Interlude 3: DO PLASTICINE SHEEP DREAM OF BEING EATEN BY CHICKENS?
[REVIEW]
Not sure this is the time or place for long format film critique, but hey, it's either that or I come round to your place and bore you in person.
If I had to title this as an academic paper, it would be "Aardman Animation in a post-Wes Anderson world".
I watched the latest Chicken Run film, “Dawn of the Nugget”, last night and... It was fine. It was exactly, more or less, the same as the original, which I rather liked.
The thing is, the animation isn't aging well. Or maybe that it is aging too well. Like Tom Cruise, a bit shiny and seemingly perfect.
Too perfect.
Aardman are perhaps the most accomplished stop-motion animation studio around. Their work is virtually flawless. Smooth motion, detailed models. Nothing is out of place.
And that's a problem.
There is nothing to distinguish it from computer rendered 3D animation. The slickness has rendered the form invisible.
Compare this with Anderson's The Fantastic Mr Fox.
Anderson is well known to highlight the artifice of the form in his films. Sets become visible. Scripts can be seen. Curtains open as if a stage. You are aware, as a viewer, of being a viewer of a confection.
It's a wonderful feeling.
And so Mr Fox's fur jitters about. You can see the hand if the animator. The movements feel slightly unreal and staccato, as if they are a sequence of stills stitched together.
The artifice is apparent to remind you of the form.
Anderson is on record as saying he wanted to use real fur because it is so unpredictable and impossible to animate perfectly. It shows. And it works. There is something delightful in the unruly way it moves that feels incredibly animalistic too.
And that's the other problem.
The chickens in Chicken Run, Dawn of the Nugget don't really act like chickens.
They are rather smooth, shallow characters that could be any animal in a plot that only considers them chickens because they are food.
What I mean is, in The Fantastic Mr Fox, look at how the animals eat. It's furious and violent. It works in contrast to the urbane nature of the talking animals. It constantly reminds us that we are watching anthropomorphised creatures. Not only is it a source of narrative, the duality of Mr Fox, but again, it's an awareness of the story and the form.
Meanwhile, in Chicken Run you have a Scottish sounding hen that jokes about bagpipes and haggis within the first 20 minutes.
Do chickens eat haggis? If so is it the offal filled haggis? Are these chickens meat eating? And in their world, do the sheep also have sentience?
Do plasticine sheep dream of being eaten by chickens?
Then there are the various regional accents. Again, played as characterisations, but mostly instead of commenting on the chicken-ness of chickens.
It's funny, not because they are chickens, but because they sound broad Yorkshire. Norther accents are funny.
Combine this with the sleekness of the animation and we get something that feels a little like nothing, completed with a Polama Faith song.
And that's such a shame. The animation is exceptional, the skill is unmatched. It's just a shame that in perfection it becomes invisible.
Meanwhile there are paper thing characters and a predictable plot that do nothing to make this invisibility a virtue.
Compare this with anything Pixar has released in the last decade. They perfected their animation style, but realised that what carried their films was the emotional complexity of the characters. That strong writing is the only thing that can give slick animation life.
We are left with something closer to an episode of Paw Patrol rather than The Wrong Trousers, with it's inventive characters combined with the artists fingerprints as a feature and not a flaw.
I miss that evil little penguin, and how, without a voice, a silly accent, he was able to convey something animalistic about human behaviour and greed.
[ANALYSIS]
The thing that I'm really talking about here is artistry.
That much like beauty, artistry is defined not by perfection but by the flaws. That the hand of the artist, when absent, leaves us with an artifact, not a work.
[FURTHER ANALYSIS]
Really the thing I'm talking about here is New Year's resolutions. Those promises you make to airbrush out your errors, the creases and marks in your personality.
Don't forget that maybe they define you. They make you complex and wonderful and interesting.
Sure, if they don't make you happy, by all means change them. You make yourself.
But if you think that sleek perfection will make things better, it won't. And it won't just be your loss.
[FINAL ANALYSIS]
But mostly, I'm talking about chickens and foxes and penguins.
Merry Christmas.
