Chris and Alex return to the feature films of the Bristol-based Aardman Animations studio for Episode 67, travelling from the world of Kensington propriety ‘up top’ to the underground chaos of Ratropolis ‘down below’ for Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006), which tells the story of the trials and tribulations of high society rat Roddy St. James who is inadvertently flushed down into the sewers of London. Mirroring this narrative collision of worlds, Flushed Away also bears the industrial weight of such duality, being part of a 12-year, four-film $250million agreement between Aardman and Hollywood studio DreamWorks Animation to produce a series of animated features. Listen as Chris and Alex examine how Aardman’s stop-frame processes (and signature silicon-based Plasticine style) combined with the workflow of computer-animated films in the U.S.; character modelling and the sculpting of digital clay as part of the Flushed Away’s CG/stop-motion hybrid aesthetics; pantomimic expression and film comedy; questions of national identity and the film’s construction of a ‘national fantastic’; the Romantic origins of fantasy storytelling; and the contribution that Flushed Away’s creativity with waste, junk, garbage and cultural detritus makes to its crafting of a highly-detailed animated world.
Mothra (1961) (with Alex Davidson)
Footnote #11 - Society for Animation Studies (with Chris Pallant)
Osmosis Jones (2001) (with Tom Sito)
Footnote #10 - Hybridity
100th Episodes
Footnote #9 - Sword and Sorcery
Your Name (2016) (Live at the British Film Institute)
Footnote #8 - Plasmaticness
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Footnote #7 - The Fantastic
Rogue One (2016) (with Jonathan Wroot)
Footnote #6 - Anthropomorphism
The Secret of Moonacre (2008) (with Lucy Shuttleworth)
Footnote #5 - High Fantasy and Low Fantasy
Contemporary Ukrainian Animation (with Joshua First)
Footnote #4 - Stop-Motion
Encanto (2021) (with Dolores Tierney)
Fantasy/Animation supports the #UCUstrike
Fantasy/Animation supports the #UCUstrike
Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) (with Brian Attebery)
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