Why Farmageddon is poised to become another big hit for Aardman

Every couple of years, Bristol’s world-renowned Aardman Animations unleashes another feature and a well-oiled PR machine fires up. Journalists from all over the world are ferried to Aardman’s Aztec West warehouse studio to marvel at the extraordinarily detailed sets and the painstaking craft involved in bringing those lumps of plasticine to life. They’re also supplied with a blizzard of statistics covering everything from the numbers of little eyeballs and mouths needed to create all those facial expressions to the amount of time it takes to produce a minute of useable animation.

But the process of bringing a feature to the screen begins a lot earlier. While shoddy writing continues to bedevil much of the British film industry, Aardman really understand the importance of good storytelling. This perhaps explains why – uniquely in the world of animation – they’ve never made a duff movie. DreamWorks have given us several of them (remember the dire Shark Tale?), Disney had a long fallow period, and even the mighty Pixar blotted its copybook with those mediocre Cars films.

Mark Burton (left) and Richard Starzak (right): the men behind the sheep (so to speak)

Writer Mark Burton has been involved with Aardman ever since their first feature, Chicken Run, back in 2000. He was nominated for an Oscar for co-directing the Shaun the Sheep Movie back in 2015, and serves as an executive producer on, and co-writer of, the sequel, A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon. A semi-detached Aardperson (“I’m a bit of the furniture, but I’ve never actually been an Aardman employee,” he explains) who’s also worked for DreamWorks, Warner Brothers and Sony, he’s well placed to comment on what makes Aardman stand out from the, er, flock in this uniquely collaborative medium.

Work on one of the big Farmageddon sets at Aardman’s Aztec West studio

“One thing the Americans have is more resources,” he says. “They can throw money at things. You are very much part of a machine. It sounds very clinical, but there are lots of good things about it. There are some very talented people involved and I learned a lot working at DreamWorks.

“We often ask ourselves about the unique Aardman ingredient. We don’t know what it is. I don’t think we specifically want to know what it is. In the end, it boils down to a core creative team. We’ve stolen a phrase that they have at Pixar, which is the Brain Trust. Ours is a Brain Trust in a more informal, British, Aardman way, with people like Nick Park and Peter Lord. In that early stage of creating the story it’s collaborative, but as you get into the production process itself it becomes even more collaborative. Because then you’ve got designers and the whole visual side, including the animators. At the end of the credits there are hundreds of names. It may be a bit tiresome for the audience, but it’s important to know that all those people have contributed.”

Is it just us, or is this rather reminiscent of the Full Moon on Stokes Croft?

Farmageddon is more of an epic adventure than its predecessor. This time, a cute alien named Lu-La crash lands near Mossy Bottom Farm. Our ovine hero and his pals must dodge U-rated sinister government agents to return her to her spaceship. “The first film was quite low-concept: Shaun and the flock go to the city to get the farmer back. You could argue that in a weird Aardman way it’s grounded in the real world. For the second film, Richard [executive producer, Richard Starzak, who has herded Shaun through his many small- and big-screen incarnations] wanted to do something a bit more out-there, a bit more high-concept. So he came up with the idea of the science fiction genre. The writers were around early on. You tend the take these ideas and throw them around, kick the tyres. ‘Test to destruction’ is another phrase we use. You know: is this idea going to be worth spending the next three or four years on?”

So how much of a challenge is it writing for a character that doesn’t speak? “There are challenges and it can be limiting. But those parameters can be really liberating, in a paradoxical way. It makes you work much harder about the way you tell that story. You want to make it as profound as you can in terms of its themes and emotions. But you can’t make it too plotty, because I think that’s where you get into a mess without dialogue. With the first film, we weren’t quite sure how it was going to work. That was before The Artist came out, so we were out on a limb a little bit. When we said to [distributors] Studiocanal we’re going to have a film without any dialogue, they blinked a couple of times. But they went with it. I think what’s interesting about Farmageddon is that when the story’s working you don’t really think about the dialogue – whether it’s there or not.”

Bringing Lu-La’s spaceship to life

Burton is already deeply immersed in his next writing project: the third Paddington film. That’s rather interesting given the friendly rivalry that has previously existed between the marmalade-loving bear and the mischievous sheep. “The first two Paddington films were intimidatingly good,” he acknowledges. “There’s always good-natured competition. Shaun the Sheep got 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. Then Paddington 2 came out and got 100%.”

The bastards! “Yeah, exactly – that’s what we said. But now I’m working on Paddington, I don’t think I can beat 100% . . .”

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon is in cinemas everywhere on October 18. If you really can’t wait that long, the Encounters festival has an exclusive preview screening on Saturday 28 September. Go here for ticket details. Expect to see Paddington 3 sometime in 2020.