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.
When I was a boy, I’d sit in front of the TV, and slotting a VHS tape into the player with a clunk, on would come The Wind In The Willows, probably the most famous adaptation of Kenneth Graeme’s classic book that there has ever been. Icons of the stage and screen voiced the characters.
Richard Pearson was mild mannered Mole, Peter Sallis was the debonair Ratty, Sir Michael Hordern was the irascible Badger, and David Jason was Mr Toad, the chaotic aristocrat with a slapdash attitude to road safety.
And now, that very toad - known in the worlds of sculpture and puppetry as a ‘maquette’, or a working model - is in front of me, and I’m beaming at it, inside and out. Every day, magic is being made in this most ordinary of office buildings. Pure, unadulterated, joyous magic.
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Not only that, it is one of just a few places in the world where such dreams can become reality. The people who work here are visionaries; highly skilled and highly sought-after artists, mechanics, mould makers, designers, sculptors, creators of every stripe.
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.
Most recently, Guillermo Del Toro, the man behind Oscar winners Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, chose its craftsmen and women to make his vision of Pinocchio, the most famous puppet of all. And they also made the puppets for some little guy called Bob The Builder.
It is a place like no other. And if you live in Altrincham, you would pass it every day of the week without a clue about the magic going on inside.
Ian Mackinnon and Peter Saunders founded the animation and puppet-making studio that bears their names 30 years ago, out of the ashes of Cosgrove Hall. That was the famous studio in Chorlton, where The Wind In The Willows was made, along with the likes of Danger Mouse, Count Duckula and, of course, Chorlton and the Wheelies.
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.
Ian is modest to a fault, so it’s Peter who has to tell the story of how they met - through a picture in the newspaper. Seventeen-year-old Ian, from Warrington, had been the subject of a local news story about his prodigious model-making. Peter’s sister Bridget, who also worked as an art director at Cosgrove Hall, saw it and was mightily impressed, so they resolved to get him some work.
Sadly, there wasn’t anything for him to do at Cosgrove at the time, so they made a few calls on his behalf, and before long, Ian was working for Gerry Anderson in London. Yes, Gerry Anderson who made the Thunderbirds.
By contrast, Peter - though he admits he ‘can’t draw for toffee’ - studied animation at the famous West Surrey College of Art & Design. A skilled puppet-maker, he joined Cosgrove Hall for a four-week job, being paid his wages out of petty cash. He ended up staying for 14 years.
“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.”
Ian did come and work for Cosgrove Hall eventually, and when it had to close, he and Peter founded the business. It was not long after that they were invited to New York by Tim Burton about a new movie, Mars Attacks!, a pastiche of an alien invasion B-movie, which would star Jack Nicholson, Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Rod Steiger and Sarah Jessica Parker.
He wanted the aliens to be stop motion, a callback to his love of physical special effects and the work of the legendary Ray Harryhausen, who made the Sinbad movies. So they designed those eye-popping puppets for him, with the huge exposed brains and bulging eyeballs. Ian was in Hollywood, all ready to start shooting when the rug was pulled.
The studio had decided that there wasn’t time to render the aliens in stop motion, so they would use the Mackinnon and Saunders designs, inspired by classic Topps trading cards, and take them to Industrial Light and Magic instead, George Lucas’s company, and do them CGI. It was devastating at the time, but it had opened a door.
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.
“He’s so passionate and enthusiastic about stop motion,” says Peter. “He would speak to every person in the company. When he left, it was like we’d had this huge voltage plugged into the company. It’s been a real privilege to have worked with him. We’ve been lucky to have been a small part of that.”
Burton’s then wife Helena Bonham Carter voiced the Bride herself, opposite Johnny Depp’s Victor. Still to this day, she has a full size maquette of her character Emily on her piano at home.
It also meant that when Burton wanted to remake his debut movie Frankenweenie in stop motion in 2012, about a boy scientist who brings his dog back to life, he’d be heading back to Altrincham again.
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.
It meant that George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray and Michael Gambon were among those who breathed life into Mackinnon and Saunders’ creations. It missed out on the Oscar, but only to Pixar’s Up.
Neither men are interested in taking any credit for this. They speak only of the ‘team’. In a room tucked away in the warren of workshops, one of them, puppet maker Richard Pickersgill is carefully placing puppets in specially tailored flight cases.
There’s Vincent and Emily from The Corpse Bride, some versions of Sparky the dog from Frankenweenie, Mr Fox and the new Pinnochio the studio made for Del Toro. He’s printed in plastic but looks indistinguishable from wood.
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.
They’re not just crafting shapes here. They’re crafting character, or at least the potential for it, those tiny facial adjustments being the difference between something that looks real and something that looks artificial, something that works on camera and something that doesn’t.
“When people first heard about 3D printing, some were saying ‘well, that’s us out of a job,” Richard says “It wasn’t. It’s another tool. And it’s why I’m still in this job, every project has a new challenge. And I’m still learning, all the time.”
Richard has worked for the company for 23 years, straight out of university. As the community is so small, he’s also worked out in Portland, Oregon, at the Laika studio that made movies like Coraline and Paranorman. Laika collaborated with Mackinnon and Saunders on The Corpse Bride, and on Pinocchio too.
In the workshop opposite, puppeteer Mark Thompson, another long-serving artisan, is in great demand all around the world too. His favourite part of the job is when he is scrambled to huge film lots, where the animation process is happening, and he’s tasked with repairing puppets on-set. As stop motion is so time consuming, seconds of footage can take days, so delays can cost insane amounts of money. It’s high pressure work.
The puppets in the flight cases are globe-trotters too, having been exhibited all around the world before, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to Lisbon. They’re not travelling as far this time - just a mile or two down the road to Sale, where The Waterside is hosting a 30th anniversary retrospective of Mackinnon and Saunders’ work, starting next month.
It’s not all Hollywood material, of course. They’ve kept on the tradition of kids TV that Cosgrove Hall took stewardship of too - so have been responsible for making the likes of Rasta Mouse, Twirlywoos and Raa Raa the Noisy Lion, as well as taking on projects like Postman Pat.
“I love my job,” Richard says. “I’m consider myself very lucky to be doing this for a living. But it’s a team effort. I’ve been here 20 years, and I’ve never made a puppet start to finish on my own. It is an amazing place to work. Sometimes you can forget that, until someone comes around and you can see it on their faces.”
Mackinnon & Saunders: 30 Years and Beyond is at the Sale Waterside’s Lauriston Gallery from November 19 to February 25, 2023, in partnership with the Manchester Animation Festival.
Pinocchio is released on Netflix on December 9.
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