While we’re all still working our way through the deluge of new Christmastime content sloughed onto Netflix’s content library like loosened earth in a mudslide, the streaming giant has already begun teasing us with next year’s seasonal offerings. Production has commenced on their 2021 slate, and the first one on the books comes with an impressive pedigree.
Today Netflix announced that the wheels have started turning on Robin Robin, the next feature project from the stop-motion wizards at UK animation house Aardman. The film will be their first proper musical, and in keeping with its projected release date of late next year, it will also be infused with a healthy dosage of Yuletide cheer.
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The film tracks the maturation of Robin (voiced by up-and-coming young actress Bronte Carmichael), a bird with a mixed-up sense of identity due to her having been raised by a family of mice since birth. Robin leaves home and embarks upon a journey of interspecies self-discovery, accompanied by a item-hoarding Magpie (to be voiced by Richard E. Grant) and stalked by a predatory Cat (voice of Gillian Anderson) between production numbers.
His odyssey of the soul mostly revolves around his efforts to procure a delicious sandwich, a suggestion that the drily absurdist sense of humor Aardman has made their trademark will not be absent from their first collaboration with Netflix. (Their second, a mercifully Mel Gibson-free sequel to Chicken Run, was put on the schedule earlier this summer.)
The folks at Netflix also released the promotional image reproduced below, a splashy exterior shot of the hunk-o-junk that Robin and her mousy family call home. The animation medium is uniquely suited to telling stories of tiny scale like this one, where the camera’s POV is no bigger than a bicycle tire – on the conceptual level, the film’s off to a great start.
