Richard Starzak makes comedy from clay faces that can hardly move and will not let anyone talk. On television, and in Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015), the discipline pays off more often than it runs dry, and we rate him for sticking to it.
Fi1m perspective
Shaun's face does almost nothing. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth that barely shifts, and yet you always know what he is thinking, because Starzak has built the comedy so that the body and the cut do the work the face cannot. He has said that when he started the series he always had Buster Keaton in mind, for precisely that reason, and it shows: the gag arrives in the stance, the pause, the moment of stillness before the thing goes wrong. The humans mumble, the sheep bleat, and nobody has said a word in the character's long life on screen.
He has been at this longer than almost anyone. He joined Aardman in 1983 as its first employee and worked on Morph, on the Sledgehammer video for Peter Gabriel and on commercials, before leaving in 1992 to go freelance, where he directed episodes of the absurdist Rex the Runt and the Christmas special Robbie the Reindeer: Hooves of Fire (1999). Creature Comforts (2003), his expansion of Nick Park's vox-pop short into a series, is the same instinct in another key: small, odd ensembles, timing over plot. He went back to Aardman in 2005 as creative director of broadcast and development, devised the Shaun the Sheep series in 2007, and in 2015 co-wrote and co-directed the feature with Mark Burton.
The feature is the test of the method, and it mostly passes. Eighty-five minutes, a plot, a whole city, still no dialogue, and much of it as neatly built as the best television episodes. The fair criticism, and we made it, is that the middle runs short of ideas; a format built on short, sharp gags does not naturally know what to do with a second act. The other criticism, that silence limits how deep the characters can go, is true as far as it goes. The flock is a chorus, not a cast. What surprised us was how little that mattered: a clay sheep searching a city for a farmer who cannot even call his name moved us more than we were prepared for, because with no words to lean on, the worry has to be in the way he stands.
Starzak has since worked in supervisory roles on later Shaun projects, and some reviewers found those milder and more formulaic than the Wallace and Gromit shorts the character came from. We would not put that at his door without seeing what he directed. What we can say is that his best work, on television and in the 2015 film, is a kind of stubbornness, and stubbornness of this sort is rare. If he wants to make another feature, the one thing he needs is a middle. The faces can stay as they are.
Biography
Richard Starzak, previously credited as Richard Goleszowski or Richard 'Golly' Goleszowski, is an English animator, screenwriter and director. He was born in Suffolk in 1959 and grew up in Ipswich, attending Northgate Grammar School. After a degree in Fine Art at Exeter College of Art and Design specialising in animation, he joined Aardman Animations in 1983 as its first employee.
Starzak worked on early Aardman projects including the music video for Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' and his short film Ident (1989), which introduced the character Rex. He wrote and directed episodes of Rex the Runt and the Robbie the Reindeer specials. He devised the Shaun the Sheep television series (2007) and co-wrote and co-directed the feature Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) with Mark Burton.
