Aardman turns 50, and its founders and filmmakers say a string of practical compromises and chance decisions produced the studio's best-known characters and shaped its industry impact.
School friends Sir Peter Lord and Sir David Sproxton founded the studio in 1976, leaving behind teenage experiments with plasticine to build a company that would create Morph, Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run. Wallace and Gromit first reached screens in 1989 and quickly became the studio's calling card.
Nick Park joined Aardman in 1985 and brought A Grand Day Out to life, a film that earned an Oscar nomination in 1990 but lost to Creature Comforts, another Park-directed Aardman piece. Lord said of Park, "We met him and thought, 'Oh, he's good'. In fact, he's very good. Now I know him, he's actually a genius." Lord also noted the pair's appeal, "They make you laugh before they do anything," describing the instant comic clarity of the characters.
Some of those comic instincts sprang from necessity. Park originally considered a cat as the companion for Wallace, but abandoned the idea after finding the model difficult and opted for a dog instead. That switch produced Gromit, the expressive but speechless canine who would become central to Aardman's brand.
Chicken Run represented a different gamble. After a dinner with Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, Aardman pitched a stop-motion caper inspired by The Great Escape. The studio spent more than £20 million making the film in Bristol, and it earned more than $220 million, or £165 million, at the box office. It remains the highest-grossing stop-motion film ever made.
The film did not receive an Academy Award because there was not yet a category for animated features. Radio 1 film critic Ali Plumb said, "And so because they couldn't give Chicken Run a little golden man, they invented the category." The Academy created the Best Animated Feature Oscar the following year, and Wallace and Gromit later won that award for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Shaun the Sheep, first seen in the 1995 Wallace and Gromit short A Close Shave, also owes its shape to editorial choices. Executives urged the studio to give Shaun a voice, and again when his feature was developed in 2015 one complaint was, "You can't do 80 minutes without any dialogue." Aardman kept Shaun silent. Managing Director Sean Clarke said, "The beauty of Shaun is it transcends borders and cultures because it doesn't rely on the spoken word." He added that Shaun has been sold into 170 countries and is especially popular in Asia, and that "Shaun is actually our most valuable character now. Wallace and Gromit built the house, but Shaun keeps the lights on." Lord says the silence was chosen because it "seemed better that way."
As Aardman celebrates five decades, the studio's founders and artists point to those small, pragmatic decisions as the engine of international success, a legacy rooted in hands-on craft and simple, stubborn instincts.
