THE unassuming Leith street which houses the Ko Lik animation studio doesn't look much like the gaping Maw of Hell, but it has spawned its fair share of ghosts, ghouls and things that crunch bones in the night. Since setting up in 2003, Ko Lik's creative duo of Neil Jack and Cameron Fraser have won Baftas for their short films and had their work screened around the world, but it was the 2006 broadcast of their half-hour Haunted Hogmanay on BBC1 that introduced them to a mainstream audience.
Two Hogmanays ago, TV viewers made the acquaintance of comic supernatural investigators Jeff Wylie and Thurston McCondry. Respectively voiced by Peter Capaldi, last seen in The Thick Of It, and Alex Norton of Taggart, the psychic sleuths did battle with the cackling spirit of Morag Lachlan Maclachlan in the dripping catacombs beneath Edinburgh.
Merging animation and spooks is not new, but it was an inspired move at a time when the big boys of the animation world tended to be a bit fluffy. Robbie The Reindeer, Shaun The Sheep and The Snowman were are all angling for cutesy appeal rather than manly thrills. Jeff and Thurston are more thrawn and exhibit a grim, uniquely Scottish gallows humour when faced with one of Hell's minions.
"It's a pan-Scottish humour," says Fraser. "I was born in Inverness and grew up in Perth. Neil fled Fife and we both live in Edinburgh. We are not from the west coast, which tends to drive a lot of television comedy, but we think that our brand of humour is familiar to anyone living in Scotland."
This spring, Ko Lik's bumbling but well-meaning ghost hunters lock modelling clay horns with the eponymous beast of their latest stop-frame animation, The Glendogie Bogey. This time, Capaldi and Norton are joined by former S-Clubber Rachel Stevens, who plays Patricia Ravelston, Jeff's main squeeze and a source of much bad-tempered jealousy on the part of Thurston. While the models of Jeff and Thurston are not a million miles from the likenesses of the actors who voice them, poor Stevens, a one-time model, has fared less well with Patricia's looks.
"Patricia wears a cagoule for much of the film and we've given her quite a big bum," notes Jack. "I don't think Rachel saw her model before doing the voice work. That may be because we had hidden it."
Whatever Stevens thinks of her character's assets, The Glendogie Bogey represents another success for Ko Lik and, in a wider sense, animation in Scotland. Jack says there is a perception that Manchester, Bristol and London are the epicentres of British animation, but in fact there is a lot more happening north of the border than there was five years ago.
"Animation in Scotland is thriving," says Fraser, among the barely controlled chaos of Ko Lik's studio workshop. "When we started, it was almost unthinkable to have a career in animation in Scotland."
Both Jack and Fraser enjoy making out that when Ko Lik began, they had no game plan beyond their initial short film, and certain facts do point towards a lack of long-term strategic planning. The company name is a good example. Bought as an off-the-peg domain name that was unlikely to have many competitors when Googled, it turns out to have several meanings. At least it does according to Jack. "In Swedish it means cow carcass, which we were dimly aware of. That's OK because it's quite funny."
"We had bought the domain name for £9.99 and we couldn't really let that go," says Fraser in a display of canny financial acumen.
Less helpfully, Ko Lik apparently means diarrhoea in German. "It's coming into its own now though as we are working with more and more German companies," deadpans Jack.
Neil Jack holding Thurston Mcondry
Regrettable linguistic pitfalls aside, part of Ko Lik's subsequent growth can be attributed to the success of their Scottish peers in the animation industry. Red Kite, the Edinburgh-based animation company where Fraser and Jack originally met, announced in January that it was to work with DC Thomson to animate the iconic Dennis and Gnasher for the BBC. Also in Edinburgh, Sylvain Chomet, the man behind the worldwide smash animation Belleville Rendezvous, is working on The Illusionist, a 2D cartoon based on a Jacques Tati script. Ko Lik, Red Kite and Chomet's Django Films have all benefited symbiotically from the influx of animation talent which each other's projects have attracted to Scotland.
According to Fraser, it helps that the animation world is not as red in tooth and claw as, say, the film industry, where rival studios routinely release spoiler films to dent another outfit's sales. By comparison, the animation industry almost sounds like a collegiate effort.
"Anyone coming into animation from live action film is struck by how cooperative it is," says Fraser. "It's not just Scotland. People in animation across the world are very supportive of each other. When we were starting up, we asked someone at Aardman Animations (creators of Wallace And Gromit] what camera head they would recommend for a particular shot. They posted one up to us with a note saying to return it when we were done."
Fraser and Jack have spent the past three years bringing Jeff and Thurston to life and, in the short term at least, are looking forward to getting their teeth into different subjects. Scottish Screen is helping them explore options, and they are also talking to the BBC drama department about possible projects. While their past two stop-frame animations have been a big success for them, they don't want the medium to completely define what they do. To turn the Looney Tunes sign-off line on its head, 'That's not all, folks!'
"We are not just a stop-frame company," says Fraser. "We are interested in a whole range of things. We are script-driven and really interested in the writing side of it. There are relatively few people in the animation industry whose primary focus is the script. Not surprisingly, most people in the animation industry like to play with the toys. We like both of these things. We love the possibilities that animation gives but primarily we are driven by ideas and scripts."
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The Glendogie Bogey is on BBC1 Scotland on May 25 at 4.35pm•
www.kolik.co.ukThe full article contains 1106 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
