From Morph and ‘Wallace & Gromit’ to ‘Shaun the Sheep’ and ‘Let’s Go Timmy!’ the iconic British stop-motion studio’s enduring appeal comes from plasticine, eccentric characters, visible imperfections, and a process that still prizes the human touch.
It’s been more than 20 years since director Will Becher began working at the now world-famous British stop-motion studio Aardman Animations. But even after two decades, Becher remembers his first day on the job. More specifically, the smells.
“Those first few days I went into that studio, I still remember being hit by the smells of the clay and the baby wipes used to clean the plasticine,” remembers Becher, who began his career with Aardman in the late 90s when he landed a summer work placement on Chicken Run (2000) building clay wings in the model making department. “I remember that being combined with all this excitement you could feel from the crew there, which, at the time, was about 150 people. It was Aardman’s very first feature film, and it was backed by this big American studio, DreamWorks. It was utter excitement.”
The four-time Academy Award-winning studio – which now enlists teams of 300 for its feature projects and series – may be famous for Claymation franchises like Wallace & Gromit, Sean the Sheep, Chicken Run and series like Creature Comforts and The Very Small Creatures. But its legacy grew out of, as Becher puts it, “humble beginnings,” starting with Peter Lord and David Sproxton’s Morph, one of Aardman’s first creations and a regular fixture on children’s TV in the 70s and 80s with appearances on the Take Heart show and, later, The Amazing Adventures of Morph.
Then came Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit short films, from A Grand Day Out to The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, each focused on the misadventures of an absent-minded human inventor and his silent but highly intelligent dog companion. By the late 90s, Aardman had found its place in animation as a pioneer in Claymation storytelling. But they had yet to attempt long-form animation. Then came the idea for Chicken Run, a feature film that follows a determined hen named Ginger, who rallies her fellow chickens to escape a grim Yorkshire farm when an American rooster, Rocky, seemingly offers them a way out.
“The crew was building and working with 200 miniature chickens while shooting these huge wide shots of a farm which, even now, would terrify most production teams,” says Becher. “To create that movie, which needed performances to hold up on a massive screen, involved so much stuff that they'd never done before with camera angles and especially the puppets.”
The chicken models were unlike any characters Aardman had attempted to craft before. While Morph and Wallace and Gromit had heavy bases and legs that easily supported their upper halves, Ginger and her fellow chicken co-stars had massive, round bodies perched on much leaner legs.
“The designs, which came from directors Peter Lord and Nick Park, needed to walk, run and fly,” explains Becher. “So, the crew had to build all this internal engineering into the puppet skeleton so no one would see it from the outside and then skin these chickens with this incredibly beautifully sculpted silicon. A lot of us newcomers were spending our days sandpapering chicken legs or, in my case, pressing clay wings out of two bits of mold. Then all the feathers had to be hand-painted. We're talking about thousands of feathers.”
And all those puppets had to be handled with care. It’s part of Aardman’s routine training for new animators.
“The puppet and model teams make the most beautiful, perfect, brand-new puppets you can imagine,” says Becher. “And then they very kindly give them to the animators in the studio, and they only ever come back broken, damaged, looking much worse, sometimes split open. So, we do train animators and teach them how to hold and move a puppet so it doesn't break.”
Chicken Run was a strenuous production, but it was also what made Becher fall in love with the studio and stick around for another 20 years.
“It is a magical place,” he shares. “It’s like a magnet for incredible creativity, and the people and the atmosphere were just insanely addictive. It was like discovering this hidden community inside a very dull-looking industrial estate in the middle of Bristol. From the outside, it was really not much to look at. But inside, through the doors, was this world of corridors and passageways and messy desks where people were creating cool stuff everywhere. The vibe and the people are what I immediately fell in love with.”
Sarah Cox, chief creative director at Aardman, adds, “We're always embracing eccentricity and oddity because I think what drives us creatively is humor and characters together. As humans, we're all quite eccentric and distinctive and different and, at Aardman, we really love pulling out those eccentricities and building on them. Our animators are great observers of human mannerisms. I mean, Wallace & Gromit’s characteristics came from Nick observing himself. We don't minimize the oddness of our characters. We don’t smooth it away. We maximize it.”
Nor do they erase imperfections.
“We don't even want the models to be perfect,” says Becher. “Because, actually, what Aardman is and what stop-motion is, is imperfect. And every single shot we do is different and can't be repeated. And sometimes those little finger marks and prints help make the character.”
