Rēl.

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F I L M

SPRING 2018 $15

EVERYBODY LOVES RAY

The Life of The Legend Mr. Harryhausen

INSIDE LAIKA A Look At The Award-Winning Studio

Photo: Beverly Hills Mom

PUPPET WIZARDS Pete Saunders Gives Insight On The Begin-

nings Of Mackinnon And Saunders

DEPARTMENTS 22

13 H ISTORIA 22 C ENTERSTAGE 37 S OUNDTRACKS 75 F OREIGN FEATURE 90 B EHIND THE SCREEN 96 S HORT FILMS 102 R EVIEWS 7

FROM THE EDITOR

Dēr Rēlists By Peter C.J. Grupico

In A Nutshell By Ken A. Priebe

90

Anderson Answers By Joe Utichi

Alex Turner and Submarine By Jillian Mapes

The Work of Stefano By Mary Shriner

102

Making A Sheep By Rudolph Archibald

A Minute Masterpiece By Atticus Silver

Aardman’s Pirates By Manohla Dargis

FEATURES 50

INSIDE LAIKA

Where Stop-Motion Animation Goes High Tech

By Tasha Robinson

50

Take a sneak peek at Laika Studios and how they have changed the game for stop-motion.

56

PUPPET WIZARDS 30 Years of Experience

By Andy Murray

Learn more about the dynamic duo that has mastered the craft of puppet making.

60 T HE AMAZING AARDMAN Staying Stubbornly Eccentric

By Peter Debruge

Aardman Animation co-founder Peter Lord talks about his popular Wallace and Gromit characters and future projects.

78

SKELLINGTONS Stop-Motion In San Fran

By Jack Skellington

Tim Burton talks about the only two films Skellington Productions produced and whether it has any future projects in mind.

Photo: Prism Music Group and Warrington Guardian

84

EVERYBODY LOVES RAY The Stop-Motion Pioneer

By John Landis

A look at the Ray Harryhausen’s personal life and how he got into stop-motion animation.

56

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Editor-in-Chief Peter C.J. Grupico Creative Director Elaine Cunfer EDITORIAL Features Editor Kaylyn Gustafson Managing Editor Rebecca Murray Senior Editor Veronica Grupico Online Editor Angeline Bethel Research Editor Mary Shriner Associate Editor A Temporary Secretary Staff Writer Jimmy Page Assistant Managing Editor Jack White Associate Online Editor Robert Plant Writer at Large Cosmo Grupico Online Editorial Assistant Daniel Crouse DESIGN Associate Art Director Vicki Meloney Senior Designer Rob Jones Designer Carlos Hernandez SPECIAL PROJECTS Executive Editor Wes Anderson Senior Editor Kurt Vile Writer/Researcher Theo Velarde RESEARCH & COPY Associate Research Editor Stephen Schram Researcher Fatima Grupico Copy Editor Thomas Schram

from the editor

DER RELISTS W

elcome to this issue of rēl — a quarterly film magazine designed especially for film buffs (and film snobs) who want to feed their film fixation. If that sounds like you then you came to the right place. I have always watched and enjoyed films ever since I was young. My dad and I would spend every Friday and Saturday night watching TCM (Turner Classic Movies). Some of my favorite classic films include 12 Angry Men, Some Like It Hot, and The Court Jester. It wasn’t until my first Quentin Tarantino film, Pulp Fiction, that I started to take film watching more seriously. This masterpiece was very enlightening to me and it enhanced my perception of what makes a good movie “good.” At rēl we pride ourselves in being the #1 magazine for those who have a true appreciation and passion for film. We like to provide the reader with more meaningful content than just mere film reviews by featuring the history of different genres and film studios, along with an abundance of behind-the-scenes content.

In this special stop-motion issue we will dive into the world of various directors, studios and their masterpieces. This has always been my favorite style of animation. So much work and time gets put into these projects and they have a lot more personality than any other animation styles. I hope you enjoy this issue as much as I did and do let us know if there are any genres you’d like to see covered in the future.

