Aardman Animations
Aardman Animations Limited, known simply as Aardman, is a British animation studio based in Bristol, England. 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, Aardman entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away. As of February 2020, it had earned $1.1 billion worldwide, with an average $135.6 million per film. Between 2000 and 2006, Aardman collaborated with DreamWorks Animation.
Aardman's films have been consistently well-received. Their stop-motion films are among the highest-grossing produced, with their 2000 debut, Chicken Run, being their top-grossing film, as well as the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time. A sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, was released in 2023.
History
1972–1996
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 collaboration provided animated sequences for the BBC series for deaf children Vision On. The company name originates from the name of their nerdy Superman character in that series. The process of using clay animation to produce a segment called "Gleebees" 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 and supplied animation for the multiple award-winning music video of Peter Gabriel's song "Sledgehammer". 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.
Later, Aardman produced several 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 Animations film 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, muted dog. These films include A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, the latter two winning Academy Awards.
1997–2007
In December 1997, Aardman, DreamWorks and Pathé announced that their companies were collaborating to co-finance and distribute Chicken Run, Aardman's first feature film, which had already been in pre-production for a year. On 27 October 1999, Aardman and DreamWorks signed a $250 million deal to make an additional four films that were estimated to be completed during the next 12 years. 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, it was paused two years later because of script problems. 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 are back 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. 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."
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 finish their agreement. The deal was officially terminated on 30 January 2007, due to the box-office underperformance of Flushed Away. 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." Unofficial reasons for departure were weak performances of the last two movies, for which DreamWorks had to take writedowns, and citing the article, "Aardman executives chafed at the creative control DreamWorks tried to exert, particularly with Flushed Away..." The studio had another film in development, Crood Awakening, which had been announced in 2005, with John Cleese co-writing the screenplay. With the end of the partnership, the film's rights reverted to DreamWorks.
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. Miyazaki has long been a fan of Aardman Animations' works.
2007–2012
In April 2007, Aardman signed and in 2010 renewed 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 collaboration with Sony was the computer-animated Arthur Christmas, Aardman's first 3D feature film. 2012 saw the release of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, 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.On 12 September 2007, Aardman appointed HIT Entertainment to manage licensing and home entertainment distribution for Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Aardman Classics in the US and Canada, which was subsequently extended on 10 June 2008 to include Timmy Time as well as worldwide representation for their themed attraction business.
The studio is also known for providing generous resources and training to young animators, including 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.
In 2008, Aardman collaborated with Channel 4 and Lupus Films to launch a user-generated content animation portal called 4mations. 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. 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.
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. 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. In April 2009, Aardman Animations edited the existing Watch identity by UKTV to make the inflatable eyeball in the idents blink.
2013–2019
In October 2013, Lord 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.In 2015, the studio bought a majority share in New York-based animation studio Nathan Love, announcing the merger with a short film called Introducing: Aardman Nathan Love on 25 September of the same year of that being that the British stop-motion animated series Digby Dragon debuted on Nick Jr. UK in 2016.
In advance of Aardman's 40th anniversary, the BBC One channel 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.
From 29 June 2017 to 29 October 2017, an exhibition entitled "Wallace & Gromit and Friends" was shown at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image 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. 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, 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. 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.