Clay Time: WALLACE & GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL

Behold the return of one of cinema’s greatest villains: Feathers McGraw. He’s a Penguin Most Wanted disguised as a rooster through the placement of a red rubber glove on his head. His last dastardly scheme was thwarted by the bumbling British inventor Wallace and his trusty, capable canine Gromit in Aardman’s claymation classic short The Wrong Trousers in 1993. He’s spent that last three decades imprisoned in a zoo, but at long last he shall have his revenge. It’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a most pleasing return to the world of these characters—a quaint English droll wit in a cute, squishy model-village design. Nick Park’s perfect cartoon creations remain lovable leads: a tall, toothy, accident-prone dope and a silent, expressive little dog. They’re as classic as any cartoons of the last half century. They’re memorable in their looks—squishy, doughy, with incredible nuance in their eye rolls and blinks—screwy inventions, a love of cheese, tea, toasts, sweater vests, classic literature, and accidentally solving complicated problems with fortuitous Rube Goldberg plotting. Then there’s the soothing sounds of their accents in dialogue with puns that go down easy, and a design that’s squishy and tactile and loaded with sly visual gags.

It’s a treat to be in their presence again. Then add in the deviously silly villainy of their greatest foe. McGraw’s a mute match for the plucky Gromit, and here sets out to turn Wallace’s newest inventions against him. The man’s made a small army of Smart Gnomes, autonomous gardening robots. Convenient when taking the lawn tools to mow the grass and trim the hedges. Quite dangerous when they turn those tools on the townsfolk. It’s a fine feat of complications for a slight, lighter-than-air story, where the entire delight is in the feel and familiarity of the film. It has all of the whimsy and energy of their early classic shorts, and, while never quite matching the zany Buster Keaton-in-miniature zip of Trousers’ model-train action climax, manages to find enough robots and boats and boot-launchers to keep the adventure moving like clockwork. There’s nothing quite like an Aardman movie, with bright and colorful design that feels like it’d squish pleasingly under your touch, embodied in the fingerprints rippling across the clay and the figure’s motions with a light touch and a chunky solidity.  And then the charming characters plunge headlong into whimsical conflicts solved through pluck and luck. It’s irresistible.

Farm to Fable: SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE

Aardman helps keep the stop motion animation tradition alive with a distinct blend of expertly choreographed cartoon slapstick and dry British silliness unlike anything else in the family film marketplace. Their latest, Shaun the Sheep Movie, is a beautifully realized work of gentle tactile whimsy, like a big and delicate playset in which the most adorable toys act out appealing little comic dramas. The story concerns a little sheep named Shaun, first introduced in a Wallace and Gromit short before spinning off into his own cartoon series, hence the “movie” appended to the title here. Over the course of the movie, Shaun learns simple elementary kids’ movie lessons: teamwork, resourcefulness, courage, kindness, and appreciating loyal friends and family. It’s thin sweetness, but because the animators at Aardman are such geniuses at sight gags, layering the frame with funny details and staging briskly clever follies, it’s a constant joy.

The story is a simple “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse” narrative, crossed with a reverse “Parable of the Lost Sheep.” Down on a farm in an English countryside, an agrarian paradise has become routine for the inhabitants. The farmer sticks to his schedule, and so do the animals, day after day feedings and washings and shearings happening so regularly you could set your clock to it. Shaun just wants a day off, so he convinces his flock to trick their kindly keeper into counting them, thus getting him to fall fast asleep. (Right away you get the level of humor at work here, which is partly a classic picture book technique working over common phrases and concepts in a wry way that anyone can enjoy.) Unluckily, an elaborate chain of unintended accidents leaves the farmer stranded in The Big City, a knock on the head making him an amnesiac. Not only can’t he get back to take care of his flock, he doesn’t even remember he should. It’s up to Shaun and his pals to head to the city and get their farmer back.

This simple idea is used to stage a silly city symphony, a light and amiable collection of inspirations (Tati’s Playtime, Miller’s Babe: Pig in the City, and the metropolis itself has to be named after Satyajit Ray’s The Big City) synthesized into a soft and colorful children’s entertainment. It’s an entirely non-verbal film, the animals and humans alike speaking in grunts, mutters, murmurs, muddy interjections, wordless shouts, and lots of baaing, of course. Following the flock as they meander down city streets (sometimes stacked on top of each other wearing long coats, the better to blend in), they find themselves in bus stations, fancy restaurants, junkyards, and other places with plenty of comic potential. We also meet dogs, ducks, and cats. They’re all trying to stay one step ahead of a cruel animal control employee. Meanwhile, the farmer bumbles around tying to regain his sense of purpose. And, back on the farm, the pigs have taken over the farmhouse (shades of Animal House).