Sincerely,

Peter C.J. Grupico

Photo: Peter C.J. Grupico

Peter C.J. Grupico Editor-in-Chief

rēl magazine | 7

PUPPETS ON FILMS

historia

A Brief Look At The History Of Stop-Motion

By Ken A. Priebe

M

ost of the stopmotion animation produced in the past century has been done for either short formats or special effects. The earliest films were merely experiments in moving objects before the camera, like Bewitched Matches (1913).

Stop-motion effects for creature sequences in live-action fantasy films began with the innovations of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, moving onto Star Wars and countless other films of the 1980s.

For the most well-executed stop-motion sequences, such as Harryhausen’s 5-minute skeleton fight in 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, the shorter format provided a solid frame to place as much quality as possible into them.

The history of the puppet feature begins with the pioneering puppet

animator from Russia, Ladislas Starewitch. Starewitch was a filmmaker and entomologist who got started in animation making short stop-motion films with embalmed insects rigged with wires. After moving to Paris he continued making short puppet films throughout the 1920s. From 1929 to 1930, he produced his first feature-length stop-motion puppet film, Le Roman de Renard (The Tale of the Fox). The story for the film was based on the 11th-century tales of Reynard the Fox, an anthropomorphic fox famous for his cruel trickery.

Hansel and Gretel: An Opera Fantasy would become not only the first American stop-motion feature film, but also the first animated feature produced in New York and the first to be based on an

opera.Production of the film was unusual in that nobody on the crew had any experience in animation. Myerberg hired noted fashion still photographer Martin Munkasci as director of photography.

Munkasci had never used a movie camera before.

The crew ran out of time and money to create original sculpts for these puppets, so they simply re-cast copies of the character designs for Hansel and Gretel. The completed film is a strange but entertaining piece of stop-motion history, and an interesting experiment in trying to adapt classical opera into an animated film. It is important to look for the connections between traditional art forms and modern stop-motion, especially in a feature-length format where it can be easy for an audience to get lost in the technique itself.

“

It is important to look for the

connections between traditional art forms and modern

Photo: Lonely Reviewer

stop-motion.

Ray Harryhausen with his puppets

”

rēl magazine| 13

ANDERSON ANSWERS

Mr. Fox from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox

Q&A With Wes Anderson

By Joe Utichi

W “

To me, it was more important that the animation have energy and personality and be funny. I wanted it to be fun and upbeat rather than perfect.

”

es Anderson, arguably the godfather of the quirky American indie thanks to the likes of Bottle Rocketand Rushmore, takes his first steps into the world of stop-motion animation with Fantastic Mr. Fox. Based on Roald Dahl‘s classic children’s book, it’s the tale of a wily fox and his adventures thieving food from three of the meanest farmers around; Boggis, Bunce and Bean.

Why did you want to do this book, particularly?

It was the first [Roald Dahl book] I ever owned and I particularly thought the digging was something nice for movies. I loved the drawings that were in the book I had.

I love stop-motion where the puppets have fur, and with all the animals I thought this would be a good opportunity to explore that.

You spent some time while you were writing in Roald Dahl’s hometown, what was that like?

The place where we went is called Gypsy House, which

he bought later in his life, but it’s where he wrote many of his best-known books. Mr. Fox was written there, certainly.

We were interested in the idea that we wouldn’t just base it on the book; we’d base it on him. He’d written memoirs for children — which is an odd thing, not many people have written autobiographies meant for children — so from that point of view we were always very aware of him and aware that kids reading his books didn’t just know the books, they knew him. We tried to get as much of his personality into the character, and we also had his manuscripts. In fact, we had the manuscript for Fantastic Mr. Fox, which had a different ending which we used in the movie. That’s a great luxury — to be able to say, “Here’s an idea we can use — it’s not in the book, but it’s from him.”

We came to set in April and we noticed you’d donated some of your suit fabric for Fox’s costume — did you identify with that character specifically?

