Last year Blue Zoo created an animated Christmas gorefest, Daddy Christmas.
This year’s Blue-Zoo Christmas short (its 4th) has less horror and more humour – but is still a showcase for the animation studio’s talents and capabilities.
Blue Zoo co-founder and head of the short film programme, Tom Box, explained, “We wanted to take this year’s short in a very different direction to last year’s, so for 2015 we thought we’d create a festive slice of pure silliness, a bit of light hearted relief from the bombardment of advertising at Christmas. Our brief to Ben [Champion] was to try and capture the over-commercialisation of Christmas and first world elf problems – to be sung by a cast of elves! Stylistically, we were very much inspired by our love of Disney movies and Muppets show tunes.”
Blue Zoo commissioned musical comedian, Ben Champion, to write and produce a song to parody an animated musical.
Santa’s elves are fed up with Christmas meaning “give me more” so they…
Four final treatments were submitted by members of the Blue Zoo team for the project this year and were pitched in person to the entire studio. The winning project was created by Simone Giampaolo and Joe Kinch.
Co-director, Joe Kinch, commented, “I’m a big fan of edgy unpredictable humour (like Monty Python and Sacha Baron Cohen). So when Blue-Zoo announced the brief about a Christmas musical with singing elves, I thought – ‘How can we give this an unpredictable twist to surprise the audience and make them chuckle?’
“We also wanted the short to be as relatable to parents as it is to little kids, so finding the right balance was really key. We wanted to have nods to other franchises and to have a lot of fun playing with these little elves and seeing what they get up to in their workshop.”
The project began in mid-October and was completed in 11 weeks. The team approached and commissioned their favourite voice artists who could sing in elfish tones, including YouTube cartoon voice-impressionist, Anna Brisbin (Brizzy).
Co-director and lead animator, Simone Giampaolo commented “The animation took influence from two masters of traditionally animated comedy, Tex Avery and Genndy Tartakovsky. Our aim was to achieve the fluidity and snappiness typical of traditional animation, whilst giving it the friendly charm of a stop-motion animation. In terms of aesthetics our aim was to create very stylized characters with the tactile feel of a stop-motion puppet. So we gave them very simple body shapes and facial features and combined them with realistic materials (cloth, hair, skin, etc.).”
