Handmade Tail
ROBIN ROBIN Aardman swaps Plasticine for needlecraft in a beautifully handmade short.
When you put a camera in front of something real, magic happens,” says executive producer Sarah Cox. “There’s a depth to it, the shadows seem to be so much more three-dimensional, but you also see things that you didn’t plan for.”
While the meticulous planning on Robin Robin started almost seven years ago, Aardman’s latest, most ambitious animated short took on a life of its own during production – with every character, prop and background element designed like handmade Christmas decorations, imperfections and all.
“Everything has a wonk to it,” laughs Simon Farrell, the film’s art director. “We’ve tried to use real materials to keep them in their purest form, so we’ve used a lot of fabrics with fluffy fibres, like needlefelt for the puppets and floristry paper for all the leaves. They’re all just really beautiful things to hold and move”.
The story of an orphaned robin raised by a family of burglar mice, Robin Robin is a heist movie, a Christmas carol and a folk musical in one – with Richard E. Grant’s rakish Magpie (channelling Withnail) and Gillian Anderson’s sly
cat (channelling Margaret Thatcher) helping Robin on a journey of singing self-discovery. Giving Teasers a virtual tour of the sets, the film’s crew describe the painstaking process that saw traditional crafting techniques matched with old-school animation processes.
“A lot of elements like fire, smoke, water, rain and snow are traditionally very difficult in stop-frame animation, but we’ve made a feature of them,” says director of photography Dave Alex Riddett, standing in front of an intricate miniature snowscape. “We’ve animated those elements, mainly in wool fibres, on sheets of glass that we can then layer up over the main shot.”
Averaging three seconds of animation per day, the filmmakers rotated 60 different sets, each one duplicated in three different scales. The biggest challenge came from staging the film’s big musical numbers, with synchronised choreography controlled using crosshatches of invisible ink to make sure each tiny paw and claw was hitting the right beat.
Throw in the extra headache of shooting during a pandemic (when each puppet had to be quarantined for 72 hours before a different animator could touch it) and you have one of the most complex films Aardman has ever attempted – but one that they’re all particularly proud of.
“Short films don’t have a great cultural platform in Britain,” says co-director Dan Ojari. “Except for Christmas time, where families come together and watch a short film, like The Snowman or Wallace And Gromit. These wonderful little films really feel like presents to the country every year. My greatest hope would be for people to still be watching Robin Robin next year, and for it to become a tradition.” PB
ETA | 27 NOVEMBER / ROBIN ROBIN STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM NEXT MONTH.