By Maggie Ritchie

A SCOTTISH band has teamed up with the makers of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep on their first-ever Christmas musical.

Robin Robin, Aardman’s animated family movie has just been released on Netflix in time for the festive season and features songs and music written by Wigtown duo, The Bookshop Band.

Husband and wife Beth Porter and Ben Please, who live in Scotland’s Book Town, not only composed and performed the music and songs but also coached the film’s stars Gillian Anderson, Richard E Grant and 14-year-old Bronte Carmichael.

The 30-minute animated short from Aardman, a four-time Academy Award winning animation studio in conjunction with Netflix, tells the tale of a small bird with a big heart. Raised by a family of burglar mice, Robin (Carmichael) sets out on a big adventure to steal a Christmas sandwich so they can all enjoy a real festive feast. Along the way she encounters a curmudgeonly magpie (Grant) who is an obsessive collector of shiny stuff and faces mortal danger from the villainous Cat (Anderson) who fancies Robin and friends as her own lunch.

Beth Porter said: “We’ve worked on short animations before, but this is by far the biggest project of its kind we have ever taken on – and it’s been great.

“One of the wonderful things is that music we composed and recorded here in Wigtown is now going to be part of millions of people’s Christmas entertainment all over the world.”

The Bookshop Band, who are well-known for the literature-related songs they write and perform, sometimes accompanied by famous authors, were involved with the Robin Robin project right from its start over two years ago.

They gave each character its own musical identity - Robin’s appearances are accompanied by a recorder, the cat by a baritone ukulele and bass clarinet and the magpie’s theme is a muted jazz trumpet. There’s even a nod to the music of previous Aardman projects, like Wallace & Gromit, with the frequent use of a brass band in the background.

Much of what audiences will be listening to is pure Bookshop Band, though the duo brought in additional musicians for some parts and even a full choir for the finale.

Coaching sessions with the cast were important as they had been selected for the character of their speaking voices rather than because of any background as singers.

Porter added: “They were all really down-to-earth and friendly. When we met Gillian, she greeted us with a nice little elbow bump. I don’t think she realised it was a singing part, but we coached her. Her cat voice was a mixture of Margaret Thatcher at her most haughty and a husky feline growl.

“I was really impressed with the way Richard went through his songs and made them sound just amazing. He really went for it and threw himself into the character of the grumpy magpie with a house full of stolen treasures that the clumsy Robin keeps knocking over. Gillian and Richard are actors rather than trained singers, but they pulled it off really well and were really fun to work with.”

Her husband and musical partner, Ben, is the older brother of one of the film’s directors, Mikey Please, and this is their tenth professional collaboration. Previous work includes Mikey’s 2011 BAFTA winning short The Eagleman Stag for which Ben composed and performed the music.

Despite being most closely associated with music, Ben has a deep understanding of movies having spent a decade as an environmental documentary maker in East Africa and continuing to work as a cinematographer.

When the brothers were growing up in Bath, they often worked on projects together and Ben recalls how his brother’s talent for model-making, that is a key part of his love of animation, began to show at an early age.

Ben Please said: “When I was about 10 and he was six we were making models and mine were much better. About two years later things had changed and even though he was four years younger, when we made models, his were way ahead.”

In recent years their professional collaborations have broadened to involve Beth as another musical talent and, from the movie-making side, Dan Ojari, co-director of Robin Robin.

Please added: “Mikey has an excellent appreciation of music, so he knows what we do and whether it’s right for a project, and we know exactly the sort of thing that he will like.”

Mikey Please said: “Because we know each other really well, and also have a strong working relationship, we were able to develop the music alongside the story, from the point we pitched it to the point it was made.”

At times, the songs were written in advance of the story and scenes were written around the music, rather than the other way round. “It was not the usual thing where you do a scene and then give it to musicians to score. The two processes went hand-in-hand,” added Mikey Please.

•Robin Robin is available on Netflix for the Christmas season – see the main trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khyk6VEvJ18