Shaun the Sheep first appeared in Wallace and Gromit.
Shaun the Sheep may have sprung from Wallace and Gromit, the first big stars of British stop-motion animation company Aardman. But the adventures of the wily, woolly Shaun and his mates have made him the Bristol company's biggest export. After 130 television episodes and many DVD sales, now comes Shaun the Sheep Movie which is being released in more than 50 countries.
Shaun might be a Suffolk sheep but the dialogue-free mix of sight gags, flatulence and anthropomorphic antics has made for a character who easily translates across the world.
The film did big business when it opened in Asia last month as the Chinese New Year - the year of the sheep - was welcomed in.
It's the sixth feature from Aardman and the second since returning to the stop-motion method (in which models are painstakingly moved by hand and shot frame by frame) after two underwhelming forays into computer animation (Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas).
Shaun's director-writers, Mark Burton and Richard Starzak, have been out on the international publicity trail - we tracked them down by email to ask how they made Shaun take a leap to the big screen ...
What was the first story or scene or gag idea for the movie? And did it survive?
On day one we sat in our office playing the ukulele very badly and brainstorming some pretty random ideas, which we pinned to the wall on cards. Only two cards made it through the process: The "baarbershop quartet" and "pantomime horse". As for the other ideas ... do any of your readers want to buy a sack of second-hand cards?
Making a movie version of an episodic stop-motion animation comedy featuring a beloved character: harder said than done, obviously. How much harder?
Much, much harder, especially as we wanted to be true to the series and make a film without dialogue. We spent two years working on the story alone. A film needs a strong emotional story, so we created a family dynamic on the farm, with the farmer as a father figure. This gives us the emotional heart of the movie. We also knew we had to take the characters out of their comfort zone - and the big city seemed a great new environment with lots of opportunities for adventure, threat and gratuitous fart gags.
Making the movie was equal to how many TV episodes in terms of time, labour, shredded nerves?
Think of the series as, say, New Plymouth, and the movie as Mexico City. The movie involved 150 people working flat out, there were about 20 units [sets] ongoing at any one time, and we recorded more than 1800 sheep bleats. That was a tough morning for Justin Fletcher, who plays Shaun.
You have heard of these things called computers? Apparently some make animated movies on them and it takes them ... well quite a long time but maybe not as long as you guys do. Does that appeal?
We're certainly not anti-computer. we do have a computer in the canteen area, which has Windows 97 on it. Seriously, we've got nothing against CGI movies - we've made a few of our own. But Aardman prefers stop-frame animation because you're working with things that really exist - the puppets, the props, the detailed sets. They're all there in our studio on the outskirts of Bristol, they need real lights and cameras and our talented team of animators to bring the story to life. In the end it's not just about the artform, it's about the stories.
This is the first film Aardman has done with the European company Studiocanal. Do you think the American studios [Dreamworks, Sony] behind the previous movies would have insisted the film have dialogue or voice-overs?
Maybe. Some of the potential American distributors thought non-dialogue wouldn't work in the US. Buster Keaton would be turning in his grave.
So no dialogue in the movie but there is grunting, burping, baa-ing and singing - and sometimes combinations of all of the above. If it takes weeks to make minutes of stop-motion animation, what's the pace of the sound recording sessions? And are the sessions slightly bizarre?
Bizarre if you just come in off the street without knowing what's happening. Luckily it's not part of the "one frame at a time" process, so we can cover a lot of ground in a two or three-hour session. The voices in our film are from great actors with great comic timing. A little grunt goes a long way.
In the movie, Shaun and his mates end up in the big city. Did you consider taking them further afield? Maybe some place like New Zealand where they would really stand out?
We were worried that audiences in New Zealand would think it was a documentary.
There's a Shaun tie-in to the Rugby World Cup. He's arguably more popular and pervades more countries than rugby. But who does he support, really?
Like the Queen, he's not allowed to divulge his interests. (Come on, England!)