Do you remember a Fast Show sketch in which reporter Paul Whitehouse, covering the making of a Plasticine-animation movie, gradually loses the will to live, as an earnest young model-maker painstakingly shows him how he moves the dog's eyebrow a millionth of a millimetre before taking a shot, then moves it another millionth of a millimetre before taking another shot, thereby producing about one frame of film every six months?
This reporter can't help recalling it while standing on the set of Aardman Animation's first full-length claymation feature, the £30 million Chicken Run, while an earnest young animator named Merlin patiently explains how it took him two weeks to shoot a 30-second scene in which a motorbike and sidecar crashes to the ground. Plus a further week of reshoots after the film's co-directors, Nick Park and Peter Lord, reckoned it wasn't kicking up enough dust on landing. Whitehouse and co may even have underestimated the laboriousness of such an enterprise.
Aardman's unassuming creations - Morph, Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts - are seen as a kitchen-table cottage industry, but the scale of their operation takes you by surprise. They started small; the company was founded by Lord and partner Dave Sproxton (who now looks after the company's commercial side) over a bunch of doodles on the former's kitchen table, while Park, who joined later, dreamt up his first ideas in the family potting shed. Nearly 25 years and rafts of Baftas and Oscars later, Aardman is a vast warehouse nestling among Homebases and mobile phone HQs in a business park outside Bristol.
Chicken Run - the first fruit of a £155 million five-movie deal with the DreamWorks studio - is two-and-a-half times longer than the Wallace and Gromit films, but Lord calculates the whole enterprise, in terms of sets, models and manhours, is "20 times greater than anything we've attempted before". You get a flavour of this on Merlin's set: a perfect miniature replica of a prison camp, Colditz Hornby-style, down to the hand-crafted barbed wire and tiny five-bar gates, with hills and trees backlit by a sky that goes from starry to sun-drenched at the flick of a switch. The production floors hum with white-coated young people - the average age of Aardman's 300 employees, most recruited locally, is 28 - crafting, assembling, painting, and glazing the 2,000-or-so Plasticine models consumed by the production with a zeal bordering on the messianic. Macabre sights abound: boxes of eyeballs and mouths, running the gamut from beatific smiles to hideous grimaces. "Basically," says Nick Park of Chicken Run, "and this is the line we've used with everybody, I'm afraid, it's The Great Escape with battery hens." The plot has an egg-layer named Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha) leading a revolt among the birds enslaved on a dismal farm in northern England, including the heroically dim Babs (Jane Horrocks in Bubble mode), against its fearsome proprietor, Mrs Tweedy, and her (of course) hen-pecked husband. She enlists the help of a fast-talking Rhode Island rooster (Mel Gibson, no less) who crash-lands in the coop, but the installation of Mrs Tweedy's new pie-making machine (the mini-Heath Robinson contraption glimpsed earlier) means it's a race against time.
Chicken Run makes knowing nods in the direction of numerous PoW movies, but it comes replete with the ultra-English love of punnery and skewed hint-of-darkness surrealism that have become Aardman trademarks. Despite the Hollywood big-gun patronage, Park and Lord's vision seems to have survived intact. When we meet in the Aardman canteen, ostentatiously adorned with posters for DreamWorks movies, they look exhausted, after three years' labour on the movie. At the time of my visit, three months before Chicken Run's release date, it was still being filmed (perhaps inevitable when a hard day's work produces three seconds of footage at best).
It's obvious that Park and Lord are very different personalities. Lord, 42, looks like the lost fifth member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - unkempt hair, expensive glasses, abundant facial hair - and tends to lead the conversation, punctuating his observations with a big, booming laugh. Park is endearingly gauche; he hunches down in his chair and speaks in a murmur. Despite the accolades - the Oscars, the CBE, the freedom of the city of Preston - he has the air of an awkward adolescent, though those who recall the home-made outsize luminous green bow-tie he wore when collecting the Oscar for A Close Shave would find it hard to conclude that there wasn't a latent extrovert lurking in there somewhere. (He sat next to Naomi Campbell. What did you talk about, I ask. He thinks for a minute. "She said she liked my tie." Anything else? "She said `Well done' when I won.")
As co-directors, Park and Lord have maintained a daily vigil of walking the miles of studio floor, conferring with animators. Park: "We go round all the sets every single day, briefing people, checking cameras, lighting, shots. It's funny: it should be a slow, painstaking process, but we don't have time to be patient; we're trying to use all the parts of our brains at once. There's been a lot of improvising. One minute we're being asked whether a character's holding something in their right hand or left hand, the next we're trying to figure out the ending of the film."
Park and Lord came up with the models for the characters. In an office plastered with wallcharts detailing various breeds of British poultry in exhausting detail, they've inevitably had to delegate a lot of responsibility to under-animators. Has this vexed them? Are they control freaks? Lord: "There are, shall we say, competing visions. The animators are effectively actors, so I'm afraid we do sometimes get people asking what their puppet's motivation is. And we've got a few method animators."
Park: "The learning curve for me has been that I've had to stop assuming people know what's in my head. I've had to learn to be a better communicator and to be open to what other people can give you, because I have a tendency to be a dictator. In a quiet way, of course." Lord: "You do get the bizarre situation where on any given day there are maybe 12 people performing the same character at various stages in the film. So it's important for them to be synchronised."
Park: "All the animators have been meeting for lunch once a week and compare notes." Lord: "It gets down to incredibly fine detail, you know, like the thickness of the Plasticine on the eyelids."
This is edging dangerously close to Fast Show territory (Lord says he and Park know the sketch well, and can vouch for its spooky veracity - "Nick and I have done that interview many times"), so we hurriedly move the conversation along. If Aardman has grown organically up to now, is the leap to features the equivalent of the Big Bang? Lord: "Sort of, but it's just another stage in our evolution. Disney first mooted the idea of a feature around 10 years ago, but we wouldn't have been ready for it then.
Park says the important thing with the DreamWorks deal is that it gives Aardman autonomy within what he calls the studio's "benign embrace". "They've kept at arm's length," he says, "but they've also been very helpful, in that Jeffrey Katzenberg has been flying over in his private jet from Burbank to Bristol to offer help and advice."
And not interfere? Park: "No, he's pushing us to make it better, but he definitely wants our sort of film."
Lord: "He's not saying he wants another Toy Story, but there's a little tension in there, as there would naturally be. Their business is huge box office and they have a vision of how to get that, but they're not forcing our hand, saying `That won't play in Nebraska' or whatever. And they've taught us about how to structure a story, keep it flowing through the peaks and plateaux."
Aardman's next feature will be an updated version of The Tortoise and the Hare, though Lord and Park will act only as executive producers. Park will meanwhile be developing the project closest to his heart, a Wallace and Gromit movie. The pair seem abashed at how far they've come. Lord: "It's amazing how things grow, how we're filling ever-bigger buildings with more and more stuff. We employ all these people now, and I suppose the dream is to take more people on and become a sort of powerhouse of animated creativity. And finally, why chickens? Park: "We knew we'd hit the right note when we went to LA to pitch the idea to DreamWorks. We were having dinner, and Spielberg said `Oh, The Great Escape's my favourite movie, and I also have a farm with 300 chickens.' It was a dream result." Lord: "And I believe it was a chicken dinner to boot. It was obviously fated."
Chicken Run will be released on June 30th