Aardman Animations Limited, stylised as AARDMAN since 2022, is a British animation studio based in Bristol. It is known for films and television series made using stop motion and clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring its plasticine characters from Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, and Morph. After some experimental computer-animated short films during the late 1990s, beginning with Owzat (1997), Aardman entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away (2006). As of February 2020, it had earned $1.1 billion worldwide, with an average $135.6 million per film.[2] Between 2000 and 2006, Aardman partnered with DreamWorks Animation.
Aardman was founded in 1972 as a low-budget project by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who wanted to realise their dream of producing an animated motion picture. The partnership provided animated sequences for the BBC series for deaf children Vision On. The company name originates from the name of their nerdish Superman character in that sequence.[7] The process of using clay animation to produce a segment called "Gleebees" (1975) became the inspiration for creating Morph, a simple clay character. Around the same time, Lord and Sproxton made their first foray into adult animation with the shorts Down and Out and Confessions of a Foyer Girl, entries in the BBC's Animated Conversations series using real-life conversations as soundtracks.
Aardman also created the title sequence for The Great Egg Race[8] and supplied animation for the multiple award-winning music video of Peter Gabriel's song "Sledgehammer".[9] They produced the music video for the song "My Baby Just Cares For Me" by Nina Simone in 1987. Also in the 1980s, they created the trombone-playing character "Douglas" in a television commercial for Lurpak butter.[10][11]
Later Aardman produced a number of shorts for Channel 4, including the Conversation Pieces series. These five shorts worked in the same area as the Animated Conversations pieces, but were more sophisticated. Lord and Sproxton began hiring more animators at this point; three of the newcomers made their directorial debut at Aardman with the Lip Synch series. Of the five Lip Synch shorts, two were directed by Lord, one by Barry Purves, one by Richard Goleszowski and one by Nick Park.
In 1990, Park's short, Creature Comforts, was the first Aardman production to win an Academy Award. Park also developed the clay modelled shorts featuring the adventures of Wallace & Gromit, a comical pair of friends: Wallace being a naive English inventor with a love of cheese, and Gromit his best friend, the intelligent but silent dog. These films include A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), the latter two winning Academy Awards.[12][13]
1997–2007
In December 1997, Aardman, DreamWorks (later DreamWorks Animation) and Pathé announced that their companies were teaming up to co-finance and distribute Chicken Run, Aardman's first feature film, which had already been in pre-production for a year.[14] On 27 October 1999, Aardman and DreamWorks signed a $250 million[15] deal to make an additional four films that were estimated to be completed during the next 12 years.[16] Along with the deal their first project was announced, titled The Tortoise and the Hare. Intended to be based on Aesop's fable and directed by Richard Goleszowski,[17] it was paused two years later because of script problems.[18] On 23 June 2000, Chicken Run was released to a great critical and financial success. In 2005, after ten years of absence, Wallace and Gromit returned in Academy Award-winning The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The following year Flushed Away, Aardman's first computer-animated feature, was released.
