A to Z of Animation Studios: A Is for Aardman
The studio that made clay cry, laugh and escape from a chicken farm.
Welcome to the A to Z of Animation Studios, where we take one studio per letter and dig into what made it great, what went wrong, and what you can learn from it. First up: the kings of claymation.
A is for Aardman Animations
Founded: 1972, in England, by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. They started as teenagers making a clay character for a kids' TV show. Their home base became Bristol.
The big break: Animator Nick Park joined the studio in the 1980s and brought two characters he'd started in film school: a cheese-loving inventor named Wallace and his silent, very smart dog, Gromit.
Greatest hits
Creature Comforts (1989). Real recordings of people talking about their homes, animated as zoo animals. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short.
Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995). Both won Oscars. Gromit has no mouth and is still one of the most expressive characters ever animated. Every emotion is in his eyebrows.
Chicken Run (2000). A prison-break movie with chickens. It became one of the most successful stop-motion films of all time.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). Won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
Shaun the Sheep (2007 on). A sheep who never speaks and still has more personality than most talking characters.
Their experiments
Aardman also tried computer animation with Flushed Away (2006) and Arthur Christmas (2011). Both are fun, but fans keep coming back to the clay. Thumbprints and all.
The Aardman formula
Small stories, huge heart. A man and his dog. A flock of chickens. A sheep on a farm.
Let the eyes do the talking. Gromit and Shaun prove you don't need words.
Very British comedy. Polite, dry and full of tea.
Patience. On a good day, a stop-motion animator might finish a few seconds of film. A single blink can take hours.
The struggle
Stop-motion is slow and expensive. In 2005, a warehouse fire destroyed a huge archive of Aardman's sets and props. The studio kept going anyway. REAL: in 2018, the founders handed most of the company to its employees through an employee ownership trust, so Aardman would stay independent.
Honorable mention: Animation Collective
A small New York studio behind the 2006 Nicktoons Network series Kappa Mikey, about an American actor who lands a role in a Japanese anime show. A fun idea with a famously wobbly budget.
The lesson
Aardman shows that your limits can become your style. Clay is slow, so their stories got small and personal. Small and personal turned out to be what people loved.
Up next
B is for Blue Sky Studios, the home of Ice Age and one very determined squirrel.
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