Not particularly. The reason I used the material from my suit was that I really liked it, and

I thought he’d probably like it too. I just thought Corduroy might be good for Mr. Fox! You’ve blended your style of film making with Dahl’s style of storytelling — did you find it was a comfortable fit?

Yes, but for me I didn’t, in advance, have an idea of how I expected it to turn out. I knew I wanted to do it in stop-motion and I knew I wanted the animals to have fur — to not be Plasticine or something like that. I wanted it to be autumnal and originally I thought I wanted there to be mud everywhere and it wouldn’t be very colourful. That stayed — not the mud, but there’s almost nothing blue or green in the movie. I thought it would be nice with this sort of handmade feeling. What it really ends up like is the result of a thousand little decisions rather than one overarching thing.

Me and the production designer, Nelson Lowry, tried to design things one way or another but what we figured out was that the more realistic we could make things the happier we were with them. If I was

centerstage

travelling I might see a building or something and I’d take a picture on my phone, send it to Nelson and we might change something about it but we tried to base it as much as we could on research and photos and things. The style is set by how authentic can we get it. How realistic can we get it to look with our resources in miniature, and that’s the look of the movie, basically. Given that the grass is going to be made of towelling and the smoke will be cotton wool, that’s the range, I guess, that we’re working in.

The animation is really pared back to basics; you’ve embraced the “invisible wind” effect of animators’ fingers on the puppets’ fur.

Yeah, animators always think that’s a bad thing, like it’s bad form. But I think they really got into it on this one. They became comfortable with it because there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Also, the stop motion I’ve loved was always a bit primitive — King Kong and the Brothers Quay — you see these objects that you recognise and you’re

very aware it’s handmade. The other thing was that, to me, it was more important that the animation have energy and personality and be funny. I wanted it to be fun and upbeat rather than perfect. This kind of animation is particularly suited to that — we can work more quickly if that’s our goal and we can focus on it and make it our priority. I don’t think we could have made the movie if it had been a Coraline level of precision and smoothness. It would have been a $100m movie rather than the $30m we ended up spending.

Did you enjoy exploring the world of animation and figuring out those particular challenges?

It was great. What’s nice is there’s a chance to invent.

Everything there is an opportunity, because you can’t just say, “Oh we’ll use a table that we find.” You have to make one.

Everything is manufactured, so everything is a chance to see, is there a way to make that funny, to connect it to a character or to find some sort of motif. Also, because it moves so slowly, every aspect is in slow motion, so things kind-of develop.

Photo: The Red List

“

Every time you do a take on a movie, you’re not sure if it’s going to succeed. Even if you have a great cast.

”

rēl magazine | 23

INSIDE

Photo/Illustration: Peter C.J. Grupico

where stop-motion animation goes high tech

n o s

in b o

R a h

By

s a T

Laika team member working on a Kubo puppet from their most recent film Kubo and the Two Strings

I

’m standing between two boats — one intact, one cracked into two jagged halves. They’re each about the size of a conventional canoe, but they have masts, rumpled sails, tiny handrails around the edges, and little decks connected with miniature stairs. Both ships are spangled with bright orange, yellow, and red spots, but up close, the spots resolve into tiny autumn-leaf decals, meticulously applied to every surface in thick layers.

These are two of the sets for Laika Studios’ new stop-motion film Kubo And The Two Strings, and when they appear in the film, they look immense: The Japanese child warrior Kubo and his animal companion Monkey leap and roll across those decks, fighting an enemy who hovers above them in midair, in the middle of a violent storm that rips leaves off the ships and tosses them around on surging waves. It’s a big scene. These are, comparatively, little boats.

ager, Dan Pascall, says the most time-consuming part of making the ships isn’t even immediately evident: The design crew had to map every leaf — thousands of them, each individually laser-cut and about the size of a human thumbnail — and reproduce the exact same pattern on both ships, so they’d match from shot to shot within the film.

