Making ‘Robin Robin’ with Mikey Please and Dan Ojari
This week sees the release of Netflix and Aardman‘s much-anticipated stop-motion animated musical holiday short Robin Robin. Created and directed by BAFTA® winner Mikey Please and Dan Ojari with a script by Ojari, Please and Sam Morrison, the short recently finished production at Aardman’s award-winning UK studio and features the voice of Bristol-based Bronte Carmichael as the titular Robin alongside Gillian Anderson, Richard E. Grant and Adeel Akhtar.
Robin Robin is the tale of a small bird with a very big heart. After a shaky nativity of her own – her unhatched egg falls out of the nest and into a rubbish dumpster – she comes out of her shell, in more ways than one, and is adopted by a loving family of mice burglars. More beak and feathers than fur, tail and ears, more cluck and klutz than tip-toe and stealth, she is nonetheless beloved by her adopted family, a Dad Mouse and four siblings.
As she grows up, though, her differences make her something of a liability, especially when the family take her on furtive food raids to the houses of the humans (pronounced ‘Who-mans’) in the dead of night.
Neither fully bird, nor fully mouse, Robin embarks on a food heist of her own to prove herself worthy of her family and also, hopefully, to bring them back a Christmas sandwich. Along the way, she encounters a curmudgeonly magpie who has a house full of glittery things that he’s stolen and, as it turns out, an unlikely heart of gold. He has set that heart on stealing the sparkling star from the top of a local who-man family’s Christmas tree. And who better to help him than the eternally optimistic Robin herself. The adventure brings them face-to-terrifying-face with a menacing, yet very cool Cat, who has a warm place for birds and mice alike: her tummy.
Can they survive? Can they bring home the sandwich and the star? And, most of all, can Robin discover, and learn to love, who she really is, delighting her family and earning her wings in the process?
Image via Netflix
Following in the grand tradition of the Aardman holiday short film (albeit for a new streaming generation), the dynamic duo of Please and Ojari, like the rest of us, grew up on the work of the studio and were keen to live up to its stellar reputation by doing “something different,” says Dan. This has led to a whole new look for both the studio and the directors themselves, continuing a long-established strength of story and humour, this time paired with the fuzzier, softer world of needle-felt puppet creation. In total there was a stunning 75 puppets including 20 fluffy mice, 19 hero robin, 11 snarky magpies, 4 purring cats and three ‘who-mans’, but no partridge or pear tree as far as I can see. There were also iterations of puppets that enabled particular performances such as a ‘sneak’ Robin puppets that were ‘more angled’ so “Robin could creep more stealthily like her mouse siblings during food raids,” says Head of Puppet Making Anne King.
In fact, the puppets were made in three different sizes (from A to C scale) for different sets, with ‘A’ scale being the largest at around 19cm in height in the case of Robin, but twice that size in the case of the Cat. These puppets were used in the biggest sets, including the ‘who-man’ kitchen, which was built to a wopping 175% scale “It gave us a vastly outsized set, which was a strange experience after being used to working on miniature sets,” says DOP, Dave Alex Riddett. “It made you feel like a seven-year-old trying to reach the biscuit tin in your mum’s kitchen… and I’m over six feet tall.” Conversely, ‘C’ scale puppets were used on tiny tabletop sets and came in at around 2cms in height in the case of the Robin and Magpie. “Yet the Animators still managed to get loads of character out of those tiny little creatures,” says floor manager, Richard Bowen.
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Needle-felt is an incredibly tactile material that has seen a growing uptake in use over the last few years, due to its highly tactile screen presence and its ability to absorb light on set. The highly talented and experienced team at Aardman drew together their broad skillsets to create this beautiful world, calling in an needle-felting experts to aid in the development, as well as a felting machine that uses blocks of needles to expedite the process by creating a layer of felt that was then needled into the surface of the puppet. Designs started from 2D drawings, then clay sculpture, in turn modelled out of rubber with a rig and a wire armature inside before the rubber was overlaid with foam and then finally with felt.
The puppets’ eyes, however, present the biggest challenge. Unlike the signature rounded ball eyes of other Aardman productions, Dan and Mikey wanted brow-less eyes that were flat to the face. “Our problem was how to get expression and emotion into those eyes,” says Chief animator Ian Whitlock. “You’ll forgive almost anything else but if the eyes are dead the puppet just doesn’t work.” For this incredibly important design feature, the team created a whole set of different blink shapes. Each eye had ten magnetic pupils and eight different eyelids that could be varied to achieve different emotions and expressions. “We also found out that a lot of expressions can be conveyed through the ears or the position of the head,” Ian says. The cat’s eyes were even made with UV pigment to give a glowing effect.”