Cox adds, “And that connects with people in a massive way.”
Cox first started at Aardman in 2010, working on the 2012 London Olympics’ Cultural Olympiad which included animated promotional materials, short films, and interactive art installations for events surrounding the Olympic games. However, Cox’s love for Aardman and desire to work with the company began many years prior with the release of the studio’s Creature Comforts (1989-2011). Park’s Academy Award-winning short film of the same name and the subsequent series derived from it used the classic documentary style and applied it to the lives of wild animals and pets.
“I saw Nick’s film at a festival and remember there was a polar bear family featured and a leopard who was missing the warm weather in Brazil,” recalls Cox. “It very lightly touched on housing problems and people feeling displaced or too trapped or claustrophobic. But it was done really lightly. I think that was one of the first films I saw of Aardman’s and it was probably what made me want to work with them.”
Like Becher, Cox has witnessed Aardman milestones over the course of her time there. One of the groundbreaking projects Cox helped bring to the studio was Robin Robin, Aardman’s first musical film.
The short, directed by Daniel Ojari and Michael Please, follows a young robin as she struggles to prove her ability to sneak and steal scraps to her adoptive mouse family.
“I was at Annecy when the directors pitched me the idea,” notes Cox. “I immediately loved the idea of Robin Robin because I saw how it could work within the arguments of identity.”
It also gave Aardman the chance to work on a stop-motion project whose characters weren’t made of clay.
“It felt like a new story, but also like something you might have read as a child,” says Cox.
Becher adds, “We'd never done a musical and never worked with felt puppets with such thin legs that had to walk while compressing down snow. So, everything was a challenge. But that’s how it’s always been. The Wrong Trousers, which has three characters and hardly any dialogue, was groundbreaking and challenging during its time too.”
But for all the new stories, characters and materials Aardman creatives routinely introduce to fans, the methods of filmmaking and design in stop-motion often remain the same.
“We did Chicken Run: Dawn Of the Nugget 23 years after the original, so technology has changed quite a lot, but there were still things about those original designs that made us realize there's sometimes no better way, even now, than to do what we would have done back then with the characters we’re working with in the present,” notes Becher, who likes to train new animators by removing the playback monitors and showing them how to animate "shooting blind”, as he says. “Even if the cameras and computers we use change, there are some parts of this process that haven’t changed for 100 years. That’s what makes stop-motion magical, and I think that’s what adds to the timelessness of Aardman films.”
Still, the studio continues to explore new, timely territory for its timeless properties.
In 2013, almost 40 years after his debut, Aardman’s first original character, Morph, made a comeback following a successful crowdfunding campaign. He now has a loyal fan base of nostalgic adults and a growing audience of children who follow his adventures on his YouTube channel and on Sky Kids. Most recently Morph and his chum Chas appeared in The Epic Adventures of Morph, a longer-format series launched in 2020. Shaun’s first film, Shaun the Sheep Movie, was released in 2015, followed by Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon in 2019.
“We’ve got Shaun the Sheep with his own account on TikTok, doing stitch videos and memes and things like that,” says Cox, who served as executive producer on the Shaun the Sheep series Adventures of Mossy Bottom. “We’re making those videos on a tiny table set and have gotten some feedback from people saying, ‘I can’t believe Aardman animated this.’ We like to put our characters into situations they’ve never been in before.”
In the last three years alone, Aardman created the short I Am Your Mother for the animated anthology series Star Wars: Visions Volume 2, released Chicken Run’s sequel film Dawn of the Nugget, partnered with Outright Games on the action-stealth video game Chicken Run: Eggstraction, released the second Wallace and Gromit feature-length film Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and, most recently, shared the trailer for the upcoming Shaun the Sheep film, The Beast of Mossy Bottom . The studio also announced at Annecy 2026 that Let's Go Timmy!, a newly commissioned 30 x 5-minute animated series blending stop-motion and 2D animation, will air on the BBC in 2027.
Aardman’s original properties are still going strong.
“I know the founders Peter and David would not, in their wildest dreams, have imagined all the projects and all the YouTube channels and the real-life immersive experiences that exist,” says Becher. “All of that is part of this huge global name. And we're very proud in the studio of being independent, and the fact that we have worked with lots of different partners over the years. It makes everything still feel so unique. But, as animators, we are still in a little dark studio bubble. So, it’s nice to know there are people out there in the world who are still watching Aardman and loving the shows as much as they always have.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
