FLOCK-BUSTER IN MAKING
Witty Shaun The Sheep hits big screen
Shaun the sheep was born in Nick Park’s acclaimed 1995 stop-motion short A Close Shave, featuring Wallace & Gromit. The leader of the flock graduated to a more prominent role on a Wallace & Gromit TV show seven years later and starred in his own series starting in 2007.
Thanks to British filmmakers Richard Starzak and Mark Burton, the woolly scamp is the head mischief-maker in a new animated motion picture, Shaun the Sheep Movie, an Aardman Animations project. But the new venture did have its creative challenges.
“The Shaun the Sheep show was seven minutes per episode and the movie is 85 minutes,” says Burton from his home near London. “We made key decisions quite early on.”
The mix of silliness, farce, satire and silent charm remain the same, however. It has led to box office success in Europe and Asia where the film was released earlier this year.
In the comedy, Shaun intends to take a break from the flock, but one mess up leads to another when Shaun and his sheep, The Farmer and his dog Bitzer, all end up in the Big City. The new environment creates all kinds of shenanigans.
As usual in an Aardman production, there are narrative layers to admire as much as the state-of-theart stop motion claymation techniques. But Starzak and Burton understood their priorities clearly.
“Early in the process it’s not really a funny exercise, because we have lots of heartfelt conversations,” Burton says.
They agreed on one key transition from the popular series. They needed a change of venue.
“We wanted to start the story in the world everybody knows from the series and then take them into a different world,” says Starzak. “The city is the opposite to the country, so that was the obvious place to go, and we thought we’d enjoy exploring that.”
Monitoring the delicate balance of wit and emotional resonance turned out to be a test, too.
“We didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that it’s a story about sheep so it’s a bit absurd, but you have to take your characters very seriously,” Starzak says.
So the duo first concocted the main benchmarks for the plot, and loaded in the set pieces and the gags afterward.
“I suppose what we do is undercut the emotion with humour, which is the English way,” says Starzak.
“But not in a cynical way,” says Burton.
Yes, the Shaun the Sheep team finish each other’s sentences but they come from different showbiz worlds.
Starzak is a day-oner at Aardman, steeped in the stop-motion tradition as a writer and director. Burton is a veteran comedy writer on British TV shows. They met and connected on Aardman’s big hit, Chicken Run, in 2000, when Burton was brought in to polish the movie’s comedy.
They’ve remained friends and colleagues ever since.
“I think it’s honesty, really,” says Starzak of their ability to collaborate effectively. “We know the room is a safe place, and we say what we like. But that doesn’t mean we always get along well.”
Adds Burton: “We argue points to win our case.”
The Shaun the Sheep Movie resolutions have already led to a respectable box office of nearly $60 million with the U.S. and Canada to be accounted for soon.
Aardman films always do well across Canada, while the past animated features scored well only on the U.S. East and West coasts.
Both Starzak and Burton are hoping their new movie expands the Aardman demographic to middle America, too.
“It’s been embraced in many countries, including China, and so we are thinking all Americans will stick with it,” Starzak says.
“Americans are very much a part of the human race,” says Burton. “We’re hoping they will have the same reaction across the country.”