Robot Chicken Born Again Virgin Christmas Special Google Play
Santa Claus got stuck in the chimney, stuck in the chimney….All images courtesy of Adult Swim.
Whether y'all're been naughty or nice, there's at least ane adept reason to rejoice this holiday flavor: Robot Chicken is back to deck the halls with the Born Again Virgin Christmas Special. For those who haven't followed the terminal six seasons of the Emmy-winning stop motion series, that essentially ways more parodies of pop culture and yuletide traditions, plus a couple of asphyxiate-on-your-cocoa moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity starring some of your favorite childhood toys brought to life. If yous're hoping to meet something as satisfying as the climax of concluding twelvemonth'south Special, which saw the Jim Carrey version of the Grinch shoved off a cliff to his expiry, we have especially expert news. Alex Kamer, who has been part of the Craven team since the second season, can all but promise this virgin delivers.
"In that location's one sequence that comes to mind which is perhaps my favorite in the episode," he teases. "It's a Scrooge sketch where he wakes upwardly after he's spoken with the ghosts and runs out into the street to tell everybody the revelation that he's had. The joke is he hasn't really learned his lesson almost existence kind to people and he'south more just amazed that in that location are ghosts. And so, he runs out into the street and starts telling everybody 'ghosts are existent, man!' and all the people are scared of him."
The Jolly General calls the shots.
If you prefer your eggnog with a side of mortality, yet, you can also look frontwards to the sight of Santa kicking some serious ass. "There's a WWII sketch where the Americans and the Germans try to have a truce but Santa doesn't hear it," he continues. "Instead, Santa tries to fulfill a Christmas wish and starts killing all the Germans, then it'due south this huge action scene with Santa rolling around killing Nazis," he laughs. "There was a lot of challenging activity to animate there, from the blood effects to the jumping and the biting, but it came out looking pretty good."
Challenges are a fact of life over at Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, where Kamer leads the charge as animation director. With simply 7 months to complete each season and a express upkeep to consider, animators take to find a way to successfully animate their scenes in i take regardless of the difficulties they encounter. "We'll only do a reshoot if something is so completely wrong that it causes a major story problem, but we can't make a habit of it," he says, noting that the state of affairs does accept its benefits. "I thing that is really pretty fun about Robot Chicken is that the schedule is so aggressive that we need to shoot the bear witness at a pretty fast stride, so when we do something like a camera move, nosotros're not doing actually slick motion control. It comes out a little rougher than what would be in a moving picture similar ParaNorman or something, only the animator actually moving the camera by hand and making decisions as they're doing information technology adds quite a life to it. It doesn't feel mechanical or pre-programmed. It has this spontaneity that's actually nice."
Alex Kamer at work on the Robot Chicken set.
That kind of less-is-more arroyo extends to the puppet themselves, which are generally vintage action figures from the '80s and '90s. Though the production sometimes upgrades certain characters, like the pop villain Skeletor, with foam limbs over wire armatures to expand their range of move, most retain basic articulation. Luckily, Kamer and his team savor finding ways to draw expressive performances out of fifty-fifty the most basic chunks of plastic. Their elementary construction, he offers, "brings the bear witness a certain charm and a humor that might not be there if the puppets were much more articulated. For case, when there'due south a sketch about Chiliad.I. Joes doing light-headed things, I love seeing M.I. Joes with their limitations moving the mode a G.I. Joe could move because it makes information technology funnier. It becomes more about really skilful timing and really good poses and actually proficient staging as opposed to being ultra fluid because information technology's comedy in the finish. It'due south well-nigh making people laugh and doing hyper-real animation doesn't necessarily lend itself to making people laugh."
Having the opportunity to amuse the masses was part of what propelled Kamer towards a career in blitheness in the starting time place. "I went to regular film school but after graduation I just started to get the inkling that if I bankrupt into the animation earth I might work on things that were a little more than fun," he recalls. A fan of Adult Swim's programming, he made the move from Atlanta to Los Angeles in order to get his foot in the door. "The kickoff thing I establish was this internship at Shadow Machine, which was doing Robot Chicken at the fourth dimension. I started off working there as an unpaid intern, merely helping out wherever I could, and over time I started to make friends with the animators and gravitated more than towards the animation floor, where they were actually shooting. I helped them out and started to do my own practise shots and become critiqued and eventually got hired as a production banana and then animation assistant and and then total-time animator and it simply went from there."
A reindeer-style eulogy.
Today, he oversees twelve animators while working closely with series director Zeb Wells and executive producers Seth Dark-green and Matthew Senreich to bring each show to life. "I attempt to create an surround for the animators in which they can do their chore and have fun," Kamer says. It doesn't get out him much opportunity to animate hands-on, even so. "There'southward a finite amount of bodies that we can support on the stages, and so having whatsoever more animators would burden them and at the same time I accept likewise much to focus on, so I couldn't actually focus on animating as well. I think it would exist a little much. There are some blitheness directors who practise [step in], but I choose to just focus on the directing job."
I of the regular items of concern, and amusement, are the requests made by Standards and Practices. Considering fifty-fifty on a serial where celebrities are regularly disemboweled and famous mascots engage in sex activity acts, there are some lines Robot Craven is manifestly not immune to cross. "They have to corroborate the animatics and they give us actually funny notes like: 'can't come across the shit coming out of his ass.' They also won't let you show thrusting, like sexual thrusting," Kamer states, quickly adding that the love Humping Robot is an exception because he'due south a car and not a man. "We couldn't describe humping against a human grapheme, but at the same time y'all can have a grandmother blow her head off and get shot! It's quite weird."
Fans tin wait to see more of the foreign and unexpected in the show'south seventh season, which is nevertheless in production. "We're shooting this pretty big action scene right at present that's a parody of Optics Wide Shut. Information technology's similar a John Woo activeness scene breaks out in the middle of an Optics Wide Close orgy, so it's a lot of choreographed action and camera moves and characters, but information technology's going to be a actually funny one I think."
Robot Chicken-ized versions of Lex Luthor, Catwoman, Riddler and friends.
Excitement is also spreading in anticipation of the Robot Craven DC Comics Special II: Villains in Paradise, starring the famous foes of the DCU. In Kamer's eyes, the original DC Special will always agree special significance since, "in a fashion, it was the commencement affair that Stoopid Buddy Stoodios made once Buddy Systems and Stoopid Monkey teamed up. Information technology was the commencement thing we shot and it was a new studio with the types of challenges that come with a new studio, simply anybody pulled it off. Information technology came out of the gate and won the Annie Accolade…and then at that place is a footling pressure level this time," he concedes. "But to exist honest with you, I think the 2d one is funnier."
With all that and more than to look forward to in 2014, let'southward accept a moment and requite thank you for Robot Chicken – the gift that truly keeps on giving.
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The Robot Craven Born Again Virgin Christmas Special debuts Mon December xvith at midnight on Adult Swim. Look for Alex Kamer'due south new independent short picture, The Well, at this weekend'south Google + Film Festival. For more details, visit http://www.ugpff.com/short-film-block-1/.
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James Gartler is a Canadian writer with a serious passion for animation in all its forms. His piece of work has appeared in the pages of Sci Fi Magazine, and at the websites EW.com and Newsarama.com.
Source: https://www.awn.com/animationworld/faves-toyland-robot-chicken-s-born-again-virgin-christmas-special
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