On 10 October 2005, a serious fire at a storage facility used by Aardman and other Bristol-based companies destroyed over 30 years of props, models, and scenery often built by the Bristol-based Cod Steaks. This warehouse was used for storage of past projects and so did not prevent the production of their current projects at the time. In addition, the company's library of finished films was stored elsewhere and was undamaged. An electrical fault was determined to be the cause of the blaze.[19] Referring to the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, Park was quoted as saying, "Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn't a big deal."[20][21][22]
On 1 October 2006, right before the release of Flushed Away, The New York Times reported that due to creative differences, DreamWorks Animation and Aardman had decided to end their contract.[23] The deal was officially terminated on 30 January 2007.[24] According to an Aardman spokesperson: "The business model of DreamWorks no longer suits Aardman and vice versa. But the split couldn't have been more amicable."[24] Unofficial reasons for departure were weak performances of the last two movies, for which DreamWorks had to take writedowns,[24] and citing the article, "Aardman executives chafed at the creative control DreamWorks tried to exert, particularly with Flushed Away..."[23] The studio had another film in development, Crood Awakening (eventually The Croods), which had been announced in 2005, with John Cleese co-writing the screenplay.[25] With the end of the partnership, the film's rights reverted to DreamWorks.[24]
From 2006 to 2007, the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan, had an exhibit featuring the works of Aardman Studios. Sproxton and Lord visited the exhibit in May 2006 and met with animator Hayao Miyazaki during the visit.[26] Miyazaki has long been a fan of Aardman Animations' works.[27]
2007–2012
In April 2007, Aardman signed[28] and in 2010 renewed[29] a three-year deal with Sony Pictures to finance, co-produce, and distribute feature films. The next year, Aardman released a new Wallace and Gromit short film, called A Matter of Loaf and Death. The first film made in partnership with Sony was the computer-animated Arthur Christmas (2011), which is Aardman's first 3D feature film. 2012 saw the release of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (known internationally in America as The Pirates! Band of Misfits), Aardman's first 3D stop-motion film and Lord's first film as a director since Chicken Run. Two additional films were announced in June 2007: The Cat Burglars, a stop-motion animated heist comedy film directed by Steve Box, about cat burglars that steal milk, and their plans to pull off 'the great milk float robbery'; and an untitled Nick Park project (which would later become Early Man).[30]
The studio is also known to provide generous resources and training to young animators by providing awards at various animation festivals. For example, The Aardman Award at the UK's Animex Festival in Teesside provides story consultation to a promising young animator for their next film.[31]
In 2008, Aardman joined with Channel 4 and Lupus Films to launch a user-generated content animation portal called 4mations.[32] They also designed the BBC One Christmas Idents for that year, which featured Wallace and Gromit to tie in with the showing of the new Wallace and Gromit film called A Matter of Loaf and Death on Christmas Day at 8:30pm. In April 2008, Aardman launched the Aardman YouTube channel, which is a YouTube Partner channel featuring the entire Creature Comforts TV series, the Morph series, Cracking Contraptions and clips from the Wallace and Gromit films.[33] From December 2008, Aardman also started posting various flash games on Newgrounds, the majority of which are based on Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep.[34]
In 2009, Nintendo announced that Aardman would make twelve short films using only Flipnote Studio. The films were posted on Flipnote's Hatena web service provider. The first film was called The Sandwich Twins and was released on 16 September 2009. The remaining eleven films were released on a weekly basis until Christmas, and can also be downloaded using Hatena.[35] In the same year, the headquarters of the studio moved into a new building, designed by Alec French architects, in Gas Ferry Road, Bristol, although work needing large-scale sets is still carried out in sheds in Aztec West and Bedminster.[36] In April 2009, Aardman Animations edited the existing Watch identity by UKTV to make the inflatable eyeball (called "Blinky") in the idents blink.
2013–2019
In October 2013, Lord (co-founder of Aardman Animations) created a fundraising project on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The campaign has a target of £75,000 which would be used to fund 12 new one-minute episodes of Morph. Lord was hoping to start production in January 2014 using the original stop-frame animation. Backers of the project would receive a variety of rewards, including early access to the new animations and a small box of clay used in the production, depending on the individual's level of funding.[37][38]
In 2015, the studio bought a majority share in New York-based animation studio Nathan Love,[39] announcing the merger with a short film called Introducing: Aardman Nathan Love on 25 September of the same year[40] of that being that the British stop-motion animated series Digby Dragon debuted on Nick Jr. UK in 2016.
In advance of Aardman's fortieth anniversary, the BBC One aired the one-hour television documentary A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman, first broadcast in December 2015. Narrated by Julie Walters, this career retrospective includes commentary by the company's founders and staff, as well as various friends, fans and colleagues including Terry Gilliam, John Lasseter, and Matt Groening.[41][42]
From 29 June 2017 to 29 October 2017, an exhibition entitled "Wallace and Gromit and Friends" was shown at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. A report on this exhibition was shown on Australian ABC News Breakfast on Wednesday, 28 June, featuring an eight-minute interview with producers Lord and Sproxton.[43] The exhibition revealed that in Park's very early sketches, Gromit was originally a cat, but Park soon changed him into a dog, since it was generally agreed that a dog was clearly more suitable as a loyal pet/companion than a cat and also because a dog would be easier to make and animate in Plasticine. Embedded in the ABC News article is a video interview with Lord and Sproxton,[44] which gives information not only on Wallace and Gromit, but also Shaun the Sheep and others.
