Aardman

Aardman Animation or Aardman Studios Inc. is the most successful company of British animation, Founded at Bristol in 1976 when its creators Peter Lord and David Sproxton wanted to realize their dream of making an animated film. They started as a small studio creating Morph, a simple plasticine character for the children's TV show Vision On.



Aardman's name comes from a super-hero goblin of cel-animation created for this program.

At this same time, Lord and Sproxton worked outside Aardman for BBC making adult entertainment like the Animated Conversations series, where they made animations to represent real taped conversations, like Down & Out and Confessions of a Foyer Girl.

Later, on Channel 4 they did a series of short films, which 5 were short Conversation Pieces, few shorts on the same idea but more sophisticated than Animated Conversations.




After these works, Lord and Sproxton hired 3 more animators, including Nick Park and created the Lip Synch series.



At that time, Aardman was a hotbed of shorts, with productions such as Ident or Adam.

Nick Park, who had directed some Lip Synch shorts, was the creator of Creature comforts in 1989, with that short Aardman won its first Oscar for best animated short.



Nick Park created Wallace and Groomit, the duo staged 3 Christmas special fpr the BBC that were full success: A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), last two shorts won each an Oscar. And later, A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008).




And in 2000 they made the first feature: Chicken Run, which was a hit of box office and awards.



After such success, Dreamworks signed a contract to co-produce over 3 animated feature films , the first was Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Wererabbit that won another Oscar for best animated feature film.



In 2005, due to an electrical fault a fire was caused in the warehouse of Aardman destroying the material of old movies and awards saved, fortunately completed films ready for sale and the material of production was stored under way elsewhere, so the fire did not affect production.

However, Aardman and Dreamworks had a number of differences as producers that they could not be fixed, and in 2006 they broke the contract without producing the next 2 films. But in 2007 they signed a contract with Sony Pictures, Peter Lord was excited by the possibilities of making films that were opened.

And despite being a stop motion animation studio, they went into the CGI animation productions as Owzat, Al Dante, The Deadline, Planet Sketch and Flushed Away




Aardman is also dedicated to supporting young animators, such as the creation of The Award in the UK Aardman Award, in Teesside's Animex Festival, which prize is to offer help for the next film.

Last year, Channel 4 set up the animation website 4mations :


http://www.4mations.tv/

They also opened a channel on youtube where you can see the TV series of creature comforts, the Morph, Cracking Contraptions, and clips from the Wallace and Gromit films.


http://www.youtube.com/user/aardman?blend=1&ob=4

His latest production is Timmy Time (2009), a spin-off for pre-school public ofShawn the Sheep.



They have movies in production as Burglers The Cat (2010), Arthur Christmas (2011) and The Pirates! - In An Adventure With Scientist (2012).

Currently, in collaboration with Cosgrove Hall Films they are developing a feature film version of the British TV series Count Duckula.



Resume of the history of Aardman: Grow! Grow! and Growing! This success is mainly due to Nick Park, as it is the filmmaker who created the most emblematic works of Aardman. However there is something that never made me thank them very much, they always had made stop motion apology saying that the CGI was cold and soulless, so the surprise when I saw Flushed Away, it is everything well done, but I think they had sold the plasticine soul of their characters . I still prefer Shaun the Sheep.