Shaun of the city
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E-mail China Daily, July 16, 2015
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| Shaun the Sheep Movie, adapted from a popular British animated TV series, will be screened on the Chinese mainland this weekend. [Photo provided to China Daily] |
In the era of computer-generated imagery, such cartoon titles spark nostalgia among younger Chinese, many of whom grew up watching clay models or puppets of animated characters on TV series in the 1980s.
"They were like puppets manipulated by the animators. With skeletons inside their clay bodies, they could move their arms, legs and eyes," says Starzak, 56, known for the clay animation comedy franchise Creature Comforts. He uses his fingers on a tabletop to show what is known as the stop-motion effect.
Stop motion, a technique that originated in The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), makes a physically manipulated object or person move in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of continued movement, when the series of frames are played in a sequence.
Up to 150 crew members worked for three years on Shaun the Sheep Movie at Aardman Animations, sometimes with just a few seconds of the 85-minute feature completed at the end of a long day.
The British directors spoke to China Daily on the sidelines of a media event on Tuesday, after which they left for a promotional tour of Shanghai, Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, and Shenzhen and Guangzhou in Guangdong province.
During the screening of a trailer in Beijing earlier this week, Burton knelt down on the floor to mimic a sheepdog.
"Sometimes we practiced the shots and rehearsed the shots. So when we animated, we could get the comic timing right," says Burton.
In an attempt to make the movie "fresh" as compared with the TV series, the feature isn't set on a farm but instead in a big city, just like "Beijing with lots of vehicles and people", says Burton.
When asked about their Chinese box-office expectations from Shaun the Sheep Movie, which has grossed $70 million globally to date, Starzak gives the figure "between zero and 1 billion yuan", displaying some British humor.
Among the few imported animated titles this summer, Shaun appears positioned for competition in China, where 18 homegrown animation movies are up for release through August across 2,000 cinemas on the mainland.
"Write a good story. I've talked quite a lot with some Chinese animators," Burton says. "The crucial element is the storytelling."
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