Creature Comforts, Vol. 2.2
March 7, 2006
Director:
Richard Goleszowski, Nick Park,
Starring:
The Great British Public,
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In 2005, Aardman Animations lost a lot of their 30 year history when a storage unit went up in flames destroying irreplaceable storyboards, awards, props and pieces of film memorabilia. Also damaged was material for some of Aardman’s popular projects such as Morph, Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and Creature Comforts. Sadly, the masters for this second part to series 2 of Creature Comforts were very much safe, and is now on DVD to completely bore audiences out of their minds.
Being an Aardman production this is, of course, a clay and plasticine animation product or perhaps better known as Claymation – just like those energy adverts. The Great British public air their views on various different subjects, then are turned into caricature-like plasticine animals and animated. This type of animation is seriously impressive and its concept is somewhat daring but it just doesn’t work at over twenty seconds.
Just like when shown on ITV, each episode is approximately ten minutes and each features a different subject matter. On this disc you can hear Bed Time, The Monarchy and Self Image among others being discussed. Nothing is edited – as far as the different speech patterns and accents are concerned. These are not scripted or voice acted, which gives them a sense of realism. The original recordings of the voices are untainted as well and feature many amateurish aspects of sound recording such as varying distances from the microphone, the noises from the cables attached, reverb from surrounding areas, in some cases even the phone ringing in the background.
Some characters do provide some comedy but it’s unlikely to produce tears of laughter, but its attempts at being funny, is more likely to send you to sleep waiting for the gags. Some creations of more suited to the voices than others, and the more charming characters and soundbites come from Victor the Geordie mouse, Behzad the Arab Stallion and Brain and Keith the streetwise Bull Terriers.
Entertainment is not what’s produced and it’s a shame because Creature Comforts brings the rest of Claymation down with them, which is otherwise, highly regarded.
Special Features:
Just as utterly boring as the main feature, there’s a 10 minute behind the scenes which strangely shows more of characters not on the DVD than of ones that are.
A game in which you have to match the sentence to who said it. You can’t lose, as it just keeps saying “try and again” until you get it right and you don’t win anything.
A nice touch is being able to select a character and view all off their offerings on the DVD, unfortunately It’s let down by only letting you choose from four.
Rating: 24%
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