This truly is A Grand Night In
Aardman has stayed true to a founding kaupapa of telling a great story and taking as long as necessary to make a film.
Anyonewho’s been to a movie with a child or two in tow over the past 30-odd years has at some time given thanks for the existence of Nick Park, Peter Lord, David Sproxton and the Aardman animation studio.
Lord and Sproxton started the company, from the humblest and unlikeliest of beginnings, in their hometown of Bristol, United Kingdom.
They found early success making short animated interludes for the utterly cult UK children’s show Vision On, before bringing Park onboard after seeing his early footage featuring Wallace and Gromit.
The threemen combined into a creative supergroup that would go on to completely legitimise stop motion ‘‘claymation’’ as a credible medium with which to make great cinema.
From early commissions, which led to award-winning TV commercials, to the eventual massive global success of the Wallace and Gromit franchise, Shaun The Sheep, Arthur Christmas and Chicken
Run, all of which have knocked them dead in the aisles of cinemas around the world, Aardman has stayed true to a founding kaupapa of just telling a great story and
taking as long as was necessary to make the film.
It’s pretty much expected of the big Hollywood franchises now that the release date for the finished film will be announced even before the script is finalised.
If you’ve ever wondered why a film with a budget in the hundreds of millions could feel so sloppily written and thrown together, it’s because we demand it should be so.
Aardman’s insistence on getting the film perfect before worrying about release strategies feels almost revolutionary.
AGrandNight In: The Story of Aardman, a 2015 documentarywhich turned up on Netflix in the past few weeks, is essential viewing for anyone who really cares about how film and TV get made and who gets to tell the stories.
Among the talking heads who pop up – Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, et al – all agree on one thing: the world is a better place for Aardman and their films being in it. Kia kaha!
I’m also liking Edgewalkers on TVNZ OnDemand. Each 20ish-minute episode follows and lets us in on a little of the lives of the young men andwomen from Auckland’s North African expatriate and refugee communities.
There are some tough home truths here, as well as blasts of some pretty great newmusic, homespun wisdom and a hell of a lot of reasons to feel wildly excited aboutwhat these New Zealanderswill grow up to achieve.
The one theme that comes through, over and again, is that while modesty and humility are necessary, denial and selfeffacement will get you nowhere in a society that probably isn’t seeing your true potential.
Recommended and definitely eyeopening.
And, for some genuinely creepy bingeing, The Sister, also on TVNZ OnDemand, is writer Neil Cross ( Luther) adapting his own novel Burial into a pretty darned good, four-part chiller set in the years after a young woman disappeared on her way home from a New Year’s Eve party.
Russell Tovey ( BeingHuman) is terrific as the apparently happily married Nathan, who just might be keeping a very dark secret from his wife Holly. Cross weaves in a dash of the supernatural to lift what could have been a police procedural to an ever so slightly mythical realm. No, the world does not need another TV show based on the premise of a youngwoman’s murder. But The Sister is at least an original and not-completelytone-deaf example.