How Mackenzie Crook’s ‘Small Prophets’ used stop-motion
The story of “Small Prophets” — the gentle, magical, nostalgic British comedy streaming on Apple TV — begins and ends in a garden shed. The show’s creator, writer and director, Mackenzie Crook, and the animator Ainslie Henderson have been friends for at least 20 years. One day, Henderson went to visit Crook in the shed at the end of his garden.
It’s “a big mess of a creative little place,” Henderson said, where Crook makes things. He writes in there, but it’s a workshop too: he illustrates and he crafts. He made many of the props in the show by hand. Both the shed and his house are peppered with his “beautiful little objects.” “If I’ve got a whole day with no other interruptions, that’s where I am,” Crook said.
When Henderson walked into the shed that day, a weird, white, papier-mâché creature on the shelf caught his eye. It was, as Crook told Henderson, a homunculus: one of a set of tiny prophets, or magical spirits, who lived in glass jars full of water. They could answer any question, and they had to answer truthfully.
“Small Prophets” follows Michael Sleep (Pearce Quigley), who works in a DIY store (a British term for a home improvement store), visits his dad Brian (Michael Palin) in a retirement home, and yearns for his girlfriend Clea to come home. Clea vanished seven years ago, and Michael’s dad suggests that the homunculi — which he learned about from an Italian alchemist in Egypt — might be able to tell him what happened to her.
The show premiered on BBC Two in February, when it quickly became the BBC’s biggest new scripted launch of the year. (It was renewed for a second season in September, this time on BBC One.) In the U.K., Crook is well-known for playing Gareth Keenan in the original British version of “The Office” (Gareth’s an analogue to Dwight Schrute in the U.S. version) — and for writing, directing and starring in “Detectorists,” which won the 2015 BAFTA for television scripted comedy.
“Detectorists” and “Small Prophets” share a singular comedic sensibility, which arose from Crook’s realization that some shows at that time, like “The Office” or “The Inbetweeners,” were drawing humor from cruelty, embarrassment and awkwardness. This is how he stumbled upon his genre: gentle comedy.
“I didn’t like the word ‘gentle’ at first,” Crook said on a video call earlier this month from Leeds, Yorkshire, where he’s directing his first feature film. “It’s taken me a while to make my peace with that. But now I realize that it’s something to do with being uncynical, being optimistic, but hopefully that doesn’t mean bland or unfunny. … It’s sort of a surprise to find that this is what I do, and this is what I’ve become known for. But I’m thankful for it, as well, because I think this world does need more optimism and hope than it presently has.”
He worries that “gentle” might suggest something not particularly funny or challenging, and would like to clarify that was not his intent. It wasn’t the outcome, either: “Small Prophets” is about some of the most challenging subject matter — grief and loss — while remaining genuinely funny and rather extraordinary.
Mackenzie Crook, who created “Small Prophets,” plays Gordon, Michael’s boss at the DIY store. (Apple)
Michael (Pearce Quigley) befriends Kacey (Lauren Patel), his co-worker at the store. (Apple)
Michael has the epitome of an ordinary life, living a mundane existence in a suburban cul-de-sac, dutifully eating his Malted Squares cereal each morning, and evading his boss at the DIY store (played by a ponytailed, bespectacled Crook). He befriends Kacey (Lauren Patel) at work, a May-December friendship somewhat based on Patel and Quigley’s own (they met working on a radio play). But somehow, Michael is simultaneously “a magnet for beautiful, crazy things,” Crook said.
When oil spills from his dusty, beat-up blue car, it pools into the shape of a big, black rabbit. A shooting star, or rather a meteor, may or may not have landed somewhere inside his house. A room inside is frozen in time, forever decorated for an ‘80s-themed Christmas — a surprise that Clea never got to see. And then there are the homunculi.
The inspiration came from a short passage in “Clea,” the fourth book in Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” which references the creatures. “It just fascinated me that he put it in this novel apropos of nothing else,” Crook said. “It didn’t add to the plot.” He squirreled the idea away until he knew what to do with it. Crook is a big fan of David Lynch, and referenced an old trick of his: To make a movie, first come up with 70 ideas.
