During the production of Aardman Animation’s Chicken Run [2] (2000), the idea for a feature involving “rats in love, in a sewer” came to light from animator Sam Fell. Fell had previously worked as stop-frame animator on Peter Lord’s directorial short, Wat’s Pig (1996), so he knew the Aardman co-founder well.
“Everyone at Aardman was encouraged to come up with ideas for features for the DreamWorks partnership,” says Lord. “We liked Sam’s idea and he, myself and [development executive] Mike Cooper developed it into a storyline before pitching to DreamWorks. The trick was to find a project both company’s liked — and this one fit the bill.
"The pitch was simple: ‘The African Queen with the gender roles reversed,’ according to Lord. "We swapped the spanner-wielding, oily rag working class character which Humphrey Bogart played to a female and made Katherine Hepburn’s very proper, out-of-her-depth, gentrified lady into an upper-crust male character.”
Classic British comic writing duo Ian Clement and Dick La Frenais (The Commitments, Goal!) were assigned to the script, which was originally planned as a stop-motion feature to follow Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit [3].
“Then, for one reason and another, Curse got later and later, delayed a year from its original release date while Flushed Away [5] got ever more ambitious,” says Lord.
Creating the Ratropolis “The final issue was recreating the water environment. Fluids are notoriously difficult to reproduce in stop-frame. We discussed long and hard about the various permutations and spent an interim period exploring a mix of CG backgrounds and set-extensions with stop-motion foregrounds, but we finally realized that CG was the right route for this project.”
The decision was certainly not a question of cost, he declares. “Flushed Away is way more expensive than any previous feature we’ve done.”
It soon became clear that animating rats meant designing unfeasibly large sets to create an underground Ratropolis — the film’s working title. “The Wallace model stands 10 inches (24.5cm) high — any bigger and it would be too cumbersome and any smaller and you’d lose detail,” Lord explains. “If Wallace walks through a doorway we can build the door 12 inches (30.5 cm) high. But if we take the scale of a rat and make the rats 10 nches high and everything in the real world proportionate to that, you realize you’d have to build 30-foot (9.14 meters) high structures. Everything becomes proportionately much larger. It which would push the budget up and require more studio space.
At that point — in 2002 — the characters had been designed; the first half of the script nailed down and storyboarded. “I had qualms about moving to CG,” he admits as production switched from Bristol to DreamWorks’ Glendale, California, studio.
“I guess we were quite arrogant in saying ‘We don’t want any of your questionable CG tricks here.’ We wanted to do it our way and to steer the DreamWorks crew to work in our style.
“DreamWorks wanted us to do that too. The Aardman trademark look and feel is a style we are famous for and it’s also a selling point. But it was also a challenge to us and them to create a digital animation style, which didn’t resemble other CG films. Our style shows the edges, it’s deliberately not silky smooth. We could have made the fur ‘furry’ and the environments slick, but we don’t want everything to look beautifully rendered and lit. Our priority is achieving a good acting performance from the characters and not to get the characters to gesticulate excessively which they do in a lot of CG.”
Plasticine Quality Of the eight animators who transferred from Aardman to DreamWorks to retrain in Maya, only one had any prior CG experience. “Never having made a CG film before, it took a lot of learning. The very best stop-frame animator may not be the best CG animator and vice versa, but they’re still very, very good. In my opinion it’s all about performance, having a sense of timing and humor.”
The U.S. studio he says was, “hugely respectful and very good about us casting the film in the Aardman image.”
However, Lord ensured he had key personnel at the heart of production. Among them were co-directors Fell and Dave Bowers, an Englishman “engrained in the Aardman culture” who, while never directly employed by Aardman had worked on Chicken Run, the aborted feature Tortoise and the Hare and as a senior storyboard artist on Were-Rabbit. Supervising animator Jeff Newitt was a key figure for Lord — tasked with “carrying the Aardman gene into DreamWorks.” Lord also assigned DP Frank Passingham to the project “because I was amazed to discover that CG films don’t commonly have a dedicated cinematographer,” he says.
He says he didn’t see any point just recreating a plasticine quality for the characters. “Flushed Away is a hybrid. It has a textured feel to mimic stop-frame but we used motion blur, for example, much more than normal.”
A series of video links kept Aardman HQ up to speed on dailies. “Pitching the storyboard is very much part of what we do here but we tend to make it an intimate affair between director and storyboard artist. The U.S. artist would come on the video conference and — either recorded or live — would literally act out and perform the storyboard with sound effects, movements and funny voices. Extraordinary.”
There’s a sense that there were battles between the two production teams to retain the original script. “There were some differences, yes,” he chuckles. “As it went on it became clear to me just how wide a gap there is between English and American sensibilities. There are huge similarities of course, but our take on life is different.”
Was Lord worried about losing control of the project? “I was worried about it being done away from here,” he admits. “And in all honestly you can’t possibly have the same control as one would when a project is under your nose. But that’s okay because we had people like Sam, who I have total confidence in. Both CG and stop-frame are slow. If anything Aardman is more efficient as a company simply because we’re smaller.”
He declares himself satisfied with the final version. “It’s fantastically entertaining, the design is subtle and there are some big comedic ideas which are what I look for as much as anything else in a project. It’s certainly got an eccentric and British vein to it. It’s not as quirky as Wallace & Gromit, but then it’s not made by Nick Park, but by directors with a different vision. Sam’s influences are filmic: he’s taken London’s East End and gangster influence from films like Snatch, Layer Cake and Sexy Beast and, not directly referenced them, but informed his direction with them.”
Lord says he’s braced for reactions to the film that will claim his company has sold out to Hollywood. Previous articles, he says, have spun the “Aardman goes CG” story to claim that it is giving up on the medium that has made it a U.K. household name.
“The biggest worry I have is that in six months time I’ll still be defending the decision to go CG and to continually repeat that we’re not abandoning stop frame.” A third Wallace & Gromit feature is scheduled he says (there’s no script yet) and he expects CG and stop-frame features to alternate from Aardman in the future — although whether this is in tandem with DreamWorks he’s not saying.
“I am personally more than happy to switch to and fro between the two mediums. Since 2001, our CG capability has expanded continually here and if that same decision to produce a CG feature happened today I’d probably shoot in Bristol.”
Adrian Pennington is a U.K.-based freelance writer and editor of animation magazine Imagine.
Links:
[1] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11809
[2] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=323
[3] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=2652
[4] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11810
[5] http://flushedaway.awn.com
[6] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11811
[7] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11812
[8] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11813
