Who wants to learn Penguinese?
Saturday, September 25, 2004
I suppose everyone has their little guilty pleasures... one of mine is watching children's television as I eat breakfast before I start working. A particular favourite of mine is Pingu, which I absolutely love! Originally made for Swiss TV in the eighties, rights to Pingu were bought by the British creators of Bob the Builder last year, and they've just finished making fifty two new episodes which will be shown early in the morning on BBC2. Certainly worth getting up early for!
Each Pingu episode is a claymation short featuring the cheeky but lovable young penguin, Pingu. Pingu spends his days living amongst the ice and snow of the south pole with his baby sister, Pinga, and his parents. He gets into all sorts of mischief with his sister and his best friend, Robby the seal.
For producing the new series, the studio has a total of 729 bodies, 888 heads and 327 flippers. The large number of bodies are used to allow a range of different cycles for a character without having to model from scratch unless a unique action is being performed. For example, Pingu's walking cycle consists of 8 models of individual poses, which can then be combined with flippers and heads for various positions and expressions. Common actions like walking, jumping, rolling into a ball and so on can then be completed with ease.
The voices were originally performed by Carlo Bonomi, an Italian clown. Bonomi had a very impressive vocal range, which the new makers had difficulty in matching with one voice actor, so they chose to use two instead. Italian Marcello Magni and Spaniard David Sant were chosen after the company's own "Penguin Idol" auditions, and certainly do an excellent job in the roles.
Pingu and the other characters in his little community speak Penguinese. Being made for children, the language is a very humourous, expressive language, yet is very universal, proven by Pingu's success in a range of countries. Although a little hard to covey in text, here are some of Pingu's key noises. Pingu announces his arrival with a short "meck-meck", when he's misbehaving, he gives out a sharp "hoo-hoo" and to express his happiness, a long "noog-noog". Theres a whole range of emotions shown in Pingu's vocals, and each character has their own accents as well. As you might expect, Robby the seal's voice is more of a honk.
Keep an eye out for Pingu, its a little gem of a show for children and adults alike.
Posted at 01:11
