Peter Lord is drawing from Aardman’s tradition

Aardman’s co-founder tells Alan O’Riordan about Shaun the Sheep’s leap to the big screen.

THE perils of taking a well-loved cartoon series and turning it into a feature film are many. Think of the disastrous Postman Pat film, or the shambles Bill Murray couldn’t save that was Garfield.

But with the Shaun the Sheep: The Movie, animation studio Aardman has got it just about perfect. They have stayed true to the original, while giving Shaun’s mischievous independent streak a bigger canvas by moving the action to the city.

“There are dangers there,” says Peter Lord, Aardman co-founder and the film’s producer. “We’ve all seen things that were blown up from TV to movies and thought, ‘That was a mistake’, so that was part of the debate at the start. There was a sense of taking a bit of a risk and a sense of responsibility —– you know, ‘We mustn’t mess this up’.”

That sense of responsibility might appear somewhat lighter given that Shaun is nothing like the cultural institution that is Wallace and Gromit. The Yorkshire duo could probably appear on a British bank note without much fuss at this stage, and compared with them Shaun, who made his first appearance in the Wallace and Gromit film A Close Shave, is a bit of an upstart. Yet the numbers for the TV series are nonetheless compelling: it is seen in 170 countries.

The story of the film, directed by Aardman old boy Richard Starzak, revolves around a prank gone wrong for the sheep. Led, naturally, by Shaun, who is tired of the routines of farm life, the sheep engineer a day off, lulling their short-sighted farmer to sleep in a caravan. Things spiral out of control, with the caravan soon a runaway, carrying its unconscious occupant speedily towards the city. There, knocked unconscious via a collision with a traffic light, he loses his memory. It’s up to the sheep to bring him back.

A still from Shaun the Sheep

“At the first pitch, we had the sheep consciously getting rid of the Farmer, but then it evolved to them inadvertently getting rid of him. Shaun’s always been a mischievous character,” says Lord. “If he sees a red button saying ‘do not press’, he will press it. He is always the troublemaker, but we thought it’d be better to have mischief that gets out of hand.

“That’s the appealing thing to kids — we’ve all done it. Like the time I set fire to the wastepaper basket in my bedroom. Turned out to be quite a big event, but it was an innocent experiment when I started.”

Aardman’s output is surprisingly broad. The company’s first creation was Morph, who will be remembered by the parents of Shaun’s target audience from BBC TV in the 1980s. Then came the famed Creature Comfort ads, and, lately, a pirate film (directed by Lord) and a CGI Christmas film, Arthur Christmas.

WALLACE AND GROMIT

Yet, the dominant influence on how the company is perceived comes via Wallace and Gromit, who embody the kind of timeless Britishness with which the company is associated. And if Shaun is drawn from that template, there are signs of a different world in this film. Towers of steel and glass soar over the redbrick streets of the film’s nameless city. It parodies celebrity culture, our obsessions with food and social media. One of the first people the Farmer encounters wears a Muslim head scarf.

“All that was conscious, yes,” says Lord. “Because although people think of Aardman as a company that does certain films, to my mind they are all individual director’s films. Nick Park would never have done this, but this is Richard’s vision, and he’s always been a bit more modern, a bit edgier in his instinct. So we decided to make the city big, which is difficult in puppet animation, there’s a lot of work in that, but the idea to make it multicultural was a charming idea. I’m very pleased with that.”

Two of Aardman's most famous characters, Wallace and Gromit, hit the big screen in 2005. 

What does tie the movie to the Wallace and Gromit films is a familiar richness of cultural references and visual puns. Parents can smile wryly at the nods to The Silence of the Lambs or the Beatles or Cape Fear as the kids laugh at fart jokes.

It’s a clever film, and only dumb in the literal sense. Like the series, there is no dialogue, save for some occasional, incomprehensible Mr Bean-like mumbling from the human characters.

The film is Aardman’s first in partnership with French producers StudioCanal. Arthur Christmas and The Pirates! were released through Sony. Before that, the company’s relationship with Dreamworks came to an end after Chicken Run, The Curse of the Were Rabbit and Flushed Away. But, says Lord, that was no disaster.

“We made three good films with them, and I’m hugely grateful to them because they were great. But both sides acknowledged that we naturally play in a certain arena. And there were two ways of going: start playing in Dreamworks’ arena or accept that that isn’t what we do.

“Making British films is very important to us,” he says. “Because the world is blitzed with massive American films the whole time. Disney, Dreamworks, Pixar, they’re so powerful now. The films are good, but they all come from the same cultural space. We come from a slightly different cultural space.”

SAKE OF STOPMOTION

That cultural space seems bound up with Aardman’s tradition of stop-motion films, to which Lord has reaffirmed his commitment.

“Two or three years ago, I would have said, yes, we’ll mix it up, we’ll do stop-motion and CG films,” he says. “And I’d hope to make a CG film again, but, increasingly it seems like stop- motion is what we should stick with. It’s our natural thing. We are good at it, we’ve evolved to be that. And it’s rare: that’s the point.

“There are masses of magnificent, slightly overblown CG films full of spectacle, texture and detail which is absolutely amazing. But they are very expensive to make and there is something a bit samey about them. We are doing something slightly different. Both in the storytelling style and technically.”

Different doesn’t have to mean niche, either. While, post-Dreamworks, Shaun the Sheep will have a smaller American release than some previous Aardman films, there’s a bigger world out there now. The film will be showing, for instance, on 20,000 screens across China.

“There’s a word people often use with Aardman,” says Lord. “Charm. It’s a strange word, but I think it’s a good word. Stop-motion is charming. It doesn’t whack you over the head, it doesn’t run you over, it just takes you by the hand and leads you along.”

• Shaun the Sheep: The Movie opens tomorrow