Sam Fell builds stop-motion films that look handmade and know their horror, and he is at his best when he lets the nasty thing stay nasty. ParaNorman does; the Chicken Run sequel mostly does not. A craftsman whose scripts keep letting him down.
Fi1m perspective
In ParaNorman (2012) a teacher, Mrs Henscher, has her class put on cardboard hats and re-enact a hanging for a hall of proud parents. The puppets are round and cheerful, the occasion is a school pageant, and the thing being celebrated is the town's oldest cruelty. That scene is Sam Fell's work in one shot: horror played straight, in clay, for families, with nobody winking at the camera. We laughed out loud and then winced, because the joke and the nastiness land at the same moment and the film declines to soften either.
He came up at Aardman in the 1990s, self-taught, animating shorts and television including Rex the Runt. The studio sent him to Los Angeles to co-direct Flushed Away (2006), its first computer-animated feature, and he stayed in CG for The Tale of Despereaux (2008), co-directed with Rob Stevenhagen; we have reviewed neither. Then came Laika in Portland, where he and Chris Butler made ParaNorman, and a return to Aardman for Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023), the first feature he has directed alone. Four features in seventeen years is not a hurried career, and the films look like it.
What he does well is puppets. The character animation in both films we have reviewed is precise enough that a face can carry a beat a lesser film would give to a line, and he knows exactly which genre he is borrowing from. ParaNorman opens on a cheap zombie picture playing on a television and takes its shadows and slow shuffle straight from the drive-in; Jon Brion's score, a wailing electronic line over a fairground organ, is funnier for never admitting it is a joke. Dawn of the Nugget runs the first film's plot the other way, a break-in rather than a break-out, and the one room that works, full of grinning hens, is as sharp as anything in the ghost story.
What lets him down is the script, and it lets him down the same way each time. ParaNorman runs in circles through its middle and says its moral twice too often, before a last twenty minutes that earn the rest. The Chicken Run sequel is neat, handsome and mostly pleasant, and only now and then remembers how odd its original was. Fell has said of his medium, "It’s the pleasure and the pain, there are two sides to stop-motion." The pleasure is on screen in every laboured-over frame. The pain, in his films, is usually in the writing.
Start with ParaNorman, on a dark evening, with a child old enough to enjoy being frightened. Go on to the hens if that goes well. And if anyone ever hands Fell a script as sharp as his puppets, we would like to see what he does with it.
Biography
Sam Fell is a British animator, director, screenwriter and voice actor. Born on 22 November 1965 on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, he was educated at Nottingham Trent University. He began his career directing the short film The Big Cheese (1992) and joined Aardman Animations, where he worked on projects including Pop, Peter Lord's Wat's Pig and episodes of Rex the Runt.
Fell co-directed Flushed Away (2006) with David Bowers for Aardman and DreamWorks Animation, and directed The Tale of Despereaux (2008). He co-directed Laika's ParaNorman (2012) with Chris Butler. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. He returned to Aardman to direct Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023).
