Only five minutes long, Park’s film manages to be both brilliantly simple and fantastically audacious at the same time building on the idea of animating a vox pop interview (see Going Equipped, above) but switching in zoo animals to create a hilarious disjunction between voice and visuals. The jewel in the crown of the Lip Synch series, and endlessly recycled since. The film has got all the Aardman ingredients – quirky characters, relentless gags, top-notch voice cast – but there’s something a tiny bit inauthentic about its vision of an underground London and, of course, the shiny, flaw-free visuals are a long way from the Aardman stock-in-trade.Īn animator makes adjustments on a character during the making of Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian 12. Even if Aardman seems incapable of making a bad film, such is its iron grip on quality control, the pressure to abandon claymation and move into computer-generated animation led to a charm deficit. It shows on screen and led directly to the companies ending their agreement. Reports at the time suggested the production of this rodenty feature wasn’t the happiest experience for Aardman, as backers Dreamworks put the hammer down after disappointing box-office figures for their previous collaboration, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Lord’s deployment of a split screen, to parallel the brothers’ development, is inspired. It’s the latter, of course, who has got the eponymous pig, the typically anthropomorphised critter beloved by Aardman, although perhaps not quite so instrumental to the narrative as Gromit. There is something of Monty Python in its medieval setting: twin princes, separated at birth, one growing up in the castle, the other in a hovel just outside. Lord stretched his narrative muscles with this rather lovely 11-minute short, which resulted in his second Oscar nomination. Even if it runs out of ideas a bit in the final third, it’s still a great watch. Sledgehammer wasn’t strictly an Aardman production – it was directed by Stephen R Johnson (famous for Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere) – but they did craft the still-spectacular animated sequences, which include painted clouds flitting across Gabriel’s face, Arcimboldo-esque singing vegetables and Park’s legendary dancing chickens. But it was its involvement in the amazingly successful promo for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer single in 1986 that put it firmly on the map. Sledgehammer (1986)Īardman was founded by Lord and Dave Sproxton in 1972, and early jobs included the opening credits for The Great Egg Race and squeaking homunculus Morph on Take Hart. Watch the video for Peter Gabriel’s single Sledgehammer 15. Not to get too meta, but there is some fun comment here on the god-like processes of claymation: Adam, after all, was fashioned out of clay in the first place.
A stream of jokes about the first created human, perched atop a tiny planet Earth, keeps this ticking along, with the real-flesh “hand of God” hammering points home. Lord was nominated for his first Oscar for this funny short, which showcases his more fingery, freeform style – compared to Park’s smoothly-polished modelling. There’s something a little bit freaky about it. A vaudeville-act dog trainer called Tiny loses his confidence after clashing with Arnold, a hulking silent-film actor it all ends up a bit Phantom of the Opera. Steve Box, who would go on to direct the unlovely Spice Girls Viva Forever video and co-direct Curse of the Were-Rabbit, made his directorial debut with this impressive 11-minute short that mixes Nick Park-ish ingredients to considerably creepier effect. Where it all began: Aardman founders David Sproxton and Peter Lord with one of their early creations, Morph.
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