How Nick Ball brought the bear necessities to Morrisons

Everyone loves a fairy tale at Christmas, so for its festive offering this year, Morrisons turned to the age-old tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

But what if the bears lived in suburbia? And what if Goldie... was Baby Bear's squeeze?!

Bringing the bears to life in a fantastically tangible way, Leo UK and MJZ's Nick Ball's Christmas Made Just RIght utilises animatronics, oversized costumes and joyfully lumbering performances to make the characters instantly endearing.

shots caught up with creatives Jack Stoten and Connor Wynn, as well as Ball, to find out why locking in the 'Den Commandments' was key to getting everything just right.

A retelling of a fairy tale is a delightfully panto Christmas springboard, but for this ad you've transplanted it into the 'real world'. Did the Three Bears or the family get-together idea come first, and what made you think you were on to something?

Jack Stoten and Conor Wynn: The Three Bears came first. The Morrisons point of difference is Market Street, a collection of skilled butchers, fishmongers, bakers and cheesemongers in-store who customise and cut things just how you like them. The Three Bears felt like they really embodied that personalisation. In the original story, the bears have specific-sized chairs, temperatures of porridge and firmness of beds. They know exactly what makes it ‘just right’ for them. 

From there, we knew we wanted to flip that story into something modern and unexpected. We wanted to place the bears in a story which felt relatable at Christmas, and that’s where the idea came from to tell the story years down the line with Baby Bear all grown up and coming home from uni, with a new girlfriend, of course.

What was your initial reaction to the brief? What was the element that you thought needed to be nailed?

Nick Ball: It was all an exercise, as often these things are, in tone. There was already a lot of warmth and humour in the idea, and I wanted to work with the Leo UK team to bring a bit more rambunctious, chaotic energy to the bears and keep the audience guessing. A big part of that was the ending. 

Before we committed to shooting anything, we outlined “The Den Commandments” 

Initially, Goldilocks was more of a suggestion, but together we felt we should commit to the bit and find our own, modern Goldilocks, then turn the screws on her from there. I think that helped keep things feeling a bit more surprising and subversive, while modernising the fairy tale without ever getting too obvious.

Another aspect of realism is the fact that the bears communicate through roars rather than speech. How did you decide how much they should be anthropomorphised?

JS/CW: We spoke about this a lot: how human do we make the bears? In fact, before we committed to shooting anything, we outlined “The Den Commandments” (a term coined by Mr Nick Ball), a list of rules about how our bears behave and interact with the world around them. It boiled down to keeping them human enough to convincingly plant them in the real world, a Christmas we all recognise and relate to, but ‘beary’ enough to inject humour and fun into the film. 

For us, giving them speech felt like it fell on the side of ‘too human’. You also get into the conversation of how a bear talks. Do they half-growl, half-speak? Do they have an accent? What would they say?! Ultimately, the ambition was to create a sequence of scenes which felt so familiar and relatable that you don’t need dialogue. 

Instead, we let the audience absorb the story with memories of their own experiences of Christmases gone by.

The bears display real character despite lacking some of the anthropomorphic elements people might normally associate with this sort of tale. How important was it to get their personalities right and, more importantly, how did you do it?!

NB: I think that the naivety of the Bears was really important for an audience to warm to them. We’re all very ready to call bullshit on things that are ‘real’ when created in CG, whereas us starting from an animatronic base and subtly evolving that with the odd touch of CG helps bridge that gap between weird dead-eye animatronics you might see at Disneyland, and something with a bit more nuance. 

I looked at Where the Wild Things Are, and how they brought together both the practical and VFX to create something a little more ownable. Beyond that, I wanted very distinct, but relatable personalities, essentially based off my own Mum and Dad and their reaction to my first girlfriend!!

The film tells the parents' side of the story, while Baby Bear and Goldilocks get to tell their own version through social media. Was that dual perspective always part of the plan, and how did you approach creating two sides of the same story?

JS/CW: As part of our character development for the bears, we always wanted to dig deeper into Baby Bear’s personality and his relationship with Goldilocks. Social felt like the perfect place to do that. Baby Bear and Goldie met at university, and this is their first Christmas together. Their “hard launch” to the world. So we decided to tell the story through their eyes on the platform that felt most natural, social media. 

In every scene, we found ourselves asking “how would a bear do that?”... and the answer was normally “With great difficulty.”

Doubling down on their interactions with the real world, whilst following the ‘Den Commandments’ laid out in the main AV gave us a great chance to have even more fun with the characters, creating a campaign which let people explore the story as far as they wish, with hidden gems scattered across Morrisons channels.

The bears' preparations are fairly chaotic, but there's real warmth beneath the slapstick. Was that idea of embracing the imperfections always central to the story, and how did you strike the balance between comedy and sentiment?

JS/CW: 100%. The imperfections are a huge part of it. 

In every scene, we found ourselves asking “how would a bear do that?”... and the answer was normally “With great difficulty.” Balancing those imperfections against the sentiment of the bears was something we had to keep an eye on, but ultimately the chaos is the caring. 

That chaos is a result of their deep desire to make Christmas ‘just right’ for their son and their unexpected guest, and that’s something we’ve all felt at one point (minus the being bears bit).

With such a fantastical premise, how did you approach integrating the Morrisons offering without breaking the spell?