Visual gags carry the day, writer-directors Mark Burton and Richard Starzak and their team of animators finding unexpected flourishes. They take obvious jokes (like an animal shelter full of critters inhabiting jailhouse stereotypes) a step farther, into delightfully weird images (recurring shots of a mean dog who silently stares with unblinking bloodshot eyes) that are then taken even one step farther, building a funny cutaway to a great payoff. You might expect three sheep to stack inside a coat to look vaguely human, but would you think they’d collide with two men inside a horse costume? That’s the sort of thing that’s so charmingly unexpected, and yet somehow perfectly understandable, it’s hard to resist.

Most unexpected, perhaps, is how sweetly touching it becomes without feeling sappy. Even though I was consistently entertained and found much to appreciate about its handcrafted qualities, I was nonetheless surprised how invested I became in the flock’s desire to be reunited with their farmer friend. It’s partly the fault of an original faux-Beach Boys song “Feels Like Summer” threaded throughout the film, in the opening where the baby sheep first meet their shepherd, then later a song they can sing together while lost, before finally playing triumphantly again once we reach the inevitable, but well-earned, happy conclusion. But it’s also in how immediately loveable Aardman can make these cartoon animals, in cute expressions and enjoyable antics. Their stop-motion style is instantly recognizable, and irreplaceable. We're lucky to have them.

A Pirate's Life for Them: THE PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS

There’s something so charmingly handmade about the stop-motion animation of Aardman, the British studio of Peter Lord and Nick Park, who have made the Wallace and Gromit films and Chicken Run. Knowing that every moment, down to the smallest detail, involved a painstaking process of moving the characters and props incrementally a frame at a time means that not a single sight gag or bit of background tomfoolery went without careful planning. These are dense movies with visual jokes layered and lovingly presented and yet their stories are so breezily charming in the telling it hardly feels like work. Repeat viewings reveal an even greater appreciation for the high level of consistent craftsmanship. It’s mighty hard work to feel this slight and effortless.

Perhaps that’s why Aardman’s forays into CGI have been a mixed bag. In Flushed Away (fine) and Arthur Christmas (a wee bit less than fine), some of the comedic appeal is still present in the writing. But for some reason seeing the same designs – round eyes, doughy faces, toothy grins – and detail in a shinier computerized package takes the viewing experience a step away from the handmade qualities that is clearly an integral part of the Aardman experience. It’s hard work to make a CGI movie, to be sure, but I never stop marveling at the level of dedication and planning it takes to pull off even the littlest touch with stop-motion.

And so I was predisposed to like the company’s return to that form of animation in a feature length way. Luckily, The Pirates! Band of Misfits rewarded my hopeful predisposition with a film that’s so silly it’d be hard not to get caught up in it all. It’s been adapted by Gideon Defoe from his book The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, a much better title. (In fact, it’s been released under that title in the UK.) The story follows a group of pirates in the late 1800s desperate to win the Pirate of the Year award for their captain Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) and prove themselves worthy scoundrels.

Pirate Captain has lost the award twenty years in a row, so he figures he is overdue. His crew, with the voices of Martin Freeman, Lenny Henry, Anton Yelchin, Ashley Jensen, Brendan Gleeson, and Al Roker (?), is a motley collection of peg legs, patches, a suspiciously curvaceous pirate, and one really fat parrot. They may not accomplish much in the way of looting and plundering, but they care about each other, so that’s nice. Besides, they seem much more interested in having fun waterskiing, putting on disguises and eating ham, though not all at the same time.

On their way to find “lots of sparkling booty,” they end up running into Charles Darwin (David Tennant), hence the original scientist-referencing title. Darwin and his trained monkey butler (a “man-panzee”) end up getting the pirates into a mess of trouble involving a maniacal Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) and the Royal Academy of Science, with special cameos from Jane Austen and the Elephant Man. From that alone, you can tell this is a movie refreshingly out of step with contemporary family film trends. It’s not a hipper than thou kids’ flick with contemporary pop culture references and grating lowest-common-denominator gags a la the Chipmunks or Smurfs updates or the worst of Dreamworks (or, even worse, sub-Dreamworks) Animation. It’s a movie that is content to reference late 1800s culture in all kinds of ways both subtle and obvious.

