Aardman Produces The Cat Burglars

(Source: www.variety.com)

Six months after Aardman Animation divorced from DreamWorks, the Bristol-based studio is going through a creative rebirth. New creative director Sarah Smith has signed a raft of top-shelf writers to develop new stories for the Claymation company. Smith was a former executive producer at the BBC, and also produced

Energized by a new three-year, first-look deal with Sony, Aardman announced a new slate of projects including one that's been described as "Wallace and Gromit meets Ocean's Eleven." Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharaoh (Life on Mars) are writing The Cat Burglars, a comedy caper about stray felines who are trying to heist some milk. Steve Box (Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit) will direct the flick, which he says will be "family-friendly Tarantino."

Aardman co-founder Peter Lord is returning to the director's chair for the first time since 2000's Chicken Run, in order to helm an adaptation of Gideon Defoe's The Pirates! series of comedy books. Lord and Defoe, along with Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil (Hyperdrive, Slacker Cats), are writing the script.

Peter Baynham, who helped write Sasha Baron Cohen's hit movie Borat, is developing Operation Rudolph, an action-comedy set at the North Pole. The flick follows Santa and his highly-trained team of combat elves as they enact the yearly task of getting around the world in one night.

Aardman also revealed that Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park is working on a new project. The details haven't been released but it won't involve Park's cheese-obsessed inventor and his super-intelligent dog. A quick trip to wallaceandgromit.com turned up a placeholder graphic and "Coming soon . . . a very special announcement."

All of the above films will be rendered in Aardman's iconic Claymation style. The studio tried an entirely CGI approach with last year's Flushed Away and was so turned off by the experience that they've gone back to what they do best. Of course, the misery of Flushed Away may have had something to do with the fact that DreamWorks Animation was constantly trying to "improve" the movie (like throwing in lots of "hit-in-the-crotch" jokes).

"This is an interesting time in the animation industry," says new creative director Sarah Smith. "While there is clearly still a big appetite among cinemagoers for great animated films, there is a feeling of sameness about much of the product coming out of the industry at present, in terms of their stories. I think there's a great opportunity to excite audiences by raising the stakes in terms of the quality, intelligence and variety of the stories our animated films tell and the genres they inhabit."

While the above statement is music to the ears of animation fans, there was no statement about the fate of Tortoise versus Hare, a mockumentary based on Aesop's classic fable. Michael Caine was originally attached to the project but had to drop out after the constant delays. Bob Hoskins was rumoured to have taken his place but there have been no updates on the movie's IMDb site. Tortoise versus Hare was originally scheduled for a 2009 release date.

Wallace and Gromit

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