Inside Oscar-nominated puppet studio in Altrincham that brought Fantastic Mr Fox and The Corpse Bride to life
In a glass-fronted cabinet in the meeting room of one of the most ordinary office buildings you could care to imagine, a toad is looking back at me. It’s a toad I know very well.
It’s a place where Tim Burton knows its puppet makers by name. A place where cult director Wes Anderson decided he wanted to bring George Clooney’s Fantastic Mr Fox to bristling, wise-cracking life. When it was dissolved after parent company Thames Television lost its tender, many of those skilled artists and sculptors suddenly found themselves adrift. Peter had just found out he was going to become a father. So Mackinnon and Saunders was born of that necessity, and with it a new era of creativity that endures to this day.
“You never think that anyone will actually pay you to play around with plasticine and make puppets,” Ian says. “You might dream about it. But you don’t think it will happen. I didn’t even know The Wind In The Willows had been made in Manchester. You couldn’t Google anything then. I had no idea that it was possible to get involved in this kind of work.”
A few years later when he decided to start work on The Corpse Bride, a full stop-motion project, there was only one company he wanted to work with. Burton got to know the puppet makers at the company personally, and would come up from London to Altrincham often. And when hipster director Wes Anderson wanted to reimagine Fantastic Mr Fox for the big screen in 2009, it was Mackinnon and Saunders who made him a range of foxes, badgers, rats, otters and weasels for the sumptuous stop motion project, not to mention the grotesque farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean.
On his back are tiny, bent nails crafted to look like ones Geppetto would have clumsily hammered in. Small magnets stick his chest plate on, and when it’s pulled off, it reveals the metal skeleton inside him, which makes him infinite poseable. It was made using cutting edge 3D printing techniques.