On 9 November 2018, Aardman Animations announced that Lord and Sproxton would be transferring majority ownership of the company to its employees in order to keep the studio independent.[45] In January 2019, Lord and Sproxton released a book detailing the history of the studio, called A Grand Success! The Aardman Journey, One Frame at a Time.[46]
On 9 August 2021, it was announced that Gurinder Chadha was directing a musical claymation feature set in India, telling the story of an elephant dreaming about becoming a dancer.[48][49]
On 30 November 2021, Aardman began producing The Very Small Creatures for Sky Kids and Apple TV.[50][51]
On 20 January 2022, Netflix announced a sequel to Chicken Run entitled Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.[52][53] The film, starring Thandiwe Newton and Zachary Levi, premiered on the platform on 15 December 2023.[52][54] A new Wallace and Gromit film was also confirmed to be 'in the works' for a 2024 release on the BBC in the UK and Netflix for the rest the world.[52][55] Also in 2022–2023, the 52 episode children's series Lloyd of the Flies[56] aired on CITV.
Aardman is one of the nine studios involved with Lucasfilm's Star Wars: Visions Volume 2, contributing the film "I Am Your Mother".[57]
The factory that made Lewis Newplast, the modelling clay used by Aardman, shut down in March 2023; Aardman purchased enough remaining clay to cover the upcoming 2024 Wallace and Gromit film.[58]The Daily Telegraph initially reported that the studio may not be able to produce new films afterwards due to a lack of clay, but Aardman later released a statement clarifying that it would find a new supplier.[59][60]
On 1 March 2024 Emma Hardie was announced to be the newly created role of Executive Commercial and Brand Director. She will be oversee financing, distribution, licensing, marketing, and planning of the studio's animated intellectual property. She takes up the role, which includes a seat on Aardman's executive board, on April 15. Peter Lord was also stepping down from Aardman’s executive board to focus on a slate of individual projects as the Creative Director. He also intends to act as an ambassador for the company and British animation. Along the announcements Sarah Cox and Daniel Efergan have received promotions to Chief Creative Director and Executive Creative Director of Interactive & Innovation respectively.[61]
On 8 March 2024 Aardman and the BBC announced a new collaboration called Things We Love, based on the studio's Creature Comforts films, set to air throughout 2024. Like Creature Comforts, the six, 30-second-long shorts feature animated animals matched to the audio of real, unscripted interviews.[62]
On 22 September 2024, Cartoon Network announced on Twitter that they had recruited Aardman to work on an Over the Garden Wall special alongside series creator Patrick McHale to celebrate the miniseries' 10th anniversary, set for release on 3 November 2024.[64] On 21 October 2024, Aardman announced that they would team up with Mattel Television Studios to produce a new Pingu series.[65] Additionally, on 11 December that year, it was announced that Aardman would be collaborating with The Pokémon Company for a project in 2027.[66][67]
Company name
The company name is taken from one of its early characters, a superhero created for Vision On in 1972.[68] Unlike the claymation productions that the company are famous for, Aardman was cel-animated.[69] Peter Lord has stated that the most interesting thing about the company name is that it "means nothing" and is only a joke that two teenagers found funny. He has stated that the name came from a combination of "Aardvark" and "Superman" for the reason that they found aardvark to be a particularly funny word. Aardman Animations became their company name when the BBC asked them to whom they should make their first cheque out.[70] Co-founder David Sproxton has claimed that the name was a result of being unable to "find another word with more A's in it than 'aardvark'" as a schoolboy.[71]
Non-Aardman productions by Aardman directors
A number of Aardman directors have worked at other studios, taking the distinctive Aardman style with them.
