This might not look like a high-stakes heist movie starring Gillian Anderson and Richard E. Grant, but Dan Ojari and Mikey Please’s stop-motion animation short film Robin Robin is, in fact, just that. It’s also a musical about identity, chosen families, and finding one’s place in the world when it’s time to leave the nest, proverbial or otherwise.
In this latest offering from Aardman — the studio behind Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep — Robin (Christopher Robin’s Bronte Carmichael) is taken in by Dad Mouse (Enola Holmes’s Adeel Akhtar) and his family of industrious mice who raise her as their own after her egg rolls into a rubbish dump. They introduce her to the family business of late-night thievery, but Robin’s repeated failure to pull off the simplest of scavenges causes her to question who and what she really is. So, she sets off on an odyssey where she meets a flighty friend Magpie (Grant) and frightening foe Cat (Anderson).
Robin Robin reveals a softer side for Aardman, which traded the company’s signature modeling clay for felt to give the holiday special a feel that is “unquestionably visceral and real,” explains Please. “It’s something that we would associate with Christmas, the warmth and softness of it. And there’s something amazing about the way felt lights.”
