Wat's Pig

Wat’s Pig is a 1996 British stop motion animated short film created by Aardman Animations and written and directed by Peter Lord.[1] It is a tale of two princes who are split as babies only to reunite as adults during a war. It is told almost entirely non-verbally.[2]

Wat's Pig
Directed byPeter Lord
Produced byMichael Rose
Jo Allen
Written byPeter Lord
Music byAndy Price
CinematographyAndy MacCormack
Edited byTamsin Parry
Production
company
Distributed byAtomFilms
Northern Arts Entertainment
Release date
10 April 1996 (New York City, USA)
1 June 1996 (UK)
7 June 2003 (Worldwide Short Film Festival, Canada)
27 April 2006 (TV premiere, Finland)
Running time
11 min
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

Plot

In a Medieval castle, a marauder tries to kidnap the twin infant sons of the lord. He makes off with only one, whom he drops about a mile away. A pig rescues this baby, so one brother grows up high on the hog, the other down with the swine. One being lazy, another industrious. Years later, when a neighboring prince declares war, the brother in the castle is too soft to fight. The twins are united just before the final battle.[3]

Production

Wat's Pig was Aardman's sixth Oscar nomination, and Lord's second Oscar nomination as a director.[4][5]

Peter Lord said: "I don't expect, Wat's Pig to make its money back, or Stage Fright to make its money back, but we have that luxury. We can do that here, because we get money from the commercials and the merchandising malarkey."[4]

He explained some of the production process:

As a concept, it was in there right from the start. I think it is interesting as a way with story telling, not just as a technical exercise. I think about Paul Driessen's film, The End of the World in Four Seasons, a similar storytelling approach. There was a time when I thought of doing more of the film in split-screen, not the whole film, but more with split-screen, but that [idea] slowly eroded as I worked on the storyboards. I felt it would become too "tricksy." It was, in a way, an intellectual challenge, but technically, we went about it in the most quaint, old-fashioned way imaginable, with film opticals at the end. Exactly why we didn't composite it electronically, I'm not quite sure. I wish we had, it would have been a lot easier!. It's funny, the way we work, it's like we were in a time warp, really. It's like making a film 20 years ago or something. We didn't assemble two halves of the image until the end, so I didn't really know how things would work out accurately until the end.[4]

Critical reception

DVD Review describes Wat's Pig as "Scripted, widescreen, more ordinary, and better (than War Story)".[6]

Awards and nominations
Year Nominee / work Award Result
1997 Peter Lord Academy Award for Best Short Film, Animated Nominated [7]

Preservation

Wat's Pig was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.[8]

References
  1. MUBI
  2. "Western Animation: Wat's Pig". TV Tropes. Retrieved 5 February 2015.
  3. BCDB
  4. "An Interview With Aardman's Peter Lord". awn.com. Retrieved 2014-01-11.
  5. "Aardman Animations · The A.V. Club". avclub.com. Retrieved 2014-01-11.
  6. "The Pirates! Band of Misfits Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray, and DVD Review". dvdizzy.com. Retrieved 2014-01-11.
  7. Chris Farley and David Spade at the Oscars®-YouTube
  8. "Preserved Projects". Academy Film Archive.


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