Aardman's Steve Box directed the animated music video for the Spice Girls' final single as a five-piece, "Viva Forever". The video took over five months to produce, considerably longer than the group's box office hit movie, Spice World. He is also the co-creator of the Finnish-British animated series Moominvalley, based on the Moomins books.
Aardman Features Limited[74] is a motion picture subsidiary of Aardman Animations. It has produced nine films so far, three with DreamWorks Animation, two with Sony Pictures Animation, three with StudioCanal and one with Netflix.
Nathan Love LLC (formerly Aardman Nathan Love LLC from 2006–2019)[75] is an American subsidiary of Aardman Animations. Joe Burrascano founded the company in 2007.
Stop motion is an animated filmmaking and special effects technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints or plasticine figures are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation. Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation. Stop motion of flat materials such as paper, fabrics or photographs is usually called cutout animation.
Wallace & Gromit is a British stop-motion animated comedy franchise created by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations. The series centres on Wallace, a good-natured, eccentric, cheese-loving inventor, and Gromit, his loyal and intelligent anthropomorphic beagle. It consists of four short films, two feature-length films and has spawned numerous spin-offs and TV adaptations. The first short film, A Grand Day Out, was finished and released in 1989. Wallace was voiced by actor Peter Sallis until 2010 when he was succeeded by Ben Whitehead. While Wallace speaks very often, Gromit is largely silent and has no dialogue, communicating through facial expressions and body language.
Nicholas Wulstan Park is an English filmmaker and animator who created Wallace & Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, and Early Man. Park has been nominated for an Academy Award a total of six times and won four with Creature Comforts (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), A Close Shave (1995) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).
Chicken Run is a 2000 animated adventure comedy film produced by Pathé and Aardman Animations in partnership with DreamWorks Animation. Aardman's first feature-length film, it was directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park from a screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick and based on an original story by Lord and Park. The film stars the voices of Julia Sawalha, Mel Gibson, Tony Haygarth, Miranda Richardson, Phil Daniels, Lynn Ferguson, Timothy Spall, Imelda Staunton, and Benjamin Whitrow. Set in the countryside of Yorkshire, the plot centres on a group of British anthropomorphic chickens who see an American rooster named Rocky Rhodes as their only hope to escape the farm when their owners want to turn them into chicken pies.
Claymation, sometimes called clay animation or plasticine animation, is one of many forms of stop-motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine clay.
The Wrong Trousers is a 1993 British stop-motion animated short film co-written and directed by Nick Park, produced by Aardman Animations in association with Wallace and Gromit Ltd., BBC Bristol, Lionheart Television and BBC Children's International. It is the second film featuring the titular duo, eccentric inventor Wallace and his dog Gromit, following A Grand Day Out (1989). In the film, a villainous penguin, Feathers McGraw, posing as a lodger, recruits Wallace by using his techno-trousers to steal a diamond from the city museum.
A Grand Day Out is a 1989 British stop-motion animated short film and the first instalment in the Wallace & Gromit series. It was directed, animated and co-written by Nick Park at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield and Aardman Animations in Bristol.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a 2005 animated comedy film directed by Nick Park and Steve Box. It was produced by DreamWorks Animation in collaboration with Aardman Animations. It was the second feature-length film by Aardman, after Chicken Run (2000). The film debuted in Sydney, Australia on 4 September 2005, before being released in theaters in the United States on 7 October 2005 and in the United Kingdom on 14 October 2005.
Flushed Away is a 2006 animated adventure comedy film directed by Sam Fell and David Bowers, produced by Cecil Kramer, David Sproxton, and Peter Lord, and written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Chris Lloyd, Joe Keenan and Will Davies. It was the third and final DreamWorks Animation film co-produced with Aardman Features following Chicken Run (2000) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), and was the first Aardman project mostly made in CGI animation as opposed to starting with their usual stop-motion – this was because using water on plasticine models could damage them, and it was complex to render the effect in another way. The film stars the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen, Shane Richie, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis and Jean Reno. In the film, a pampered fancy rat named Roddy St. James (Jackman) is flushed down the toilet in his Kensington apartment by a sewer rat named Sid (Richie), and befriends a scavenger named Rita Malone (Winslet) in order to get back home while evading a sinister toad (McKellen) and his hench-rats.
