Ginger (center), Mac (in glasses), Babs (right) and Bunty (far right) plan their escape from Tweedy’s Farm. © DreamWorks Pictures.

DreamWorks
By now, Lord and Park were working with Jake Eberts, founder of Allied Filmmakers and former founder and chief executive of Goldcrest Films. Eberts has been involved with two past animations. In 1974, he arranged the development finance for Mortin Rosen's Watership Down; two decades later he executive produced the stop-motion James and the Giant Peach (1996). "Jake was our contact with Hollywood," says Lord. "He helped us stay independent until we had a film in place that we wanted to make, which was very valuable. By the time we did the DreamWorks deal, we had the film treatment quite developed. At that point DreamWorks came on board for the pre-production, serious model-building, the scripting, storyboarding... all that was three years ago."

More recently, of course, DreamWorks announced a $250 million 'long-term affiliation' with Aardman, committing the Hollywood major to not just Chicken Run but four future Aardman movies. "It's an incredible deal," says Lord. "We have full creative control. We can choose our projects, stars, subject-matter..." Park and Lord have nothing but praise for Jeffery Katzenberg, DreamWorks co-founder and contact. "He lands here in his private jet every month or two months," says Lord. "What amazes us is his commitment, which not many studio bosses have to a single film. He doesn't tell us what to do -- he's said this is an Aardman film first and foremost -- but challenges us to get it better. The important thing is that we deal direct with him, not with a bunch of department heads. He's accessible, experienced and the only person we need to listen to." A smaller bonus: if Aardman produces 90 seconds of animation in a week, Jeffery Katzenberg pays for staff lunch. (Which is why this visitor can truly say he had lunch on Katzenberg.)

Park says of DreamWorks, "They respect what we do; they seem to love our shorter films, the comedy in them. It's a learning process both ways. DreamWorks learned about the kind of films that suit us, but at the same time we learned so much about making a long-format film. Keeping an audience hooked for 80 minutes is a very different ballgame from making a short film. Once upon a time, we were making films primarily for ourselves, for our own enjoyment. But if you want to work with Hollywood, you need regimentation."

The Challenge
Given that Aardman are known for shorts and mid-length films, what are the challenges in going to feature-length? "I always thought making a feature film would be about two-and-a-half times harder than a 30 minute-film," says Park. "But the amount of work and mental effort, the man-hours everyone puts in... it's easily twenty times as much. The story is the most difficult thing, getting it to work over eighty minutes. It's harder to hold in the head than a thirty-minute story, and you've got the audience attention span to consider; you have to take the viewer on a journey of ups and downs, fasts and slows. It's difficult to calculate, which is why we ended up making the film in story-reel form, basic moving drawings, which we use to judge how it's playing before we shoot." (More on this later...)

There have been excellent stop-motion features over the years, from Ladislas Staewich's French classic Tale of the Fox (1938) to the charming Norwegian film The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (1975), directed by Iva Caprino. Yet only two have ever received international distribution: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996), both directed by Henry Selick and distributed by Disney. Nightmare was a hit, but James barely broke even in Stateside theatres. And with computer animations like Dinosaur and Toy Story 2 grabbing the headlines, won't audiences find stop-motion passé?