The homunculi were one of those seed ideas for “Small Prophets.” Crook knew he wanted to set the show in modern-day suburbia, in a cul-de-sac. He knew he wanted to work with Quigley, who plays Michael. And he knew he wanted to work with Henderson, his animator friend, on those homunculi. (In the early stages of design, Crook made illustrations of what the prophets might look like. “They’re like Francis Bacon paintings,” Henderson said. “They’re mad-looking things.”)
Henderson worked on the show with Will Anderson, the former as a stop-motion animator, the latter on digital animation, 2-D animation, compositing and finishing shots. (Glen Southern designed and sculpted the creatures themselves, and they collaborated with Mackinnon & Saunders, a puppet fabricator that has worked on Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio,” Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride.” There were seven total puppets for three homunculi.)
As much as possible, Crook wanted this world to feel tangible; to achieve it, the team used in-camera effects and props as much as possible, rather than CGI. “It feels a bit more authentic … when it’s stop-motion. You can see the mark of the maker in every movement,” said Anderson in a video call with Henderson. The prophet puppets float “behind this warped glass, which is slightly abstracted and a bit more magical, and separates you from them in a really interesting way with reflections and inks.”
It’s almost as if the flesh-colored prophet puppets were actors, and Henderson directed them, Anderson said, manipulating their silicon bodies into position over and over again. In this analogy, Anderson would be ironing out logistics like camera angles or lighting. He made their garments, like the queen’s billowing cape (“ethereal clothes,” Henderson called them), digitally after the fact.
Crook knew that he wanted the homunculi to be almost still, as if someone had fallen into icy water, their cold, wet clothes clinging to them, barely wanting to move. Near-stillness is one of the hardest things to animate, Anderson pointed out. But “when it’s done well, it really binds, because they are thinking, alive things; they are. That’s our job to animate.”
For many, stop-motion holds a real nostalgia, Henderson said — another theme of the show, dovetailing with Michael’s yearning. Production designer Lucy Spink wove nostalgia into “Small Prophets,” especially in the Christmas room. She texted her sisters pictures of wallpaper options. “Which one makes you cry more?” she asked. “Or makes you feel like you remember being there?”
From a production angle, creating gentle comedy is “a tonal thing,” Spink said on a video call from the Yorkshire Dales. “You know how far to take it. That it isn’t extreme fantasy, but you’re pulling somewhere back from that. And it was a visual serendipity, is what I felt was what we tried to do, which was like the world was saying there’s a little something strange going on.”
If someone described this show as magical realism, Crook would “find that a compliment.” The first time he heard the phrase was about the 1992 Mexican romantic drama “Like Water for Chocolate,” which really struck him. “I just thought, wow, OK, you can do stuff like that, impossible stuff” — like a crocheted bedspread flying in a swirl of colors for a kilometer behind a carriage — “and ask people to believe it.”
“Like Water for Chocolate” is based on Laura Esquivel’s 1989 novel by the same name, which folds recipes into its story. One is for quail in rose petal sauce, which Crook made for his girlfriend at the time, whose name was Clea. She cried because she found the tiny bird so sad.
Kacey (Lauren Patel) gazes at one of the homunculi in a scene from the series.
(Apple)
There’s a quote from “Justine,” the first novel in the “Alexandria Quartet,” that I shared with Crook. It reminded me of how he had spoken about wanting to believe in the unexplained: “We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”
“I’d not even picked up on that, but that’s it,” Crook said. “I’ve never believed in ghosts, but I would love to see one. And if I did, it would flip my world upside down. I’d have to reevaluate everything, and that would be an exciting thing. And I think ‘Small Prophets’ is a lot about that.”
The “Small Prophets” finale, dropping on Apple TV Nov. 4, channels that essence of storytelling — inexplicable but undeniably real — back into a garden shed. This time it’s Michael’s, engulfed by his wild garden, built with the exact same footprint as Crook’s own.
“That spirit that’s in the show: that gentle, warm funniness — that’s what he’s like to be with,” Henderson said. “Will and I went and stayed in his house, and he made us dinner, and we sat ‘round and drank wine and had a fun time storyboarding. That’s cool. That’s how life should be when you’re making stuff with people.”
