The 2005 remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had a really cool scene in with loads of squirrels throwing nuts into holes.
Remember?
If not, I highly suggest YouTube’ing it!
So now you’ve seen it, here’s the fact… the squirrels are real life, not computer animated!
In total there are 40 squirrels, which were professionally trained by The Nut Room Animal trainer Michael Alexander and his team.
They spent a total of 19 weeks training these squirrels for this one scene.
The squirrels were trained to sit on stools while they opened nut shells and dropped the nuts onto a conveyor belt.
Originally they wanted to train 100 squirrels however due to the fact that squirrels can be difficult to handle and unpredictable, they trained 40 and the rest was animated in afterwards.
