From Love of Words, Characters, and Movement towards Emotional Intelligence and Empathy. A Conversation with Aardman Director Lucy Izzard

Angela Gotsis
Special thanks to Lucy and Aardman’s PR team for the time and attention!

Lucy Izzard is an illustrator, animator, and director whose work is rooted in poetic rhythm, movement, and character development. Her films show the incredible possibilities of what animation could do by enveloping the audience in a shared experience of feelings and situations. She is the director of The Very Small Creatures, a stop-motion pre-school series whose characters discover the colourful world of emotions, empathy, relationships, and many more. The series was nominated for BAFTA® in 2022 and was a part of the official selection of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2024. The Very Small Creatures won the RTS (Royal Television Society) West of England Award for Children’s Television in 2024.

Angela: Lucy, would you tell our readers when and how your fascination with animation began?

Lucy: As a teen, I always loved art and thought I’d be a graphic designer. Before university, I did an art foundation course. In the UK, you need it before university to study in an artistic field. It was there that I found illustration as a profession, and I thought I would be an illustrator. I thought I’d be a children’s book illustrator because I’m very playful in what I do. Naturally, there are elements of my childhood that come into this, for example, I’ve always been drawn to cartoonists, satirical cartoonists like Ronald Searle. I just loved how they could depict a scene and capture so much character in one image. Everything was so considered and intentional – the smallest detail was there for a reason. You understood so much about a character from their pose. I think for me, it was that. Growing up, my parents introduced me to Edward Lear – nonsense poetry and limericks. We’d sit around the kitchen table, and we’d be making up limericks, these specific types of poems. Also, Spike Milligan. We had some of his books at home, such as The Bald Twit Lion. It’s a lot of lovely silliness. Everything was very playful and very rhythmic.

It was probably poetry and cartoons that led me into this world because at university, as I started to make illustrations, everything seemed to have a story. It was a place for me to have a commentary on certain things that interested me, and I feel like poems do that. When I was creating these pieces of work, they would be more like storyboards. Animation was the next step for me. I could bring these characters to life, and I could make these stories move. And I could do it by myself, which was so freeing. I started as a 2d animator, so drew pictures and I was able to create worlds. Amongst other things that inspired me was the way certain people would tell stories. There is a short film called Dad’s Dead by Chris Shepherd. I think it’s such an amazing film, albeit a very intense one. It’s not at all like my work, but the way that he layered up all the different mediums, all the different imagery, and the way the story unraveled, with such well-defined characters, I think that really inspired me, too. When I left university, I started to direct at the company that he had set up with a wonderful producer called Maria Manton, who, sadly, is not with us anymore. I think animation has a rhythm like poetry. It’s so accessible, easy for anyone to do it, and it’s so playful. That’s how I got into animation.

Angela: It’s a more independent and intimate process in creating animation, isn’t it?

Lucy: It is. And I think I quite like the control. There’s an element of control that animators like. We literally do decide what happens at every moment. That’s something that I might touch on again later because now I’m doing a stop-motion series and I’m part of a much bigger team, it requires more collaboration between departments and relinquishing the type of full control one has working solo on a short film. I absolutely love the collaboration process of stop-motion, but I think there’s something beautifully immediate about 2d animation – having an idea and animating it. You can do it all by yourself, really, and it’s relatively affordable as well.

Angela: What software do you use?

Lucy: I originally learned by drawing on paper. Traditional animation. When I was at university, there was a new program called Flash, which is now Adobe Animate. I think the program was designed for series work, creating animated symbols that could be reused; however, I’d use it to digitally draw frame by frame, straight into the program, and it would save me time on scanning my drawings and cleaning then up in Photoshop. I probably wasn’t using the program in the way it was intended, but sometimes there’s a beauty in not knowing how you’re supposed to do something, because you find a creative and individual way to use it!

Angela: Your work is related to social and educational issues. What draws you into a particular project?

Lucy: That’s a good question. I think with anything I do, I’m interested in the character, and I’m interested in why I feel an emotional connection to a particular story. I have an interest in psychology. I never studied it, but I just do. And especially being a parent, I read lots of books about how I can be a better parent, brain development in children and what is happening at various stages in their development. It’s interesting to me why we behave the way we do? What’s happening in the mind and the body? I’ve got my own personal bugbears.

