Aardman Animations

Forget the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Trip Hop or even Cider… Aardman Animations has to be Bristol’s most famous and best loved export. The über-​cool animation studio has been responsible for some of the most amazing programmes, including the hilarious Creature Comforts, the unforgettable Wallace and Gromit and the more recent Shaun the Sheep. Unsurprisingly, Aardman Animations is a mutli award winner. Think Oscars, Baftas and basically any award going with an animations category. The work ethic of the place is sound and it attracts some of the most creative minds of a generation. Long may it continue. Wallace and Gromit also lend their name to an appeal for the local hospital.

Aardman Animations has become a Bristol institution over the passed 20 years kick started by the enormous success of their first Wallace and Gromit half hour «A Grand Day Out» back in the late 80’s.
Since that time they have gone on to become not only a national treasure, but an international benchmark for stop motion and CGI animation. This modest film company truly is the jewel in Bristol’s crown.
Their distinct brand of light entertainment comedies, whether they be Hollywood blessed feature films like Flushed Away or Chicken Run, or simple children’s shorts like Timmy or Shaun the Sheep are of the utmost quality and the envy of the animation world.

The thing I love the most about the city of Bristol is it’s fantastic creative scene. Aardman animations is another creative force to make Bristolians proud.
With an endless list of creations, probably the most famous being the beloved Wallace and Gromit, they have achieved a massive presence in the worldwide film and TV world.
They can be found hard at work in the creative hub of Spike Island down on the docks.

Many a Christmas of my youth was spent with the family huddled around the television watching the latest Wallace and Gromit episode. A source of much Bristolian pride, Aardman Animations are responsible for them, as well as the popular creature comforts series (the one with all the talking animals). Aardman do a good trade in slightly off the wall family animation and have been enjoying major success over the last few years, taking a clutch of Oscars for their feature length Wallace and Gromit films. They’ve also been venturing into computer animation with the release of Flushed Away.
If you’ve ever watched a behind the scenes on Wallace and Gromit, you’ll know why they only get a release out every few years. It takes hours of painstaking work, gently moving the arms of tiny little plasticine models millimetre by millimetre just to get a few seconds of shot. Very skilled stuff and you can see that they must be mad about animation to spend all day doing this.
All the success is starting to show, and they’ve moved into a new purpose built building, a welcome change to the warehouses and flats that populate Spike Island (the land sliced up Bristol harbour that the building sits on). Just wondering into the lobby is a fantastic way to see these innovative people at work.

You know Wallace and Gromit right? Well they were created right here (well at their old studios that burnt down) but they live here now!
Animators/​businessmen Nick Park and David Sproxton have done themselves proud with a new site for the stupendous studios.
Now they’ve got themselves a proper place to house their Oscars for model animation. And man, have they done them all. As well as the aforementioned dog and man in their various adventures, they’ve done Morph, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep and Timmy Time, and, bizarrely, Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video.
They’ve also filmed commercials and promos.
Oh how I love ‘em and their cute plasticine figures. Aardman entertain, provide humour, employ local people, create beautiful films and works of art with their progressive technology.
All this fun and creativity stemming from little old Bristol. Aren’t we lucky!