Aardman fan since the first Chicken Run released way back in 2000. Even at a young age I could see they had a distinct voice compared to Disney and Pixar’s domination of the medium at the time. Also for the previous decade, the only mainstream claymation films for kids were Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. So it was a treat to get a new stop-motion animated film that felt fresh and introduced new audiences to Aardman’s sense of humor which to me is one of their greatest strengths.

When I heard that The Paris Theater was doing an Aardman retrospective series titled ‘Poultry in Motion’ to celebrate the new release of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, I knew I had to catch their omnibus screening of short films, TV ads, and music videos ranging from the 1980s to this year’s very first collaboration with Lucasfilm. I’m still not sure if most of the shorts that were screened are available to stream anywhere. The Paris did advertise it as ‘rare shorts’ so it felt really special to get to see this medley of Aardman treasures from the vault.

I’ve only known Aardman for their later era that began with Chicken Run in 2000 and it was really great to see their humble and very experimental beginnings take the form of these shorts, commercials, and music videos. For me, Aardman’s signature style is most noticeable in how they shape character’s teeth, eyes, and hands. In their early shorts the character designs don’t resemble that but they still have that Aardman charm and most importantly, their quirky humor.

One standout was the short Creature Comforts (pictured above) which felt like an inspiration for The Office except it features zoo animals being interviewed about their lives in terrariums. I also really dug the short War Story which is simply made from an audio recording of a real-life person recounting his POV of the Blitz during WWII. Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer music video from 1986 was a fun experiment in live action stop-motion and reminded me of a time in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s when music videos used to be extremely creative and inspirational. I always love seeing filmmakers jump from music videos to feature length narrative films (i.e. Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze). The shorts omnibus was capped with the Aardman-Lucasfilm joint from the newest season of Star Wars: Visions — I Am Your Mother, directed by Magdalena Osinska, which was a fantastic way to display how far Aardman Animations has taken the medium since they started out 50 years ago.

You can find more Aardman Animations retro treasures coming to Museum of the Moving Image in December in their ongoing World of Animation series that will feature a few Wallace & Gromit shorts from the 1980s and 1990s.

Earlier in November, The Paris Theater hosted an early screening of the next Aardman Animations feature length film — the long awaited sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. It looked like a sold out show and the audience was buzzing with excitement. Lots of younglings in attendance and the promise of a post-show Q&A with the film’s director, Sam Fell. It was so good to see the cast of hens and roosters back on the big screen in a sequel that takes place shortly after the first film which was released over 20 years ago.

The Q&A was moderated by Mara Webster, Co-Founder and Head of Programming of In Creative Company.

They shared how the movie originated as a ‘Chicken Impossible’ father-son story. The final movie is still very much an homage to a Mission: Impossible caper but is now a mother-daughter story, still focusing on Ginger as the lead just like the original film. Fell says the pivot was on the horizon during development stating that, “the 21st century is becoming more the female century.” Aardman saw that Ginger’s leadership and the ensemble of hens are what made the first Chicken Run so special and decided to double down on that in the sequel.

After committing to this story pivot Fell and his team knew they had to bring back the original film’s villain Mrs. Tweedy, and cited James Cameron’s Aliens as inspiration for the psychological trauma Ginger would endure after the events of surviving Mrs. Tweedy the first time.

Over 600 model chickens, made of clay and silicon, were created for Dawn of the Nugget. They had to start from scratch since the original assets were destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2005. Luckily, there was a great ‘making of’ art book for the first movie which Aardman relied on to recreate the magic of the first puppets. This time around the artists used some new technology like 3D printing and even VR.

Moderator: I like how you used VR as an aid to building a lot of the landscapes to see how things would look like before you built them. How did you come up with the idea to use VR?

Sam Fell: The first movie very cleverly set the chickens in a farm where they’re always in their huts or yards. You can film them all in one go. The human puppets were much bigger at a different scale. In the first movie the humans and chickens were in different areas and very rarely shared the same scenes. When they were then they never were in the same shots. In the new movie the chickens are breaking in, we were sending the chickens out to the land of the giants. We constantly had our chicken puppets in the human world. We had to figure out how to plan the movie in 3D so we could split it up into different elements: chicken scale, human scale, matte painting, CG (we used some CG crowds). It has some hybrid quality to the production. Very early on our production designer had Oculus goggles with gravity sketch to draw in 3D. He drew in 3D to scout our locations, storyboarding from a 3D world in the chicken’s POV. You could easily get a video game-style chicken POV of the sets. It was exciting to use this technology to help the stop-motion animation.

Fell reasserted the audience that he still considers Dawn of the Nugget a stop-motion film. The technique is over 100 years old and hasn’t drastically changed much. You could watch the first Chicken Run and go directly into the new one and it looks like you’re watching the same film.

Sam Fell: It doesn’t feel like you’ve jumped 23 years which in fact you have. Its a fantastic technique, its handmade, has a warmth.The photography itself of making something beautiful, lighting it, photographing it well, is an old technology.Most of what we’ve done could’ve been done 70 years ago. I don’t like to rush to the newest tech every time because it’s not necessarily the most useful. Its like a bicycle. People still use them. It’s a good bit of tech. THIS is like an e-bike. We augmented it with new techniques and digital things that helped us make this bigger scope movie.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget will be available on Netflix on December 8. It will play on some screens in NYC, too!

The repertory series Poultry in Motion is still going at The Paris Theater through December 3.