my half-term survival guide for film-lovers

Aardman stop-motion classics (available on BBC iPlayer, Prime Video, Netflix)

There’s something primally appealing about stop-motion animation – it’s the toys-come-to-life fantasy you had as a child made real. No one does it better than Aardman, whose wares are available all over the various streaming platforms: The Farmer’s Llamas on BBC iPlayer, the Shaun the Sheep films and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists on Amazon Prime, and some more Shaun, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and an hour-long behind-the-scenes documentary on Netflix.

The plan is to couple these with some home-made attempts at the medium, courtesy of a smartphone app and whatever vaguely anthropomorphic objects are at hand. If there’s one thing I know about stop motion, it’s that it’s enormously time-consuming, so this should kill one full day at least.

An anime odyssey

I’ve already recommended a forage through the Studio Ghibli filmography in our children’s half-term arts and culture guide today: all but one of the legendary Japanese animation house’s features are available on Netflix. But there’s much more for families to discover on the anime front, including the anthology film Modest Heroes, made by the Ghibli offshoot Studio Ponoc and also available on Netflix, which contains three endlessly inventive and beguiling shorts: the last of these, Invisible, contains some of the most extraordinary animation I’ve recently seen, and has the kind of open-ended conclusion that leaves you with lots to talk about. 

Pixar goes experimental

The studio behind Toy Story, Up, Inside Out and the rest are past masters at prompting weighty parent-child conversations, but their lesser-known experimental short films are just as thought-provoking for all ages, and made with a freeness that a $150m-plus budget tends to preclude. Eight are collected under the SparkShorts banner on Disney+, and each one is a perfect mini-dose of artistry and ingenuity. The six-minute, hand-drawn Burrow was originally destined to play in front of Soul in cinemas: sadly lockdown scotched that, but even experienced at home, its intricate subterranean cross-sections make you want to reach for a sketchpad.

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