Critical Studies: Animation Studios

Aardman Animation Studios


I have chosen to focus on Aardman animation for this piece because I have been brought up with Wallace and Gromit, Morph and Creature Comforts. 
Wallace and Gromit was always playing and after watching the making of The Curse of the Ware-rabbit, I knew, thats what I wanted to do, become an animator.

Aardman Studios was set up by Peter Lord and David Sproxton who met at school and then move to Bristol to set up their studio, which since 1972 (the year they registered the name Aardman) has received 4 oscars and been nominated for 7.




One of their earlier creations was Morph who was created to "annoy" Tony Hart in a series called Take Hart

Though at this point it was still just the two of them, doing most of the animation. 


Also a lot of the work that the studio produced were 5 minutes shorts for channel four, not huge money grabbers and so Aardman couldn't afford to employ a large number of staff needed to expand their vision. However, people liked their animation, they loved morph and soon advertisers were coming forward to use Aardman's genius to sell products. Even though Lord and Sproxton were not convinced that they wanted to do animation, they agreed for the money, thinking they would go back to shorts in 6 months or so. Still doing them to date, adverts have become one of the financial backbones of their company. 

In 1985 Nick Park joined Aardman and with him he brought Wallace and Gromit, Characters from his student film, A Grand Day Outs, About an inventor and his dog, who build a rocket and fly to the moon in the search of cheese.
From then on Aardman rocketed. With short films like the wrong trousers (at the time widely thought of as the most successful animated film ever made), creature comforts and more, the nation and the world became to love them.


In 2000, Aardman teamed up with Dreamworks animation, who funded Chicken Run. Aardmans first feature film. The Film was a major success and grossed $220M at the box office world wide. This was the run up to Wallace and Gromit, the curse of the Ware Rabbit. Which took 3 years to story board, changing little things the whole way through, rearranging scenes and adding and deleting parts of the story. In fact the whole film was so well planned that only 3 minutes of the animated film was cut in the final edit, meaning minimum time resources and money were wasted. 


Over all Aardman animation, in my opinion are a beacon which all other animators can look up to. By looking at their journey and how the company start form just two school and grown into a huge enterprise and a household name, is truly inspiring and deserves the respect and admiration of every one in the field of animation. 


Further References


Cracking Animation: The Aardman book of 3-D animation, by peter Lord and Brian Sibley

the art of wallace and Gromit by Nick Park and Brian Sibley 

http://www.animationartconservation.com/index.php?c=art&p=wallace_gromit
http://www.aardman.com/about-us/history/