But the detail on them is spectacular. Standing next to them, it’s easy to see how many hours of work went into constructing them to look like real sailing ships made of leaves, even through the lens of an ultrahigh-def Canon 5D Mark III positioned inches away from the decks. Kubo’s production manLaika team member working on a Paranorman puppet from the film Paranorman

It’s a lot of effort. But Laika’s version of stop-motion is particularly striking because its characters and backdrops are rendered in such detail, and move so smoothly, that its films could be mistaken for wholly CGI creations, instead of stop-motion with digital assistance. And

its processes are striking because they’re all built around the idea that technology has to service art rather than the other way around. If a director wants a particular visual effect, even if it’s never been done in animation before, it’s up to the fabricators and artists to figure out how to make it happen.

He exaplains, “We wanted Kubo to be a stop-motion David Lean film. To be myth in miniature. And to make a small-scale movie that’s shot on a bunch of gussied-up tabletops in the

middle of a crummy warehouse look and feel like a big epic fantasy on an endless majestic vista, that’s a real challenge. So it took all of our tools to make that happen.”

What I saw of Laika Studios was mostly one 150,000-foot, sweaty, high-ceilinged space partitioned off into individual overheated little rooms by floorto-ceiling black curtains.

up on animators per shot,” Pascall says. “We’ve tried it in the past, and it doesn’t work.

They work at different paces, so it slows them down overall.” He says they sometimes shoot layers or characters separately, then composite them digitally, especially if the characters are far apart in a shot, and the depth

of field would keep one of them out of focus for the camera.

But for instance, in a scene where Kubo stands in a wooded area and a wind blows through the trees, that’s the work of a single animator moving every leaf and branch separately. The process is incredibly laborious: On Kubo, 27 animators

One of Laika’s ideals is that only one animator should work on a given scene at a time. “We don’t double

HEN WE “ WSTARTED

LAIKA, STOPMOTION ANIMATION WAS TAKING ITS LAST, DYING BREATH.

”

A close-up of the 3-D printed faces used in Kubo and the Two Strings

rēl magazine | 39

Setting up the scene for The Boxtrolls

worked simultaneously on their own scenes, each trying to achieve the company goal of 4.3 seconds of animation per week, and more often, only hitting about three seconds per week.

And before they can even get started on a scene, other teams have spent many months assembling all the materials the animators are going to use. According to Puppet Fabrication Supervisor Georgina Hayns, an individual “hero puppet” can take four to nine months to design and build, so the fabrication team starts its work some 12 to 18 months before shooting on a project begins. Each shoot requires many copies of the same puppet, again so multiple animators can work simultaneously — there were 32 separate

Kubo puppets on this shoot. Each puppet requires a complicated custom body, handmade clothing, and a rig that can hold the tens of thousands of 3D printed faces the animators swap in and out. Because of the wear and tear on the puppets caused by constant handling, the fabrication department includes a maintenance team that re-tightens the puppets’ joints after every shot. And because the wires in the puppets’ fingers are so fine and fragile, each puppet requires a backup library of hands. “The fingers can break mid-shot,” Hayns says, so she has “one crazy little department” that just makes spare hands: “If we’ve got 140 puppets out there, we probably have 500 pairs of hands.”

One new thing in the case of Kubo And The Two Strings is a greater reliance on CGI, especially to handle water effects and fill out crowd scenes. In a scene where the Kubo charac-

ter tells a story to an admiring audience, most of the viewers are digital creations rather than physical ones. Laika doesn’t have a problem with digital assists: They’ve been necessary from the beginning, to erase the rigs that hold up the puppets, and the seams between the upper and lower face plates.

Even Laika’s first feature, Coraline, had some computer-animated effects.

Laika has been pushing the facial animation for stop motion animation. For Coraline, they animated the faces in the 3D computer program Maya, printed them out with a 3D printer, and painted them by hand. In the end, the paint coloring of every Coralline face had to be watered down because of the extended process of painting thousands of faces. A big innovation on Paranorman was the inclusion of a 3D colored printer, which prints the faces in completed colors.

