Wallace & Gromit之后:一只很英国的羊

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CAVA
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Wallace & Gromit之后:一只很英国的羊

Post by CAVA » 2007-03-10 5:14

尽管《人兔的诅咒》好看得不得了,电影并没有完成预期的票房指标。制作公司Aardman和美国投资人分道扬镳后,重和BBC合作,从三月起在其儿童节目推出40集短片,主角就是Wallace和Gromit的伙伴之一,Shaun the Sheep。

小羊Shaun的毛在A Close Shave里被Wallace的自动流水线全部剃去,并飞快地织成了一件毛衣。所以被取名Shaun(剃光的意思)。Shaun喜欢离开羊群自己行动,聪明劲儿和动手能力有Gromit之风。

新系列每集只有5分钟的样子,但尽显Wallace & Gromit的一贯风格。场景是非常非常英国的一个农场,细节做得可爱之极。‘人物’包括Shaun,它的羊群伙伴,没太多权威的牧羊狗,三只淘气的小猪,和有点笨的农场主人。Shaun和伙伴尽职吃草之余,很爱搞些兴趣爱好活动,拿卷心菜当足球踢,自发水彩画课程,等等等等。羊们常有些异想天开的主意,三只小猪又以捣蛋为己任,所以闯祸是在所难免。

昨晚把A Close Shave找出来又看了一遍,发现Wallace & Gromit的优势还是在于短片。英国幽默本来就是短而精,抻长了反而不灵,要迎合美国市场的口味更是有失去自己风格的危险。所以豆先生的电视系列远比主题电影好看。话是这么说,今年Bean的电影出来还是要去捧场的。

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Last edited by CAVA on 2007-03-10 6:13, edited 1 time in total.

CAVA
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Post by CAVA » 2007-03-10 5:16

http://www.shaunthesheep.com

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From The Sunday TimesFebruary 18, 2007

Call my fluff

There is such a thing as a comedy blink. It’s obvious when you think about it, and it’s all about timing. Oliver Hardy turns towards the camera with a deadpan expression, holds for a beat, then blinks. Time it right and it’s comedy gold. Time it wrong and it’s just a fat man blinking. So imagine that, instead of a seasoned comic, you have a little Plasticine sheep. It’s facing the camera with a deadpan look, and you have to stick on the Plasticine eyelids at exactly the right moment to make the blink funny.

In Shaun the Sheep, there’s an awful lot of comedy blinking. The series is silent, so eyelids have to do plenty of talking. It’s the latest production from Aardman, the claymation crew behind Wallace & Gromit ― though a glance at the puppets’ features should prove that. Indeed, fans of the animator Nick Park will be familiar with the show’s lead: Shaun was the little lamb that got away in his 1996 Oscar-winning short A Close Shave.

Shaun is technically the first full spin-off from an Aardman animation short or feature.

And spin-offs have a chequered career in television history. Frasier did well coming out of Cheers; Joey did disastrously coming out of Friends. As a rule of thumb, the less significant the character in the original, the more likely they are to succeed. The omens for Shaun are thus reasonably good ― he was on screen for a tiny part of A Close Shave. Even so, Park took some persuading to franchise Shaun out.

“We were talking to the BBC about a children’s show,” says the producer Julie Lockhart, “and we were aware of how popular Shaun had been. Nick is always wary of exploiting his characters, but he gave the go-ahead for another team to work on Shaun, and supervised the whole project.”

When Lockhart talks about Shaun’s success, she is, in theory, discussing a nebulous concept. Artistic appeal is traditionally hard to quantify. In the case of Shaun, however, it was simple. The fluffy charmer was the single most successful piece of merchandise A Close Shave produced. His children’s backpacks and hot-water bottles are still flying off the shelves more than 10 years later.

As a result, the show ― and its inevitable merchandising revenue ― comes at a useful time for Aardman. Having signed a deal for up to five pictures with DreamWorks in 1999, and after publicly celebrating the success of Chicken Run, the two companies announced the end of their partnership on January 30, after months of speculation in the American press. Aardman’s last two features, Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Flushed Away, both lost money, with Flushed Away costing DreamWorks £73m to make, but recouping just £25m at the box office.

Although the official statements on the split were full of mutual admiration, DreamWorks had planned its two-movies-per-year schedule until 2010 without an Aardman

feature in sight, and the Brits were finding demands to make their very English sense of humour more US-friendly creatively stifling. “We always knew America would be a hard ― we’re a very English company,” says Aardman’s Arthur Sheriff. “We embrace the international market, and we are talking to other distributors, but part of our strength is that sense of humour, and we want to continue with it.”

