A Manchester-area puppet-making and stop-motion company, founded in the early 1990s, behind puppets for Corpse Bride, Fantastic Mr Fox and The Clangers.
Mackinnon & Saunders is a puppet-making company. It builds the characters used in stop-motion films and series, where each puppet is moved a small amount and photographed one frame at a time. Its own website describes it as one of the world's leading puppet-making companies. Feature films it has worked on include Corpse Bride, Fantastic Mr Fox, Frankenweenie and Mars Attacks!. On television it has made puppets for Postman Pat, Bob the Builder, Pingu, Twirlywoos, Raa Raa the Noisy Lion and The Clangers. A 2022 Prolific North article also credits it with puppets for Pinocchio, made with director Guillermo del Toro, and said the team used 3D-printed metal for Pinocchio's armature.
Ian Mackinnon and Peter Saunders met at Cosgrove Hall, the Manchester studio behind Danger Mouse and Count Duckula. Their company history says they set up their partnership at the start of the 1990s and began by renting one of Cosgrove Hall's former workshops. The Manchester team grew from five to 45 around 1995, and a Los Angeles design studio opened in 1995 for Mars Attacks!. We found no formal mission statement, but Tim Burton's praise on the company's history page points to a focus on sensitive, textured craftsmanship that makes characters feel alive.
The company is based in the Manchester area. Its history page says the Manchester workshops produced the puppets for Fantastic Mr Fox in 2007, and a 2022 article places the company in Altrincham with around 110 animators, puppet makers, sculptors and other creative staff. In 2013 it formed a joint venture, Mackinnon & Saunders Digital Studios, with Komixx Entertainment. In 2015 it joined the Trafford arts centre in Sale for an exhibition called Puppet Masters, which showed original puppets, sets, props, drawings and concept art.
Culture is hands-on and craft-based. At that exhibition, Peter Saunders said the company wanted to show local people "some of the work that goes on behind the scenes". Manchester's animation scene is a close community: Steve Henderson, founder of the Manchester Animation Festival, called the city "the Hollywood of the North West" in the 2022 article, and said artists, not AI, are what the work needs. That is one person's view, but it shows how the company sits among other studios and a festival.
Making a puppet takes many skills. The people on a puppet team include designers, sculptors, mould-makers, armature engineers (who make the metal skeleton inside the figure), fabricators and costume makers, finishers and painters, plus the animators and producers who run each production. Art, design, sculpture, model-making and engineering all feed in, so it suits people who like making things by hand and also enjoy problem-solving. The company's website is the place to see its current projects.
Website: mackinnonandsaunders.com
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