T’S SUCH AN “ IOVERWHELMINGLY

Photos: Digital Trends

COLLABORATIVE PROCESS.” ParaNorman was the first stop-motion movie to utilize a 3D Color Printer to create replacement faces for its puppets. Over 31,000 individual facial parts were printed for the production. Thanks to the face replacement technology created by the 3D Color Printer, Norman had over 8,800 faces with a range of individual pieces of brows and mouths allowing him to have approximately 1.5 million possible facial expressions.

The brow and the mouth are separate, so the compiled combinations are in the hundreds of thousands.

The 3d printed faces are ready to go. The only time they need touch ups is to add a gloss or something like that. Because they no longer have to hand

appliance, Laika can print many more versions than they would normally. They have faces with multiple noses and eyes used in an action moment for motion blur. Because the facial implants come in two pieces, each character has crack lines in their faces when the movie is shot.

The visual effects department removes the crack lines in post.

The 3D printing process also produces sub surface scatting, a process which has taken a lot of time in computer animation to make skin look real.

Paranorman had 62 individual characters, some with many multiples of the main characters. The production has 178 puppets in total, one of the largest stop motion features ever.

The production has printed

son, Coraline used about a third of that — 12,000.

Emerson says. “They’ve all moved on, and you’re picking up the pieces and figuring it out.

What’s great about the work we’re doing is, not only are we collaborating, we’re running in parallel. We’re not developing in a vacuum. It’s such an overwhelmingly collaborative process.”

And when a thorny issue crops up in pre-production, it’s never clear which department is going to solve it. Emerson says that as the head of computer effects, he’s used to keeping his mouth shut in meetings, to make sure the fabrication, rigging, 3D printing, and artistic departments have first crack at each new issue. “We’re not purists about stop motion,” Knight says. But he does prefer creative technological problem-solving over one-size-fits-all software solutions. “Within these walls, you have giant, throbbing, NASA-size brains that are inventing technologies, and then you have Luddites, people who are still working with their hands like artists and craftspeople were a century ago. b

MORE

ABOUT KUBO • Textures inspired by the Japanese woodblock artist Kiyoshi Saito are worked into Kubo’s sets, costumes, and characters to unify them. Even the digital raindrops in the storm scenes have their own Saito pattern.

• Laika doesn’t destroy elements from its films. It has auctioned them — in 2015, one Coraline puppet sold for more than $50,000 — and sent pieces out for exhibitions. Otherwise, everything the studio has constructed since Coraline is kept in storage..

• Kubo’s tiny shoes were hand-woven out of period-authentic grasses, then cast in rubber for durability.

• T he Moon Beast, Kubo’s primary antagonist, is Laika’s first entirely 3-D printed character. Laika beta tested a new resin printer from 3D printing company Stratasys in order to build it.

• The delicate gold flecks visible on Moon Beast’s chiton are Mylar party balloons from a local grocery store.

• To achieve Moon Beast’s otherworldly glow, the animators shot each frame of its scenes twice, once under normal light, once under ultraviolet flight. Then the frames were digitally composited.

Creating the bike used in Paranorman

rēl magazine | 41

W I Z A

By Andy Mu r ray

R D S: With over 30 years of experience Ian Mackinnon and Peter Saunders’ talented team have had the privilege of bringing some of the world’s best known animated characters to life — from Bob the Builder, Postman Pat and Fifi and the Flowertots, to Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. From concept mold making and armatures to costume, hair and paint, our team will always go the extra mile to ensure the characters we produce create the maximum impact on screen.

Corpse Bride puppets being used in a wedding scene

f you wander into quiet, leafy Oldfield Brow just outside Altrincham, you’ll find many things that you might reasonably expect to see: a little church, a Post Office, and a couple of takeaways. But then you’ll come across something you wouldn’t expect at all: the headquarters of the world-beating stop-motion animation studio, Mackinnon and Saunders.

