Eureka!: Chop Socky Chooks (Aardman for Cartoon Network)

Chop Sooky Chooks

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Director Sergio Delfino on the multiple battles to put together a children's CG kung fu show.

Where did the idea come from?
I plundered my childhood memories of the classic buddy antics of The A-Team, Bond villains and their henchmen, Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon and the TV show Kung Fu. I'd been animating the movie Chicken Run for two years, so it seemed like a fun idea to throw chickens into this mix.

How did you decide on the look?
Pixar was showing how you could do great CGI movies, but a lot of kids cartoons were in 2D. This was an action series and demanded CG. We wanted a distinctive visual style with a rich look. CG is often a bit unreal but we worked hard with our CG animator Danny Capozzi to make it a lived-in real world.

How did you pitch it?
Internally, as a half-page idea about crime-fighting chicks. I was a little sheepish as I wasn't sure it was an Aardman project - I was from a stop-motion background and we hadn't done much CG. But they thought it was different and Cartoon Network immediately signed up.

How did it evolve from there?
CN gave us a lot of steer in terms of target audience, tone and content. They had some very strict parameters for violence, which threw us. They said we couldn't show a physical blow landing on a character - a bit tough for kung fu action. But they ended up giving us a lot of leeway and parents will, I hope, recognise the context and see it isn't gratuitous. We got away with quite a lot.

What challenges did you face?
We worked with Canadian studio DKP Productions but during production, it was taken over by a bigger studio, which had different ideas about how the show would work. We had to pull out with nine episodes in the bag and transferred to another studio in Toronto, Core Digital, which made the remaining 12. We'd written and produced animatics for DKP and had to revise all of them for the new studio to avoid having to create too many new set-ups, which required some radical rewrites. It was all about streamlining, which focused us on being creative with what we had, but still trying to keep it epic.

What was your Eureka moment? Contact: robin.parker@emap.com