I hate stereotypes. I really hate gender stereotypes as well. It’s changing now, and it’s wonderful, but as a girl at primary school I wasn’t allowed to play football. There wasn’t a girls’ football team. I was kind of blackmailed by my teachers – if I stayed in the netball team, they’re let me play football at lunchtime with the boys. But I had no interest in netball! There were different rules for boys and girls. I am just so fascinated by that social construct and how we got there, and how different we all are. What is nature and what is nurture. Social obligation and the complexities that all these things bring. Being very social beings, we’re all trying to understand each other all the time.

Obviously, having a career in animation, you don’t always choose the projects, but I do think that people come to me for a particular type of film because I’m more interested in the content, the stories, and the emotional connection, than the aesthetic. I believe we should have an emotional connection to everything that we watch. That’s what moves us and what stays with us for days, weeks or even years afterwards. I’m quite an emotional person, so it will inevitably come out in my work in some way. I tend to write on the jobs I work on. I’m very much part of that. I love that story-forming process.

Angela: You develop the whole film, right? Do clients come to you with just an idea?

Lucy: I can’t think of a time when a client has come to us with a finished script. Usually, they say: ‘This is our idea, we’ve got these characters. What would you do with that?’ Then there’d be a process of working together to develop and shape the story. I really love working out the narrative. Some directors don’t, and they’ll work with a writer. Finding the best story structure is key. I think every word must be there for a reason. I do think it comes from my interest in words and poetry. I love how words sound and the rhythm of the words, and I feel that is integral to storytelling. An absorbing story must have an interesting rhythm.

Angela: In your work you use a variety of techniques. How do you choose a technique for each project?

Lucy: Budget and time influence what I can and can’t do. I think, really, it’s the budget that unfortunately defines these things. In Aardman, we make the stop-motion show The Very Small Creatures, and it’s wonderful that we get to do that, but it does feel like a luxury in this day and age, which is such a shame. What works so well for children, especially preschoolers, is the tactile nature of the clay and textures we use on set.  There’s something so lovely, not only about the characters, but the character of the stop-motion medium as well. It’s all created in camera on a set., with VFX added in post afterwards. Everything is handmade, and it’s gorgeous. We have a fantastic team in the art department at Aardman. We’ve been fortunate to make one series after another and have just finished our third series.

Angela: How many people are in the team?

Lucy: There are probably about 40 or 50 of us. I value each department’s expertise – the camera and lighting team, the art department, rigging as well. There’s a complex scene at the end of one episode in series 3, called Huff and Puff, where the characters run into it a house made from wooden blocks and knock all the blocks down. The amount of rigging that needed to happen was extensive. Not only does it need to be functional, but each rig position also needs to be carefully considered so that the compositing team can easily paint out the rigs in post. (They have about a week to clean up a whole episode.)

I direct the series, overseeing everything from the start of the project to completion. For the shoot, I have an animation director with whom I work. This year, we had seven or eight animators on the series. We animate multiple episodes at once on a series to make it happen within a short amount of time. There’s lots of overlapping. Whilst I’m still finalising the animatics with the storyboarding team, some episodes are being animated and directed by my animation director.

Angela: I’m thinking about AI now because I’ve seen lots of animations made with it, and its aesthetic is very peculiar, I would say.

Lucy: It’s a strange fairground for the mind, isn’t it?

Angela: It is, but research in neuroscience and aesthetics says that what the brain is most exposed to finds it likable. So, if the new generation and even we get used to it, we will like its look. This will be an aesthetic that we might enjoy, eventually.

Lucy: Well, that’s quite worrying. I can see where certain elements of AI are useful. We had an ambitious episode in series two where a child’s wooden choo-choo train travels along a track around the whole playroom. We couldn’t build a whole playroom because we were only using them for a couple of shots. The editor used AI software to mockup roughly what we thought the non-existent areas of the playroom should look like. Then we could direct the team on the studio floor to shoot what we needed – characters on green screen at specific angles, stills of the background at specific angles – and then the compositors could use our rough AI mockups as a guide to compose and design the final look. We didn’t use the AI for the finished product, but we used it as a time-saving tool to help us work out how the space should look and what the objects should be doing in camera.