However as executive producer Sarah Cox states “In the end, the material you use to animate doesn’t really matter, what matters is the soul of the character you’re able to put into it.” and the soul of this film is that of a soft sweet little outsider adopted into the heart of an unusual family, who finds solace in embracing her differences and how her uniqueness can add value to those around her. With children at its core, this tale of acceptance will doubtless be a festive short that will stand the test of time and be revisited with great anticipation each year. Skwigly recently spoke with directors Dan Ojari and Mikey Please to learn more about bringing this world together.
How long had you been sitting on the idea for Robin Robin and how did it end up in front of the folks at Aardman?
Dan Ojari: From when we sort of like devised the plot and the overall story, it was probably like about three or four years.
Mikey Please: Yeah, a long time. The initial germ of the idea came about in a relatively short amount of time, but then we had many years of orally telling that story to various people. And it wasn’t until we could get to the end of it without that person walking away, that we thought it’s ready to pitch. Then we took it to Annecy and. very luckily. bumped into Sarah Cox in the canteen
DO: Before that we’d put a little story synopsis booklet together, which was a bunch of different ideas that we were developing. We found that it’s a really nice way to clearly communicate an idea or a story. I think we also had a really rough script and some concept art. But we hadn’t gone to Annecy to pitch the idea or anything, we just bumped into her, got chatting and just sort of quite informally started pitching it.
MP: And we got more and more enthusiastic until I think I fully burst into one of the musical numbers in the canteen, kneeling at her feet.
That’s how all good pitches should go.
DO: We’ve found if you do jazz hands at the end of your pitch, the success rate is a lot higher!
Robin Robin (Image courtesy of Netflix)
The use of needlefelt is yet another new material for you both. What did you feel this way of making puppets brought to this world?
DO: I think the the look of the characters is down to a couple of things, firstly the needlefelt technique, which has a real charm and tactile nature to it, and a kind of warmth to the way that it lights, it’s very endearing as material. But then there’s also Matt Forsythe, who is our character designer, and then production designer – we really love the bold shapes that he brought to his characters.
MP: And of course, the Flynn twins, Nathan and Joshua Flynn, who then translated Matt’s drawings into 3D models, and Anne King, the puppet supervisor here at Aardman, so there’s a lot of people who contribute to that design.
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What were the challenges of working with such a big team?
MP: There has been a sort of gradient of projects leading up to this, where we’ve worked with progressively larger teams, and this was certainly like, the biggest team we’ve worked with, but I’d say neither of us have made any anything completely on our own, ever. Most animation is a process of collaborating, so that communication skill and being relatively personable and able to take on other people’s ideas and be a crossroads for many different creative people, it’s a skill that sort of gradually grown and hopefully works.
DO: I think if we’d have gone from just making our own films to this, it would have been horrendous. But we’ve been fortunate enough to have, bit by bit, a bit more experience with that. You have to understand what you’re doing, rather than if you’re making your own thing, and you’re figuring it out as you go along, whereas when you’re working with people, your role is to be clear.
MP: Luckily, I think that the Aardman team are so used to creatively-led production. So that kind of R&D and that experimenting phases is sort of built into the production.
DO: Yeah, it was quite satisfying to come to a place that’s very organised around creating something like this.
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There’s obviously quite a huge, talented voice cast behind it. Did you always have these specific people in mind for characters, or were they just some really nice surprises along the way?
DO: We started the project with quite a clear plot. The characters weren’t super defined so there was a big process of figuring out who they were and also what was just endearing and funny about them. Richard E. Grant was quite an early reference for Magpie. We still explored lots of different routes of who Magpie might be, but as soon as we tried out the script, reading it like Richard E. Grant, you realise he’s the comic relief of the whole film and in lots of scenes really steals the show. Bronte Carmichael, who plays Robin, her audition really stood out as just really endearing and funny and warm.
MP: Sometimes you can have a really brilliant audio performance when listening to it over headphones, but when you put it next to the physical body of the puppet they’re completely disjointed; you can’t believe that the voice would be physically inside of that visual thing you’re seeing. So with each of the characters, we’re sort of waiting for that moment where the physicality of the puppet and audio nature of the voice sit together. So yeah, there was a moment where we saw Bronte’s video test with the puppet and it was very exciting. “She’s been in our mind for so many years and there she is, for real!”
I saw this morning that there’s a tie-in book, which looks really lovely. Moving forward, what are your plans either with Robin Robin or future work?
MP: It’s a bit too early to say, specifically. But of course, Robin Robin is a world in which we would love to tell other stories, should the opportunities present themselves.
Robin Robin will debut on Netflix November 24th. Hear more from Mikey Please and Dan Ojari in our latest episode of the Skwigly Animation Podcast (stream below or download here)