Tim here. This week sees the release in the US of Shaun the Sheep Movie, a film whose nightmarishly anti-grammatical title hides the sweetest soul of any family movie of 2015. And this is no less than we'd expect, given that it is the newest film from the ever-reliable Aardman Animations of Bristol, England.
We're going to be taking a look at Aardman's first feature, 2000's Chicken Run, as next week's subject in Hit Me with Your Best Shot, but that's just a tiny slice of the studio's generally terrific output. If you'll permit me to go full fanboy - for y'see, people who love Aardman really love Aardman at an almost primal level - I'd like to sing the praises of the studio's other full-length films. Most of them, at least. Even fanboyism has its limits.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
Undoubtedly the most familiar title on this list, having won the 2005 Best Animated Feature Oscar, among other accolades. And because Wallace and Gromit themselves have become such iconic characters, arguably the most successful stars of a short cartoon series since the 1950s. [More...]
Sadly, one thing that The Curse of the Were-Rabbit proves is that shorts are the natural environment for the duo: stretching their delicate misadventures all the way to 85 minutes leaves some sagging momentum and subplots that just kind of sit there doing not much.
That being the case, "not as good at Wallace & Gromit as the four W&G shorts" is a fairly mild criticism, and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a lovely comedy across the board, with an exaggerated British stiffness in the form of the game Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter joining Wallace's longtime voice actor Peter Sallis. The re-creation of the English countryside could not be any more loving, with the miniature sculptures having a doll house quaintness to set off the hokey visual comedy. It's also a smart technological exercise, using CGI to simulate hand-made clay puppets in context that traditional stop-frame animation could never achieve. Chicken Run is probably the better film, but this is certainly my favorite.
Flushed Away (2006)
The tension between Aardman and their financiers and distributors at DreamWorks ended in tears with this, the studio's first all-CG feature; though using the techniques pioneered in Were-Rabbit, it often doesn't look that way. With a starrier cast than is usual for Aardman (Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen), and more sarcastic jokes, it feels very "off", and it's pretty easy to argue that this is the one of their six features that's not really worth it. But even if it's plainly the all-time nadir of Aardman's storytelling, the studio took to the expanded palette of computer animation well enough, creating a fantastic universe of sewer-dwelling animals that's designed like a particularly lavish picture book, and which makes good use of the water effects that could never have been achieved in Aardman's traditional aesthetic. Still, this is one for the completists only.
Arthur Christmas (2011)
The first film in Aardman's somewhat happier teaming with Sony Pictures is still CGI, and the character design is less distinctively the studio's own (though it's also idiosyncratic enough that you'd never mistake it for any of the big American animation companies). It's probably the least interesting film on this list to look at, but the flipside is that it's got a much more entertaining, clever, and good-natured script than Flushed Away, courtesy of director Sarah Smith (the first woman to direct an Aardman film) and Peter Baynham. At the least, it's the closest we've come in a lot of a years to an all-ages Christmas movie that deserves a place in the holiday movie canon. The story of how Santa's (Jim Broadbent) grown son Arthur (James McAvoy) almost screws up Christmas is of course trite and more than a little bit contrived, but a raft of really great supporting performances and charmingly bent design help to balance out the usual seasonal sentimentality: it's a sweet movie with plenty of spiky undertones, and surely good enough to deserve more than its near-complete invisibility in the four years since it premiered.
The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists! (2012)
Somewhat inexplicably Oscar-nominated (under the US title The Pirates! Band of Misfits), this was a return to form: the studio's first stop-motion film since 2005, the first to be co-directed by studio co-founder Peter Lord since 2000, and maybe the most aggressively British thing they ever made. Based on a series of semi-educational children's books about 19th Century history, the film throws together Hugh Laurie, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Brendan Gleeson, and Imelda Staunton (as a psychotic Queen Victoria) among other into a pot and asks them to be as silly as they dare. Which turns out to be extremely silly. More than anything else here, this is a kids' film, but with high enough energy that never turns manic that one needn't have access to a child to enjoy it; that, and the seamless combination of CGI backgrounds and clay figures allows it to look grubby and hand-made, while still oozing ambition and scope; it's like the contents of the world's most lavish toy chest.
The point of all this, of course, is that it's almost impossible to go wrong with Aardman, so all of you should go see Shaun the Sheep immediately. It's wonderful and it's tanking hard at the box office, so it needs all of our love.