Certainly, Shaun the Sheep seems about as British as you can get. It’s set in rolling countryside, near the fields of a charming grey-stone farm, and the plots usually revolve around Shaun, the smart sheep in a dangerously stupid flock, attempting to lead his errant band through the complications of the modern world. In one episode, he organises himself, two comrades and a scarecrow’s clothing into a tottering fake human to purchase takeaway pizzas for the gang. In another, the dimwitted farmer chucks out his old record-player, allowing the animals ― after some suitably incompetent experimenting ― to set up a nightclub in the barn. The farm’s snidely grinning pigs act as a counterpoint to Shaun’s schemes ― gatecrashing the club to breakdance, for instance ― while there are plenty of Gary Larson-style gags about the farmer failing to spot tomfoolery. The supporting cast includes the farm dog, Bitzer, a fat sheep called Shirley, who eats anything that moves, and a tiny baby lamb called Timmy, who seems to have stolen Shaun’s “cutest character in show” award.

Unlike your traditional ship-’em-out-by-the-bucketload kid’s TV show, Shaun has been in production for almost two years. As you walk round Aardman’s vast warehouse on the outskirts of Bristol, the reasons for this enormously lengthy schedule become apparent. Film and television studios are, sadly, among the least glamorous places on earth. Most of the time, nothing much happens; when it does, it’s usually to do with the wiring. Compared to a claymation studio, however, traditional studios are hives of furious activity.

Characters in Shaun the Sheep move 25 times per second, which means resetting the scene 1,500 times for every minute of footage. For a seven-minute short like each episode of Shaun, therefore, that’s almost 10,500 scenes. Although Aardman’s immense warehouse space is subdivided into tens of mini studios, they produce roughly six seconds of Shaun footage daily. If you share the impatient attitude of your rather excitable correspondent, you’d be forgiven for squawking: “In the name of God, man, can’t you pick up the pace a little?” On the contrary, they would gently inform you: this is Aardman working at breakneck pace. For a full-length feature like Chicken Run, they feel pretty damned pleased if they produce a single second per day. It’s a wonder nobody breaks into a long, wailing scream and takes a mallet to the stars.

Patience, however, is financially rewarding. As Shaun and his co-stars are entirely silent ― with the exception of Vic Reeves singing the title song and actors providing baas ― the show is already approaching Mr Bean-style export status. It’s been sold to 72 countries before the first episode has aired. Aardman has even made the shop signs illegible, to ensure foreign buyers are happy. In this country, the BBC is launching the series on March 5 on CBBC, which makes a neat circle: Aardman began life making Morph animations for the 1970s children’s shows Vision On and Take Hart, but has never before made a full-scale kids’ series.

“We started out slightly worried about how to script the humour,” confesses Lockhart. “In the end, we just went with stuff that made us laugh. You have to trust your own instincts, rather than try to second-guess children.

“You find that slapstick always works ― although this is for kids at primary school, and they want very different things at different ages. Eight-year-olds, for instance, are always asking to see arms getting chopped off, and loads of blood. We, though, have to exclude any violence for fear of imitative behaviour. The BBC won’t play some Tom and Jerry cartoons for just that reason, and the only change they asked us to make was to have a character using a chainsaw wear protective gloves and a hat.”

The focus group is, of course, a terrible, terrible thing in television. It stifles creativity and forces script ideas through narrow holes. Nonetheless, it seemed appropriate to run Shaun past one composed of 3- to 10-year-olds. If this sample is anything to go by, girls and boys will be split down the middle on the show. While the pigs and the dog appeal to the gentlemen (although, as Lockhart says, they’d like a little more bloodshed), the ladies prefer Timmy.

Indeed, the show’s first British review comes from Rosa, aged six: “I liked Shaun when he saw the bull and got a red cloth, and the bull wanted to run at him, but ran past and missed him. But Timmy is my favourite. He’s so cute, and he was funny on the tightrope.” Sounds as if Timmy is ready for a spin-off of his own.

森林的火焰
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Post by 森林的火焰 » 2007-03-10 9:16

:admir002: :admir002: :admir002:
http://harps.yculblog.com
搬家了搬家了

karen
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Post by karen » 2007-03-10 11:05

哗, 有新的可看啦! :love015:

火星狗
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Post by 火星狗 » 2007-03-10 13:40

昏倒,BBC从三月份开始的儿童节目,这可怎么追啊,大概只能寄希望于好心人upload到youtube上了。

还是英国人有耐性,和美国人一周一集赶火车似的电视剧集不可同日而语。
电影并没有完成预期的票房指标
这太让人吃惊。我觉得The curse of the were-rabbit算是难得的老少皆宜的片子,有educated口味的观众固然会看得到达ecstacy的状态,就是作为一部普通的娱乐电影它也完全可以让观众从头笑到尾。

CAVA
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Post by CAVA » 2007-03-10 14:20

官方网站上有CLIP的,可以先睹为快。http://www.shaunthesheep.com

DVD在网上已经有卖了。我准备它在商店里一出来就去抢购。

啊哈,Youtube上真的有了。

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Post by 狸狸 » 2007-03-11 0:04

:admir002: :admir002: :admir002: :admir002:
Perhaps we grows very strong, stronger than Wraiths.
Lord Smeagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum!
Eat fish every day, three times a day, fresh from the sea.

silkworm
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Post by silkworm » 2007-03-11 7:53

还是最喜欢牧羊犬。

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