With this movie, the filmmakers emphasized the charm of a handcrafted, textured look. In Chicken Run, the characters were very slick and smoothed down.

The performance comes from talking to the directors, and acting out things yourself to get the subtleties of the performance. You’re trying to get the shots right first time, first take. To be honest, the animation process is almost secondary. When you’re slogging through 10 hours a day, moving a stop-motion character incrementally, what you’re always holding onto is: What’s the feeling? What’s the emotion? What’s the character doing? When you know what you’re going for, that’s when it’ll flow, and the eyes will widen at the right moment and all of that.

Chris Sadler (lead animator): I was the character leader on Victor, the bad guy. A lot of what we do is very much influenced by the dialogue, while the design and shape of the character often denotes what he’s going to be. Victor is a very portly character, but with long skinny arms and legs, which means he’s very gesticulatory, almost in a John Cleese way. His head was so tall that we had to keep it quite stiff; if it had moved around too much, that would have translated too much motion to the top of the head and it would have been all over the place. We gave him this sort of stiff-backed, strutting movement. His neck is very set into his body, so if he moved his head, he would generally move his whole shoulders, which gave him an air of superiority.

We had a problem a few months into production, because we drifted into Victor being too much of a fool, rather than a real serious villain. I’d grown so used to him being a pompous idiot that he was getting too soft. It wasn’t until we got to doing some of the things in the scene in the woods, when he gets pretty nasty; that he started to come back into the way Steve Box had imagined him.

Key animator Ian Whitlock goes through the painstaking work of animating the characters. Many of the animators were split up with a main unit doing “wides,” and then two or three sub-units with the same set on a smaller scale.

AO: Did you re-animate any of Victor’s scenes for this reason?

CS: No, but I won’t say it wasn’t thought of (laughs)! I think it comes down to the way he’s portrayed in the script more than the way he’s animated — although if he’s running round pointing a gun at someone, he’s going to look threatening, unless I really screw up!

AO: Can you talk about the logistics of the production?

CS: We were filming on 33 miniature sets on the floor of Aardman’s feature studio in the “Aztec West” industrial park in Bristol [where Aardman made Chicken Run]. You move around quite a lot depending on what sets and characters are available. It’s part of the nature of making a stopframe feature that you can’t stick to one character all the time. Most of my shots were of Victor, but I don’t think there’s a character in the film I didn’t animate at one time, especially in crowd scenes where there wasn’t enough room to get two animators on the set and one person had to do them all. A lot of people say the hardest thing for a male animator is to make a woman character look feminine enough, not like a man in drag. There was a female animator who did a lot of Lady Tottington toward the end, and she picked the character up very quickly, so there may be something in that…

The character leads handle the scenes where their character is really important. For example, I did a lot of the scene where Victor is introduced at Tottington Hall, but even then I wasn’t sole animator on him. There were some reverse angles, which were done by the animator in charge of Lady Tottington. Conversely, in the forest scene, I was sharing animation with the lead animator on the Were-Rabbit. First there was one main forest unit on which we did a lot of the wide shots. Later, we had a forest unit facing in one direction and the other in the reverse direction. In this way, I’d do all the shots pointing back at Victor, while there was a reversed unit next door, which was handling what Victor was seeing in the scene.

A lot of the units were split that way — a main unit doing “wides,” and then two or three sub-units with the same set on a smaller scale. In the first Tottington Hall scene, my set was pointing out across the garden — it was very big and plain, with lots of grass, showing Lady Tottington’s POV. Next door was a much smaller reverse set just showing the doorway. And there were a couple of shots in the scene breaking out of that eyeline, when Lady Tottington walks down the steps, and that would be a different set again.

Dave Alex Riddett (director of photography): One thing that’s developed through the Wallace & Gromit films are the famous chases. We haven’t changed the techniques very much, we’ve just got more elaborate, with bigger sets and more intricate ways of doing the sequences. A lot of the technique in Were-Rabbit amounts to having an enormously long background and literally moving it behind characters.

So in some of the climactic shots, Gromit is in a plane suspended over a set on a rig while a massive building is moved behind him on tracks, one frame at a time. Generally the backgrounds are real, shot in front of the camera, although we’ve done a lot of greenscreen for the plane shots and the fairground stuff, because our fairground sets were enormous. There were about four large fairground sets and at least half-a-dozen smaller areas of it, all Wallace and Gromit-sized. A lot of them had to be greenscreened because they would take up so much studio space, so we shot characters first and background plates afterwards. We spent the last few weeks of the film just shooting plates.