Aardman's First Feature Egg-stravaganza!
It's the friction between Ginger and Rocky which drives the story.
After considering several movie couples, the creators decided to model
the pair on Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, whose volatile screen
chemistry delighted audiences from their first team-up in Woman
of the Year (1942).
The cross-generation culture clash was inspired
by films like Rock Around the Clock (1956), while the Anglo-American
theme -- with plenty of digs at both sides of the Atlantic -- is in
the tradition of pics like A Fish Called Wanda. The directors
confess they were nervous how audiences would react to some of the
American jabs, until they heard the laughs in preview screenings.
The Voices
Rocky is voiced by Mel Gibson, in his second animated feature
role following John Smith in Pocahontas. According to Nick
Park, "Peter Lord and me already knew Mel was a fan of Wallace
and Gromit. We met up with him in Los Angeles a couple of years ago
and he invited us out for lunch. We went wondering what it was about
and it wasn't about anything really! But we knew we had a good contact.
By the time we saw Gibson in Maverick we had created the character
of Rocky, and made him as a model. So we took a bit of Gibson's dialogue
from Maverick, animated Rocky to his lines, and it fitted perfectly."
"Working with a studio like DreamWorks gave us the opportunity
to use someone who was already a star," Park continues. "For
a long time we knew Rocky was going to be an 'outside' chicken but
we couldn't decide what to make him. Then after Maverick it
all seemed to fit: the proximity of the war, how the GI's came over
to Britain... It made sense to have an American among these very English
backwater chickens, who have no life. It reminded us of films where
new music comes in and livens up the fuddy-duddies. With Rocky, we
were thinking of a happy-go-lucky, loveable rogue, extremely likeable
but very unreliable. We didn't just want the American to come in and
be the hero!"
The female lead Ginger, perhaps the true 'hero' of the film, is voiced
by Julia Swalha, well-known to British TV comedy fans as the long-suffering
Saffron (the daughter) in Absolutely Fabulous. She's also appeared
in TV dramatisations of Pride and Prejudice and Martin Chuzzlewit,
plus Kenneth Branagh's film In the Bleak Midwinter. Swalha
is joined by AbFab co-star Jane Horrocks. In fact the chicken
Babs is very close to Horrocks' dimwitted Bubble in the live-action
series. The actress is best known for her extraordinary multi-vocal
performance in the stage and screen versions of Little Voice.
The sinister Mrs. Tweedy is voiced by Miranda Richardson, recently
seen in Tim Burton's effects-laden Sleepy Hollow. Her past
films range from Damage and Tom and Viv to Interview
with a Vampire and Spielberg's Empire of the Sun.
Printer-friendly version
Post new comment