It’s a film of sophistication and class in that way, that rewards intelligence and curiosity, which makes it all the more giggly to descend into droll, good-natured silliness right along with these sweet, lovable rapscallions. These goofy pirates make this an animated period piece that’s an unabashed cartoon willing to rustle up historical context in which to spin out crazy slapstick, unexpected non sequiters, a handful of tossed off anachronisms and occasional meta winks in a beautifully straight-faced style. The whole story is a funny mix between a small (very small) amount of real history and hysterical silly fictions. Director Peter Lord and the whole Aardman crew go wild with the hilarious detail. I liked how Darwin’s taxidermy creatures all have terrified expressions on their dead faces and Queen Victoria’s secret-throne room floor is covered with trapdoors. The walls of all the little sets are plastered with small visual jokes that zing by so fast I know I didn’t catch them all.

Narratively speaking, the film is a tad bumpy. It takes quite a while for the plot proper to kick in and, because the characters are purposefully thin archetypes, it’s hard to get all that invested in their emotional arcs, such as they are. But it’s all so winningly detailed in dialogue that zigs and zags and visually, especially in action sequences with oodles of moving parts. And it’s such a well-played goof that’s it’s hard to mind so much that it’s ever so slightly uneven and ultimately a bit less satisfying than the best that Aardman has been. It’s the kind of movie where an island is known as Blood Island because “it’s the exact shape of some blood,” a pirate wonders if pigs are fruit, and Pirate Captain won’t sail a certain route because it would take them right through the spot where the map’s decorative sea monster resides. It’s the kind of movie where London’s scientists pick the Discovery of the Year with an applause meter, one of the attendees of a secret gathering of heads-of-state is Uncle Sam, and a monkey butler communicates through a seemingly endless number of flash cards. The whole film has a likable feeling of sharp, exaggerated silliness of a most lovingly handcrafted kind.

Reindeer Games: ARTHUR CHRISTMAS

Arthur Christmas is a bright, colorful, nonthreatening CGI kiddie film about Santa Claus and his family and his elves up at the North Pole. It’s adequate, passable entertainment in that it’s not actively terrible or aggressively annoying, but it’s also bland and with only faint glimmers of personality. It feels homogenized. That’s a shame. It comes from Aardman, the British animation company that brought us the droll, delightful stop-motion Wallace & Gromit films and Chicken Run. I expected more from them.

Still, it’s a perfectly acceptable film that’s in no ways insulting. It tells a sweet story about Arthur (James McAvoy), Santa’s youngest son who’s a bumbling guy always messing up the plans of his older brother (Hugh Laurie), a strict manager who makes sure Santa (Jim Broadbent) and the sleigh run on schedule. In this film the sleigh is a giant spaceship-like construction that hovers invisibly over a town, deposits thousands of black-ops elves to deliver the presents, then, mere seconds later, moves on to the next town.

The system’s perfect. Of course, any movie about a perfect system must throw a wrench in, so this Christmas Eve one present is left behind. That’s within the acceptable margin of error to the older brother and to Santa, so Arthur recruits his grandfather (Bill Nighy), a retired Santa, to help him deliver the present. They borrow some of the old reindeer and sprinkle some magic dust and away they go. Hijinks ensue, as does familial healing and a reinforcement of a deeper, warmer meaning of Christmas.

So, it’s not that bad. The set-up is fun and the follow through is more or less what you’d expect. In fact, in patches, like a fun opening sequence that follows the covert ops as a bunch of elves deliver the presents, the film runs quite smoothly and charmingly. I was expecting something with just a smidge more wit, just a smidge livelier. It’s good enough, but that just didn’t feel like enough.

After some time, I started pondering the ways of the North Pole as presented here. Santa is an honorific passed down the family line from father to son. At one point in the film he’s called a ceremonial figurehead. (Mrs. Claus (Imelda Staunton) seems to be a nickname for whoever happens to be married to Santa). The elves are a vast army of what exactly? Feudal serfs? Indentured servants? Residents of a company town? Clearly this was not what director Sarah Smith and her co-writer Peter Baynham wanted me to be thinking about, but under the low-level antics and red, white, and green Christmas palate I often found little else to distract me.