JS/CW: Taking them to the store felt like a really natural part of the story and gave us more opportunities to see them interact with the world around them. Regardless of your Christmas traditions, picking up last-minute bits is the one thing we all have to do. 

We had a lot of fun thinking about whether or not a bear would be able to use a coin-operated trolley or if he’d just rip it off with brute strength. Or how he’d react to seeing a whole salmon presented to him instead of having to sit on a cold riverbank for five hours waiting for one like he usually does.

The choice to use animatronic rather than entirely digital bears is a delight. Was there ever a thought to go down a fully VFX route, and at what stage did you decide practical effects were the way to go?

JS/CW: From the first time we put pen to paper, we knew this was going to be a handcrafted piece. Right back to the initial briefing where we were asked to champion Morrisons colleagues and their handcrafted approach to their work on Market Street, there was no doubt this spot would reflect that. 

Regardless of your Christmas traditions, picking up last-minute bits is the one thing we all have to do. 

We wanted the Morrisons ethos to live through every layer of the film, putting the power of real craft from real people at the heart of everything. Once we settled on the story, it was all about finding where we could add to the craft, from scratches on the walls of the bears’ home to a full bespoke composition from an incredibly talented orchestra and choir.

Let's talk about the animatronic bears. Can you talk us through the process of actually creating them? Who was responsible for bringing them to life, and how much collaboration was involved in getting them ready for the shoot?

NB: The team over at Animated Extras had these bears on the shelf, but from there we polished them up a bit, and then spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out the wardrobe with their quite odd proportions. 

We wanted it all to feel really domestic and unremarkable, but to get that effect, it does really take a village. Each bear has a chap in a suit, and two or three puppeteers for the face stuff. There’s a lot of yelling so everyone can coordinate, whilst the performers in the bears are virtually flying blind.

What were the benefits of shooting the characters practically? What did having the physical bears on set give you that a fully digital approach couldn't?

NB: Having the bears really there changes everything, for the human cast especially. When our delivery driver opens up to seven feet of grizzly on the doorstep and just has to not flinch, it's a lot easier to do that when there's an actual seven-foot grizzly breathing in front of him than a tennis ball on a stick and me making bear noises. 

Having the bears really there changes everything, for the human cast especially.

You see it in the effect on the light: they’ve got weight, the floor creaks under them, and everyone, cast and crew, reacts to it like it's real, which is exactly the thing you can't fake and the thing that makes an audience believe it too.

How does directing an animatronic bear differ from directing a human performer? How much control did you have over their expressions and movements, and were there moments where their physical limitations actually helped the comedy?

NB: Do you ask a magician how he does his tricks?! But because I can’t keep a secret, it's all very much about getting on the same page as the performers (both in the suits and the puppeteers) and being confident that you can guide it, with their input, and their feel for the characters, to get to something that tonally feels right. 

A lot of time was spent trying to avoid things feeling too pantomime, whilst also giving enough room for a “does a bear shit in the woods” logic… and making our best guess as to how they might handle a domestic, human situation.

There's some lovely physical comedy in the film, particularly as the bears attempt to navigate their very human surroundings. How much of that was planned in advance, and how much developed once you had the bears on set?

NB: We did multiple rehearsal days to understand the limitations, as well as adapt our gags accordingly. I'm a very instinctive, reactive director, and am only too happy to let those limitations guide some of the decision-making. It’s also about the performers in the suit. Their comic timing playing off mine is where the whole thing started to find its own rhythm. We were always discovering.

For instance, the Mrs. Doubtfire sequence of Mummy Bear in the kitchen was something I built out a day or so before the shoot, realising that we could do more than we thought. That scene was a hell of a lot of fun to shoot… the stuff that didn’t make the cut was pretty amazing.

Obviously, there's some digital wizardry involved alongside the animatronics. How did the two approaches complement each other, and is there anything audiences might be surprised to learn was achieved one way or the other?

NB: The simplest way to put it is the body is real and the face is where the two meet. The suit and the puppeteers give us everything physical, the weight, the clumsiness, the way half a ton falls into a couch, and then the digital work concentrates almost entirely on little additional movements in the eyes and muzzle, the few square inches where people actually read emotion. 

By keeping them as the best version of a practical puppet, they stay believable and lovable rather than creepy.

But for me, the goal was never to turn them into “real” bears. The CG was there to chase the best animatronic suits in the world, not to erase the fact they're animatronic at all. It sounds like a tiny distinction but it's the whole ballgame, because the second you start chasing photoreal you lose the warmth and land slap bang in the uncanny valley. 

By keeping them as the best version of a practical puppet, they stay believable and lovable rather than creepy. So we're always inside the guardrails of what the animatronic could plausibly do, just finessed to its absolute best.

The music takes an unexpected turn for a Christmas ad. Can you talk about the score and how you landed on it?

NB: Music was hugely important on this one, maybe the thing Leo King, my editor, and I were most determined not to make the obvious version of. We worked with my regular collaborators at Stare Crazy, and rather than reach for the usual sleigh bells and strings, we started somewhere completely unexpected, with Venezuelan folk rhythms, and then reworked and reharmonised that into something that reads as Christmas but doesn't announce itself as Christmas. It keeps you slightly off balance in a good way. And then we recorded it properly, with a real choir and a real brass band. 

That realness matters as much in the music as it does with the bears. It's all part of the same world-building, trying to sidestep the tropes everyone expects from a Christmas film and give it something that feels handmade, unexpected and alive.