Angela: It speeds up the process, doesn’t it?

Lucy: It speeds up the process exactly, and that’s what you need on a series. You need to stick to a tight schedule.

Angela: Would it be helpful for storyboarding?

Lucy: Probably not, for me, storyboarding is one of the most crucial parts of the production because this is where the story forms and you need a good storyteller to decide what shots best tell that story. A good storyboarder, in my opinion, is gold dust! The animatic (the narrative in pictures) is the bible to the episode. It’s like deciding every word in a poem, every image, and every pose and every picture must be there for a very specific reason. It really needs a lot of careful thought. The storyboard artist decides on what you see and what you don’t see, and when you reveal the punchline of the joke. There’s a real skill in that. I think we need to embrace AI as we’ve embraced the internet but be wise as to when we use it.

Angela: Nothing is new, except you, isn’t it?

Lucy: Exactly. I was asked if we had more stories to be told in my series, and I said, yes, of course, because whilst you have five different characters, all with different personalities, you have five different perspectives on the same thing. You’re always going to find a story there if you’re led by character.

Angela: I read that The Very Small Creatures were supportive characters of the first Aardman
character, Morph. Is that correct?

Lucy: Yes, The Very Small Creatures is a spin-off series from Morph. In some of the early episodes of Morph, there were these tiny, only about one-centimeter-tall creatures always seen as a crowd, called The Very Small Creatures. I was watching this and had the idea to take five of those characters,
those very small creatures, and give them their own preschool show, with a slightly different tone to Morph, a tone more ideal for a younger audience. A series separate to Morph’s world that doesn’t feature any of the characters from Morph. Morph is set on an artist’s desk, but that’s not where children play; children play on the floor, so that’s where our series is set. Like Morph, I really wanted this series to have comedy at the forefront, but it was important to me that it also had empathy and kindness at its heart. A group of friends who do everything together, and experience fun and comedy together, as opposed to friends who mock and trick each other, as they do in Morph. It’s much better to laugh with someone than to laugh at someone.

Angela: So, there is an educational purpose to the show?

Lucy: There is an educational purpose, but very much not in an academic sense. In an emotional sense because it’s for young preschool children. When my children were around two years old, they started to play with other children and were beginning to become more social beings; until that stage, they were just playing by themselves next to each other. There are many life lessons at that age; recognizing your own emotions, recognizing them in someone else, managing your own emotions, and understanding how someone else could be feeling about what you do. I actually love these years. There’s this phrase in England, which is the ‘terrible twos’. I think toddlers get a bad rep, but I think they’re gorgeous. I find them very caring. They have a lot of emotions that they’re dealing with and they don’t always know how to express them. I find it a fascinating period in their development.

Angela: Did you have an educational advisor when writing the script?

Lucy: You know what, we all talked about this, but because I had done so much reading myself on this topic, we never actually got somebody else in. There was an interesting thing that happened in series three. I was reading a book called ‘Sleep Well, Take Risks, Squish the Peas’ by Hasan Merali, who is a pediatric physician. It’s about what we can learn as adults, looking at how toddlers behave. There was a part in the book that affected, changed, how one of the episodes played out – an episode about giving and receiving gifts. Wrapping up drawings or found objects, like rocks, and giving them to me was one of my children’s favourite activities to do when they were little. In our story, one of the characters, Orange, makes homemade gifts for the others – Pink, Green, Blue and Yellow – and we had the giver, Orange, display happiness after being thanked by the character on the receiving end. However, after reading the book and learning that studies conducted have shown toddlers don’t get happiness from being thanked, they don’t need praise, and that they get happiness from seeing the receiver enjoy the gift, I wanted to stay true to a toddler’s sensibilities and show this exact pattern of events. So instead of Orange doing a happy dance after being thanked, they do their happy dance when they see their friend open the gift and joyfully play with it. It was a small change, but I think it’s important to stay true to a toddler values, and those details are essential. I suppose that’s my job as the series director – to do the research and do the reading because I want it to be as authentic as possible.

Lucy Izzard’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lucyizzarddraws/