Don't speak

From the first time the Road Runner zoomed across the screen with an exultant "Meep, meep!" to this past summer's blockbuster hit WALL-E, whose star robot mesmerized audiences and critics alike with little more than a few mechanical sighs and beeps, the history of animation is ripe with characters who have spoken volumes without saying much at all. And while the bulk of this dialogue-free content has lived on the big screen, the genre seems to be migrating to TV and the web with greater frequency.

At a glance, creating series that rely more on character expression than verbage to drive storytelling seems like a no-brainer when it comes to cutting down on production costs and increasing international salability by eliminating reversioning/dubbing expenses, but that's not always the case. In an effort to explore the ins and outs of creating and marketing successful dialogue-free series, we talked to a number of producers and broadcasters commissioning these types of shows and found that a lot more goes into crafting characters like Aardman's wise, but mute Gromit - who never speaks, but always has the best lines - than is immediately apparent.

Extra resources are poured into the animation, and attention has to be paid to every eye twitch and mouth movement made by the central characters, pushing the animators' creative abilities to the forefront of the process.

Character expressions

Bristol, England-based Aardman Animations, in fact, is developing something of an expertise in the non-dialogue genre. Coming off the success of silent series Shaun the Sheep, the company is in the midst of production on its first preschool project, stop-motion Timmy Time (52 x 10 minutes), which has a full cast of characters who get along just fine without talking. The Shaun spin-off stars Timmy the lamb and chronicles his day-to-day adventures at the nursery school he attends with an assorted group of wee barnyard animals.

"You have to take into consideration whether or not the kids are going to be able to understand what's going on, and what the characters are supposed to be feeling," says Miles Bullough, head of broadcast and development. He explains that rather than Timmy saying that he feels sorry, it's necessary to show his remorse without always resorting to obvious means, like turning on the waterworks every time he feels a bit anxious. "The nuance of how the characters are feeling has got to come across through the actors," he says.

By actors, Bullough is talking about Aardman's animators, who have drama training and often act out upcoming series' scenes as part of their process for translating movement and expressions to the stop-motion figures they are manipulating. In some more challenging cases, they will record themselves on video to get a visual blueprint for exactly how the figures should behave and move.

Aardman's directors also refer to neurolinguistic charts that map out facial expressions, so they know what a person's face should look like when they tell a lie or have a "Eureka! I remembered" moment. "Your eyes dart in different directions, depending on what you're doing and thinking, for example, and using the charts as a guide helps add authenticity and convey meaning to what we're doing," says Bullough.