“They say you should be able to watch any good movie with the sound down,” Mark Burton, writer and co-director of 2015’s wordless “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” told IndieWire over a January Zoom call. “‘Pulp Fiction’ would be bloody useless then, wouldn’t it?” quipped his directing counterpart Richard Starzak, setting the tone for a conversation about the mechanics and virtues of silent storytelling in a filmmaking landscape that has largely abandoned it. However, 10 years after Burton and Starzak’s feature debuts, Oscar-nominated flicks like “Robot Dreams” and “Flow” could be bringing this essential mode of cinema back into fashion.
Simultaneously the subject of each other’s praise and the butt of each other’s jokes, Burton and Starzak (referred to as Golly) took very different routes to being united under the umbrella of stop-motion studio Aardman Animations. Starzak maintains a special place in animation history as the first employee hired at Aardman, while Burton had been on the British TV and radio comedy circuit for a while before lending a script for “Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”
Though Shaun the Sheep was a creation by storied Aardman director Nick Park in Wallace & Gromit’s third outing, “A Close Shave,” it was Starzak who reinvented and reimagined the character for a self-titled TV series. It followed the titular mischief-maker on his home farm, where he’d test the limits of what he could get away with before attracting the attention of the dimwitted farmer or his loyal dog, Bitzer. Though now a staple of the character, Shaun’s show was forced into being dialogue-free. “It was partly a financial decision because lip-syncing on characters is what takes a lot of time in stop-motion,” says Starzak. “But as soon as we made that decision, we realized that actually it makes it more universal.”
Validation of this idea came when Starzak screened a few episodes of the show for his child’s primary school before it aired nationwide. “There was a scene where the farmer was going upstairs to his bath, but in the bathroom, Sean is siphoning off the hot water for the sheep, and so we have shots of his feet going up the stairs and the water getting lower, and suddenly, these kids stood up and went, ‘Come on! Come on!’ which I thought was amazing, because they’ve never seen the show before.”
For Burton, children’s inherent passion for storytelling was key: “They just live in it, that’s the difference. Because adults love it, but they know it’s a film. Little kids just are in the film like that.” The step up from series to feature was a particular challenge for Burton, but he also found freedom within that. “It was sort of liberating because we could only tell a story that’s quite simple in terms of what happens, but it doesn’t have to be simple in terms of a lot of the deeper stuff going on. And we’ve got a whole army of brilliant animators who can show nuance.”
Due to a lack of faith at Aardman that Shaun the Sheep could make a good feature, Burton and Starzak knew it was all in the idea. “We sat in a room, strumming ukuleles, and we would pin cards to the wall,” recalled Burton. “My card would say something like, ‘Maybe they go from the country to the city,’ then Golly’s would say, ‘Pantomime horse!’”
Though the idea of sheep lost in the big city would be the one that stuck, it took some more outlandish ideas to get there. “One of the early ideas was that the farmer buys this huge white horse which he rides around on the farm thinking he’s John Wayne,” explains Starzak. “By accident, Shaun scares it to death. He actually kills the horse by scaring it to death. So he and the other sheep bury it in the ground, but all its legs are still sticking up out of the ground, so then he has to chainsaw them off.”
Along with studying silent comedy greats like Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati (Burton was particularly fond of how he used sound effects to convey character), the duo was keen to maintain an emotional core through the film that ends up going to some absurd places, even without dead horses. The farmer comes down with amnesia, somehow allowing him to become a world-famous fashion icon named Mr X, a name they both now regret. “He’ll be doing Nazi salutes next,” as Burton puts it.
Through the madness, Starzak stressed the emotional state of each character. “The relationship between Bitzer and the farmer and between Shaun and the farmer, how those change, how the farmers got amnesia, and all these different elements were complicated and scary,” he said. “But we always kept in mind the key thing in the storytelling — you always need to know what the character is thinking at any point. If you lose that for even a few seconds, it can throw the audience.”
“It’s a lo-fi story,” Burton added. “It’s just a bunch of animals getting on a bus and going to the nearest city, but for them, it’s a huge, epic story. But we always took them seriously as characters, gave them emotional lives, and talked about the film like it was ‘Battleship Potemkin’ or something.”
“I remember we both talked about our dads a lot in relation to the relationship between Shaun, Bitzer, and the farmer,” Starzak continued. “The film’s about an absent father. There was also some stuff with Bitzer forgiving Shaun and Shaun having to realize what he’d lost.”
Perhaps the most impressive feat of “Shaun the Sheep Movie” is its spectacular gag-rate, hitting home runs in the background and foreground without a single word spoken. Along with a barrage of silent comedy homages, Burton and Starzak gleefully lean into cinematic tropes like three sheep in a trenchcoat fooling an entire village and treating an animal shelter like it’s Shawshank.
As freewheeling as the film feels, it’s the result of an intricate editing process. “I think where we work well together, was one of us would have a comic idea, but we would really put our heads together to go, how do you actually execute this and make it funny on screen?” Burton said. “Ten frames out, it wasn’t funny. Ten frames the right way, it was hilarious. So we would often be slaving over a hot edit, just twiddling and fiddling. It was a very granular process to make those jokes work.”
For Starzak, the tightrope between emotion and comedy is found in the animation style. “I think the type of animation that we developed at Aardman is that we give the characters physical weight,” he said. “If they fall over, we do it as if it was live action. If we’d have gone the Warner Brothers route and everyone went slap, ding, bang, it couldn’t have been as emotional. We try to give all the characters human weight, and I think that really helps people suspend their disbelief.”
The process made the duo true believers in silent film, exemplified by Burton saying that Pixar “pussied out” of making “Wall-E” completely silent during a talk at the studio — “They all laughed so it’s fine,” he clarified — before explaining the virtues of silent cinema. “I think the audience reaches into the film, looking for nuance. If you put it in there, they’ll come and find it, as opposed to having to hit them over their head with dialogue and things like that,” he said. “Snappy dialogue has its place, obviously, but sometimes it’s really nice to let the audience reach in and take the story out of the film.”
Starzak succinctly sums up the purity of silent film: “I think it’s so much more cinematic. It just tells the story cinematically.” With movies like “Flow” picking up awards, a shift in the animation industry could be afoot. We’re in an age of heavy experimentation in the visuals of animated movies, technology developing to blend 2D, 3D, stop-motion and more all into one frame, it can’t be too much longer before we rediscover the purity of silence.