David Alan Sproxton is a British entrepreneur, best known as one of the co-founders, with Peter Lord, of the Aardman Animations studio. Sproxton was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) on 17 June 2006.
Peter Duncan Fraser Lord CBE is a British animator, director, producer and co-founder of the Academy Award-winning Aardman Animations studio, an animation firm best known for its clay-animated films and shorts, particularly those featuring plasticine duo Wallace & Gromit. He also directed Chicken Run along with Nick Park from DreamWorks Animation, and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! from Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation which was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 85th Academy Awards.
Steven Royston Box is an English animator and director who works for Aardman Animations.
Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death is a 2008 British stop motion animated short film produced by Aardman Animations and created by Nick Park. It is the fourth short to star the titular characters of the Wallace & Gromit series, the first one since A Close Shave in 1995.
United Kingdom Animation began at the very origins of the art form in the late 19th century. British animation has been strengthened by an influx of émigrés to the UK; renowned animators such as Lotte Reiniger (Germany), John Halas (Hungary), George Dunning and Richard Williams (Canada), Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton have all worked in the UK at various stages of their careers. Notable full-length animated features to be produced in the UK include Animal Farm (1954), Yellow Submarine (1968), Watership Down (1978), and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).
David Bowers is an English animator, storyboard artist, film director, screenwriter and voice actor.
Christopher Sadler is a British animator, director and writer. He is primarily known for his work on Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, Rex the Runt, Cracking Contraptions, Creature Comforts and Shaun the Sheep.
Aardman Animations is an animation studio in Bristol, England that produces stop motion and computer-animated features, shorts, TV series and adverts.
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is a 2023 British animated comedy film directed by Sam Fell from a screenplay written by Karey Kirkpatrick, John O'Farrell, and Rachel Tunnard, based on a story conceived by Kirkpatrick and O'Farrell. A sequel to Chicken Run (2000), the film was produced by Aardman Animations and stars the voices of Thandiwe Newton, Zachary Levi, Bella Ramsey, Romesh Ranganathan, David Bradley, Daniel Mays, Jane Horrocks, Imelda Staunton, Lynn Ferguson, Josie Sedgwick-Davies, Peter Serafinowicz, Nick Mohammed, and Miranda Richardson. It tells the story of Rocky and Ginger who lead a rescue mission when their daughter has been abducted to a highly-advanced poultry farm run by their old enemy Mrs. Tweedy.
Robin Robin is a 2021 stop-motion animated musical short film produced by Aardman Animations, created and directed by Dan Ojari and Mikey Please, and written by Ojari, Please, and Sam Morrison.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a 2024 British stop motion animated comedy film produced by Aardman Animations and directed by Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, featuring Park's characters from the Wallace & Gromit series. It is the sixth Wallace & Gromit film overall, the first since A Matter of Loaf and Death in 2008 and the second feature-length film following The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005, serving as a full-length sequel to The Wrong Trousers (1993).
↑ Wheatley, Cliff (17 June 2014). "Top 10 DreamWorks Animation Movies". IGN. Retrieved 26 July 2015. Impressively, Chicken Run is still the highest grossing stop motion animated movie of all time.
↑ Lloyd, Robert (10 July 2006). "Pee-wee's back in the limelight". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 8 September 2012. Retrieved 12 March 2015. The show is nevertheless full of marvelous animated sequences, some by Peter Lord and Nick Park of Aardman Animation/"Wallace & Gromit" fame.
↑ Dawtrey, Adam (20 December 1999). "Aardman's 'Hare' to run with Goleszowski". Variety. Retrieved 12 March 2015. Goleszowski has been part of the Aardman family since joining the company in 1983. He stayed for nine years, working on projects including Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" video and "Pee Wee's Playhouse" in New York before going freelance.
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