Aardman Animations is a British stop motion animation studio founded by Peter Lord and David Sproxton in 1972. Nick Park joined Aardman in 1986, bringing his creations Wallace and Gromit with him. The company is based in Bristol and is the centre of a sizeable animation and film special effects industry in the City. Because of the company's base characters with faint west country accents are also a feature.

Aardman's early work was in creating inserts for Vision On, a television series aimed at deaf children. Lord and Sproxton went on to create the character of Morph for the children's art programme Take Hart, who went on to have a series of his own.

In 1983 Aardman produced a series of short films for Channel 4 that featured audio recordings from real world situations such as a Local Radio DJ that were then matched to an absurd animated scenario. This same technique was the basis for Creature Comforts.

Aardman also made the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", in which Gabriel himself was used as a stop-motion model (a process called pixilation, which was also used in the Aardman series Angry Kid, featuring an actor wearing a mask, and in the video for "Road to Nowhere" by Talking Heads which was not made by Aardman).

Three Aardman films, all directed by Nick Park, have won Oscars.

Aardman productions

Music videos

• Barefootin' for Robert Parker
• My Baby Just Cares For Me for Nina Simone
• Sledgehammer for Peter Gabriel (see also: So)

NB: Contrary to popular belief, the promo videos for Happy Hour by The Housemartins and Reet Petite by Jackie Wilson are not by Aardman. Though they share a similar visual style, these are by another animation house, Giblets.

Commercials

• Serta mattress commercials featuring the out-of-work counting sheep
• Fruit Pastilles based around a recording of the song "There's a moose, loose"
• PG Tips featuring talking birds in a sit com situation.
• Electricity commercials based on "Creature Comforts"
• Dairylea cows
• Lurpak Butter commercials, featuring a little butter man named Douglas and the voice of Penelope Keith (who is continually annoyed by his attempts to play The Flight of the Bumble Bee on his trombone)
• a long running series of ads for Cadbury' Crunchie bars, in which the chocolate covering of the confection sprang to life as various characters, often performing to The Pointer Sisters' hit "I'm So Excited".

TV series

• Creature Comforts (2003)
• The Adventures of Morph
• Rex the Runt
• Wallace & Gromits Cracking Contraptions
• Angry Kid

Short films

• Creature Comforts - 1990 Oscar, animated short
• Ident
• Late Edition
• Adam - 1992 Oscar nomination
• Wat's Pig -1996 Oscar nomination
• Not Without My Handbag
• A Grand Day Out - Wallace and Gromit
• The Wrong Trousers - Wallace and Gromit
• A Close Shave - Wallace and Gromit
• Angry Kid

Feature films

• Chicken Run

Miscellaneous

• Special christmas-themed channel idents for BBC2 in 1996 and BBC1 in 2001 (unusually for Aardman, this latter set was computer-animated rather than using stop-motion animation)
• Channel idents for BBC Three featuring little blob people, voiced in the style of "Creature Comforts"

Related topics

• Trumpton 3 BBC stop motion series for kids- credited by Nick Park as being inspirational.

External links

• http://www.aardman.com/
• Creature Comforts film (http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/atom_221)
• Aardman Animations (http://www.bcdb.com/cartoons/Other_Studios/A/Aardman_Animations/index.html) at the Big Cartoon DataBase