Pirates!, Aardman and the power of mixed-media animation

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is well on its way to being a box-office smash, and shows the brilliant Aardman Animation at their very best, but it's also a significant technical triumph, and a great demonstration of the strength of blending classic stop-motion techniques with cutting edge computer technology.

The Pirate Captain prepares to board...

Filled with the dry wit, hilarious visual gags and good-hearted adventure that has made Aardman Britain's leading animation studio, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists was released in the UK last week, and looks sure to be as much of a hit with audiences as with critics. Based on the first of a series of comic novels by Gideon Defoe (hence it's idiosyncratic title, which would sit much more comfortably on a bookshelf than a cinema hoarding, and which is being changed to the more manageable The Pirates! Band of Misfits for its US release) it also has the potential to become a sizeable franchise.

If it does, then its success will be well-deserved. The Pirates! is a gleeful piece of swashbuckling family entertainment, every frame stuffed with brilliant jokes that demand a second or third viewing and a fantastic cast including a star-turn by Hugh Grant as the hapless Pirate Captain and the incredible Imelda Staunton as a pirate-hating Queen Victoria. It also has a winning script which refuses to talk down to its audience, keeping the parents interested with cameo appearances by the Elephant Man and Jane Austen rather than cheap 'adult' humour.

Perhaps best of all, and easiest to pass over, is its gorgeous animation, which manages to stay true to the stop-motion which made Aardman's name in the 1980's and 90's while providing eye-bursting 3D and seamlessly introducing a variety of computer generated landscapes and effects. 

It's not Aardman's first foray into mixed-media animation: the apparently 'home-spun' Wallace & Gromit in the Cure of the Were-Rabbit involved the participation of leading post-production company MPC Films, who provided a plethora of computer generated bunnies to 'bulk out' those created by Nick Park and his team.

Can you separate the CG bunnies from their plasticine cousins?
I'm not sure we can...

In The Pirates! however, Aardman incorporated mixed-media techniques throughout the animation process. Computer generation was handled in-house, made possible by Aardman's earlier experiments with computer generated animation for their modestly successful all-CG collaboration with Dreamworks, Flushed Away. As so much of Pirate Captain's adventures take place on the water, a famously time-consuming substance to work with in traditional stop-motion, it naturally suggested the full-on incorporation of computer generated visuals. 

The ocean swells, the sweeping vistas of Victorian London and a host of other elements have been rendered digitally rather than in-camera, and it is a credit to the skill of Aardman's team that the effect is never jarring. Aardman have essentially updated an intrinsic principle of animation, in which the background is 'pre-rendered', whether this means painted onto a single surface or onto multiple panes of glass as in many of Disney's most lush environments, while the characters are animated by hand and overlaid. Here it was the motley band of pirates and their (not very sea-worthy) ship that were superimposed over the computer generated environment using green screen.

Animators work to blend the set and characters into the
computer generated ocean environment - here Charles Darwin
is readied to walk the plank into a digital ocean

It doesn't stop there, the animation has also been rendered in highly effective 3D, and contains numerous moments which imitate traditional cell-animation. These include the comic travelling sequences, in which the pirate ship careers around a map, leaving a confused trail of red dots as it ricochets off cherubs and is blown around by baroque zephyrs. The result is a technical palette which pays homage to great animations of the past, contains a visual style which is definitively 'Aardman-esque' (all ping-pong ball eyes and letterbox jaws) while also allowing for spectacular set-pieces. Most importantly of all, the various techniques compliment one another, rather than creating incongruities.

Mixed-media animation is something BreakThru Films feel very strongly about, so we'll be cheering The Pirates! on to success when it opens in the US later this month. Our current projects, and particularly the short animations created for Chopin's Études, have been created with a wide variety of technical processes, blended together to create visually distinctive films which are both aesthetically powerful and technically progressive. The Flying Machine sees live-action blending with computer generated graphics and 3D stop motion animation, continuing a lineage which extends back through Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Mary Poppins and beyond.

Our stop motion animated Flying Machine against
a computer generated vista

We're also very excited about Scarecrow, which has recently been selected for the BeFilm 2012 Underground film festival in New York at the end of this month. It's to be shown in 3D, as intended, and we hope it can demonstrate (as The Pirates! does) that 3D really can be the future of animation, if studios have the confidence to develop their films in true-3D, rather than simply slapping on the effect in post-production to increase box-office revenue. Used effectively, in collaboration with the other animation techniques, it can be spectacularly effective and moving.

Rotoscoping, a technique which has been used since
the birth of animation, gives Scarecrow a real sense
of living history

Scarecrow uses a combination of traditional animation, rotoscoping and 3D computer generated graphics to tell the story of a fallen soldier in Poland's November Revolution. The rotoscope technique allowed the animators to bring the startling paintings of Polish painter Jerzy Duda-Gracz to life, creating an aesthetic that at once stays true to the era Chopin evokes, while at the same time involving the work of one of Poland's most significant modern artists. As the story progresses and the soldier's soul seems to rise up from his broken body, directors Przemyslaw Anusiewicz and Janusz Martyn begin to introduce 3D computer generated elements, strange cloaked figures which dance above the marshland like animated shrouds. Viewed in 3D, it is an effect which simply could not be achieved with traditional animation, a true example of technology making the impossible possible.

Computer generated animation brings a more haunting aspect of
Duda-Gracz's art to life in striking 3D

Whether allowing pirate ships to spring forty feet above a crystal-clear ocean, or bringing a haunting vitality to some of Poland's most beautiful art and music, mixed-media techniques are keeping animation at the cutting edge of film-making. The sense that an animated film can embrace a wide variety of technical forms is one which keeps it fresh and responsive to innovation and creative thinking.  The days in which stop-motion or traditional animation and computer generation were seen as mortal enemies, with the latter poised to consign its frame-by-frame predecesor to the dustbin of history, are thankfully far behind us. At BreakThru we're constantly looking forward to the next advancement, and as Aardman's Pirates! seem poised to storm the US box office, we're proud to be among such illustrious company.

-Stewart Pringle

Follow the BreakThru Films blog for future articles on some of the revolutionary techniques that we;re developing for upcoming projects. Except the ones that are too secret to show you yet...shhh!