Robot Chicken Born Again Virgin Christmas Special Dvd
Santa Claus got stuck in the chimney, stuck in the chimney….All images courtesy of Adult Swim.
Whether you're been naughty or nice, there's at to the lowest degree one adept reason to rejoice this holiday season: Robot Chicken is back to deck the halls with the Born Again Virgin Christmas Special. For those who oasis't followed the concluding six seasons of the Emmy-winning stop motion serial, that substantially means more parodies of pop civilization and yuletide traditions, plus a couple of asphyxiate-on-your-cocoa moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity starring some of your favorite babyhood toys brought to life. If you're hoping to run into something as satisfying as the climax of terminal year's Special, which saw the Jim Carrey version of the Grinch shoved off a cliff to his expiry, we have particularly good news. Alex Kamer, who has been part of the Chicken team since the second season, can all but promise this virgin delivers.
"There's one sequence that comes to mind which is maybe my favorite in the episode," he teases. "It'south a Scrooge sketch where he wakes up later 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 about being kind to people and he's more simply amazed that there are ghosts. And so, he runs out into the street and starts telling everybody 'ghosts are real, human!' and all the people are scared of him."
The Jolly General calls the shots.
If yous adopt your eggnog with a side of mortality, however, yous can besides wait forrad to the sight of Santa kicking some serious ass. "There'southward a WWII sketch where the Americans and the Germans endeavour to take a truce but Santa doesn't hear it," he continues. "Instead, Santa tries to fulfill a Christmas wish and starts killing all the Germans, so it'due south this huge activeness scene with Santa rolling around killing Nazis," he laughs. "There was a lot of challenging activity to breathing there, from the blood furnishings to the jumping and the biting, just it came out looking pretty good."
Challenges are a fact of life over at Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, where Kamer leads the charge every bit blitheness director. With only seven months to consummate each season and a limited budget to consider, animators accept to notice a way to successfully breathing their scenes in one take regardless of the difficulties they run across. "We'll just do a reshoot if something is so completely wrong that it causes a major story trouble, but we tin can't make a habit of it," he says, noting that the state of affairs does have its benefits. "One affair that is really pretty fun nigh Robot Chicken is that the schedule is then ambitious that we need to shoot the show at a pretty fast step, so when we practise something similar a camera move, nosotros're not doing really slick motility control. It comes out a piffling rougher than what would exist in a movie like ParaNorman or something, but the animator actually moving the photographic camera by hand and making decisions equally they're doing it adds quite a life to it. Information technology doesn't feel mechanical or pre-programmed. It has this spontaneity that'south really nice."
Alex Kamer at work on the Robot Chicken set up.
That kind of less-is-more approach extends to the puppet themselves, which are mostly vintage activeness figures from the '80s and '90s. Though the production sometimes upgrades certain characters, like the popular villain Skeletor, with foam limbs over wire armatures to expand their range of motion, most retain bones articulation. Luckily, Kamer and his squad enjoy finding ways to depict expressive performances out of even the most bones chunks of plastic. Their simple construction, he offers, "brings the testify a sure charm and a sense of humour that might not be at that place if the puppets were much more than articulated. For example, when there's a sketch virtually G.I. Joes doing silly things, I beloved seeing M.I. Joes with their limitations moving the manner a G.I. Joe could move considering it makes information technology funnier. Information technology becomes more nigh really good timing and actually good poses and actually good staging equally opposed to being ultra fluid because it's comedy in the terminate. It's about 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 function of what propelled Kamer towards a career in animation in the first place. "I went to regular film schoolhouse but afterward graduation I just started to get the inkling that if I broke into the animation world I might work on things that were a niggling more fun," he recalls. A fan of Adult Swim'south programming, he fabricated the motion from Atlanta to Los Angeles in order to get his pes in the door. "The first thing I plant was this internship at Shadow Machine, which was doing Robot Chicken at the fourth dimension. I started off working at that place as an unpaid intern, just helping out wherever I could, and over fourth dimension I started to make friends with the animators and gravitated more towards the animation flooring, where they were actually shooting. I helped them out and started to do my own practice shots and get critiqued and eventually got hired as a product banana and and so animation assistant and then full-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 Green and Matthew Senreich to bring each show to life. "I try to create an environs for the animators in which they can do their job and have fun," Kamer says. It doesn't exit him much opportunity to animate hands-on, however. "There'due south a finite amount of bodies that we can back up on the stages, so having whatever more animators would burden them and at the aforementioned fourth dimension I have too much to focus on, and then I couldn't really focus on animating as well. I think it would exist a little much. There are some animation directors who practice [step in], but I choose to just focus on the directing job."
One of the regular items of business, and amusement, are the requests made past Standards and Practices. Because fifty-fifty on a series where celebrities are regularly disemboweled and famous mascots engage in sex acts, there are some lines Robot Chicken is apparently not allowed to cross. "They have to approve the animatics and they give u.s. really funny notes like: 'can't encounter the shit coming out of his donkey.' They also won't let yous testify thrusting, like sexual thrusting," Kamer states, chop-chop calculation that the beloved Humping Robot is an exception considering he's a machine and non a human being. "We couldn't depict humping against a human character, but at the same time you can take a grandmother accident her head off and get shot! It's quite weird."
Fans can await to meet more of the strange and unexpected in the evidence's 7th season, which is nevertheless in production. "Nosotros're shooting this pretty big action scene right now that's a parody of Eyes Wide Shut. Information technology's like a John Woo action scene breaks out in the middle of an Eyes Wide Shut orgy, and so information technology's a lot of choreographed action and camera moves and characters, only information technology's going to exist a really funny one I call back."
Robot Chicken-ized versions of Lex Luthor, Catwoman, Riddler and friends.
Excitement is also spreading in apprehension of the Robot Chicken DC Comics Special 2: Villains in Paradise, starring the famous foes of the DCU. In Kamer's eyes, the original DC Special will always hold special significance since, "in a way, it was the first matter that Stoopid Buddy Stoodios made once Buddy Systems and Stoopid Monkey teamed up. It was the first thing we shot and it was a new studio with the types of challenges that come up with a new studio, but anybody pulled it off. It came out of the gate and won the Annie Honor…so there is a footling pressure this fourth dimension," he concedes. "Merely to be honest with you, I think the second 1 is funnier."
With all that and more to look forward to in 2014, allow's accept a moment and requite thanks for Robot Chicken – the gift that truly keeps on giving.
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The Robot Chicken Born Again Virgin Christmas Special debuts Mon December 16th at midnight on Developed Swim. Look for Alex Kamer's new independent curt motion picture, The Well, at this weekend's Google + Film Festival. For more than details, visit http://www.ugpff.com/short-motion-picture show-block-1/.
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James Gartler is a Canadian writer with a serious passion for animation in all its forms. His 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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