Ian Mackinnon and Pete Saunders first met at the l egendary Cosgrove Hall Productions in Chorlton-cumHardy, working as animators on projects such as Wind in the

Thames Television but, in 1993, Willows and The Pied Piper of Thames lost its ITV franchise Hamelin. Saunders says: “I was and shut the company down. It born and bred in Rochdale and re-emerged with new owners, I went to Chetham’s School before it became a music school. but only after a steady wave of staff redundancies.

Then I went to West Surrey College of Art and Design “That’s when Ian and myself down in Guildford. I did a didecided to set up our own ploma in animation there, and company. Had Cosgrove Hall then I was looking to get work continued to exist, we’d still be in London but Brian Cosgrove there to this day. There was had been down to the degree absolutely no reason why we show that year.” should have looked elsewhere, really. So we never meant to Cosgrove spotted the set up our own company, it was potential in Saunders’ work, only force of circumstance.” and offered him six weeks work on a stop-motion project at Cos- Initially, Mackinnon and grove Hall.

Saunders rented out space in

“I thought, it’ll be a little bit of money and I’ll go traveling after that. And then six weeks work extended out into about 15 years. It was a really, truly, great company to work for. I joined the company a year after it started and so there was only a small handful of people there, maybe about nine or ten people, but over the years it grew to about 130, 140 people.”

For most of its lifespan, Cosgrove Hall was bankrolled by

Ian Mackinnon (left) and Pete Saunders (right) with the puppets they created for various feature films

the Cosgrove Hall building until they purchased their current premises. More than 20 years later, the company is recognized as one of the leaders in its field.

If you’ve ever seen Rastamouse, Bob the Builder, Pingu, James and the Giant Peach, the revived Clangers or Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox, you’ll have witnessed their puppet-making wizardry.

In particular, they’ve established a long working relationship with director Tim Burton. Back at

Mr. Fox in a scene from Fantastic Mr. Fox

I thought, it’ll be a little bit of “ money and I’ll go traveling after that. And then six weeks work extended out into about 15 years.

”

Photos: Coral Gables Art Cinema and Peter C.J. Grupico

“The year after Mars Attacks! came out, Tim said, ‘I’ve got this really lovely project called Corpse Bride and I’d love you guys to be involved’. We were cock-a-hoop about that. I mean, the end of the 90s, the company it was six years before that was was engaged to work on puppet given the go-ahead, but he kept designs for Burton’s Mars true to his word.”

Attacks! The original plan was “The lovely thing about working for the belligerent Martians to with Tim is that he’s a huge be rendered in stop-motion, but stop-motion fan. With Corpse in the event the studio changed Bride he would come up whentack and used Mackinnon and ever he could to see the progress Saunders’ designs as the basis of things. Considering he’s for computer-generated imagan A-lister film director, he’d ery instead. It was a disappointinvariably come up by himself, ment, but ultimately there were stay overnight and come in and no hard feelings.

see what was going on. You really got the sense that he was excited by the construction and the kind of evolution of the characters. He was so enthusiastic and he’d talk to everybody.

He wouldn’t just talk to me and Ian, he’d go round the workshop and say, ‘hi guys, how are you doing? That’s great work’.

It was like a real bolt of energy coming in. People would really, really look forward to his visits.

These are pretty full-on, these big projects, and Tim would come up every so often and get everybody really charged up and motivated. He’s a great joy to work with.”

“Ian and myself had only been in business for two years and we were still at that time based in the Cosgrove Hall building, and some people from London involved with computer graphics came round as guests of Cosgrove Hall. They came round our puppet-making company and one of them rather gleefully said that we’d be out of business in two years. He said it’s all going to go to CG. Well, I’m pleased to say that that’s over 20 years ago now and we’re still here. We’re getting approached to work on projects from literally all over the world now, which is great.” ,

“We got nine months of work out of it, we’d worked in Los Angeles. So we were incredibly grateful and we made a bit of money out of it, but most importantly of all we got to meet Tim and establish a relationship with him.”

It was a relationship which soon bore fruit.

