When Dreamworks announced that they wouldn't need the services of Aardman Animation anymore, I was a little bit worried about what would happen with the British animation giants. But, I shouldn't have worried. Now that Aardman is safe and sound within the realms of Sony Animation, they have been hammering away on no less than four new movies. Most interesting of these, at least to me, is The Cat Burglars, a claymation movie about a posse of stray cats who steal milk, and which mixes Aardman's traditional style with the cool of a movie like Ocean's Eleven. Aardman itself is even dubbing it "family friendly Tarantino", and if that doesn't intrigue you, then I don't know what does.
Aardman is also working on Christmas movie called Operation Rudolph, where all is revealed about how Santa Claus is able to get his gifts to the home of every kid in the world on Christmas Eve. The movie will show Santa's workshop as a military style operation, with highly trained elves doing most of the travelling for their boss. Then there's a pirate movie based on a series of books, simply called Pirates. The fourth project will be the new movie by mister Aardman himself, Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit, but the only thing known about this is that it won't be the next Wallace and Gromit movie.
And if this full range of movies doesn't comfort you, then surely these words from Sarah Smith, the creative director handling all four of the movies, will: "This is an interesting time in the animation industry," she told Variety. "While there is clearly still a big appetite among cinemagoers for great animated films, there is a feeling of sameness about much of the product coming out of the industry at present, in terms of their stories. I think there's a great opportunity to excite audiences by raising the stakes in terms of the quality, intelligence and variety of the stories our animated films tell and the genres they inhabit."
Aardman has yet to make anything that was below 'really good', so let's hope the looser ties to their new distributor (who no doubt are less meddlesome than Dreamworks was) will stir up their creative juices and will help them deliver more classic entertainment.
Read more: Animated Chatter
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