A scene from Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!

rēl magazine | 51

behind the screen

MAKING A SHEEP A Step-by-Step Guide

By Rudolph Archibald

I

n model-making terms, there are three types of sheep in A Close Shave, which we broadly categorized as Normal Sheep, Stunt Sheep and Thin Sheep. Thin Sheep were required for the scene in the wool shop when they run between Wallace and Wendolene, and we needed to show a mass of different woolly shapes going past while Wallace and Wendolene are still holding hands over their heads. They, obviously, had much narrower

1

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bodies than the normal type.

Stunt Sheep were used for the shot where they plunge through the small trapdoor in Wallace’s house, and when Shaun emerges shivering from the Knit-O-Matic. They had to be different again, with a lighter and more squashy build, and had skeletons made of mesh and coiled wire. Normal sheep were really quite complex, and had a variety of options built into their basic armature. This was made of K&S square-sec-

Legs are made from twisted aluminum wire with steel discs for feet.

The head is made of fast-cast resin. Once out of the mold, the holes and slots for eyes and ears are drilled to shape with an electric drill.

tion metal tubing, and had two sets of holes in each corner so that the sheep’s legs could either come out vertically or out at the sides. On these pages we show the various construction stages for a Normal Sheep.

These involve a bewildering array of materials which we have learned about through experience, ranging from the K&S armature down to tiny details like the glass-bead eyes with painted pupils.

3

4

The first stage completed, with pieces of K&S square-section tubing added last to join the legs to the body.

The eyes are white glass beads with pupils painted on using a paint brush and enamel paint.

The drill is turned slowly white the pupil is painted.

5 6

A covering of Plastazote– a hard, foam-like material– is put over the metal armature and trimmed with a scalpel, leaving various holes clear for fitting the legs, neck and tail.

Next, the Plastazote body and legs made of maxi-plast rubber are sculpted and baked.

7 8

The body and tail are then covered with foam.

The foam is trimmed to shape with scissors. Fur fabric is starched to make it lie down properly. It is then trimmed and glued over the foam.

“

These involve a bewildering array of materials which we have learned about through experience.

”

Photos: Presse Citron

Shaun the Sheep, a popular character from Aardman Animations, striking a pose

rēl magazine | 91

reviews

AARDMAN’S PIRATES

A Must-Watch On Netflix This Spring

By Manohla Dargis

Y “

”

A Scene From Aardman Animations’ The Pirates!

Band of Misfits

102 |rēl magazine

Directed by Peter Lord (“Chicken Run”) and written

by Gideon Defoe, extracting this and that from a novel in his “Pirates!” Series (The Pirates!

In an Adventure With Scientists), the story centers on the Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant) and his desire to win best pirate of the year. Having lost the contest year after year, the Pirate Captain believes his time has come.

Much is often made of the handmade attractions of Aardman’s work, of the signature imperfections and literal fingerprints on its creations.

These tiny dents and fingerprint whorls are reminders that these movies were made by people who molded clay with their hands instead of only

manipulating symbols on computers. But these human touches also give the movies an extraordinary hap-tic quality that can transport you back to childhood pleasures, like squishing Play-Doh and making crooked clay pots for your parents. That’s partly why the movies seem more personal than many computer animations and why, for all its digital flourishes, The Pirates!

Band of Misfits, like other Aardman films, is a wonderful time machine.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). You wouldn’t want the children to have all the fun, would you?

Photos: Collider

But these human touches also give the movies an extraordinary hap-tic quality that can transport you back to childhood.

ou can’t always just say “aarrr” at the end of a sentence and think that makes everything all right. This is wise advice and not only for pirates and piratephiles of all ages. It’s also the closest thing to a lesson in the delightful stop-motion animation The Pirates! Band of Misfits, a story of high-seas silliness from that British national treasure Aardman Animations (Wallace & Gromit). Exquisitely detailed — from its ocean breakers to the wavelike curlicues on a pirate’s luxurious beard — the movie is a curiosity cabinet of visual pleasures but so breezy and lightly funny that you may not realize at first how good it is.

FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY