A to Z of Animation Studios: Aardman Animations
A to Z of Animation Studios: Aardman Animations
(Or: How Claymation Made Me Question My Life Choices and Also Gave Me Nightmares About Chickens)
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🔥 A is for Aardman Animations
Aardman is responsible for some of the greatest claymation films of all time. They’re also responsible for shattering the dreams of thousands of aspiring animators who, at some point, thought, “Stop-motion looks fun!” and then realized they’d rather be set on fire than spend 36 hours making a character blink.
Founded in 1972 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, Aardman’s early work proved two things:
1. British people are weird.
2. Stop-motion animators have either the patience of saints or severe masochistic tendencies.
Let’s talk about the madness they unleashed:
• Wallace & Gromit – A cheese-addicted sociopath and his emotionally burnt-out dog go on adventures that somehow always involve elaborate Rube Goldberg machines and near-death experiences. Gromit has no mouth, yet he screams.
• Chicken Run – The Great Escape but with chickens, which sounds dumb until you realize that the villain is a serial-killing chicken farmer who makes pies out of her victims. I watched this as a kid and have never trusted poultry since.
• Flushed Away – The only time Aardman dared to do CGI instead of stop-motion, and the entire time, it looked like the animators were desperately trying to escape their own bad decision. Features Hugh Jackman as a rat and somehow, that’s not even the weirdest part.
• Shaun the Sheep – The most expressive sheep in animation history, who manages to have more personality than every live-action Disney remake combined. This franchise made me feel emotions about barnyard animals and I’m still not okay with that.
Aardman is a testament to pure, unhinged dedication. They will spend five years animating a single film frame by frame just to make sure your childhood is permanently scarred by plasticine animals with unsettlingly realistic teeth.
🎖 Honorable Mention: Animation Collective (Kappa Mikey, Three Delivery)
Before we move on, we need to talk about Animation Collective, a studio that said,
“What if we made an anime, but with the quality of a PowerPoint presentation?”
And thus, Kappa Mikey was born—a show where one white guy gets isekai’d into a budget anime, and somehow, it’s one of the greatest things Nickelodeon ever aired. The animation quality was inconsistent at best, illegal at worst, but we all watched it anyway.
Then there’s Three Delivery, a show that no one remembers but me, and honestly, I might have imagined it. If you claim to have watched it, I need proof of life because I’m still not convinced it wasn’t just a fever dream induced by eating too much Chinese takeout.
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If this rant didn’t scare you off, subscribe to the YouTube channel where I yell about animation in high definition. Stay tuned for B, where we’ll either worship or annihilate Blue Sky Studios, depending on how salty I feel.
(Spoiler: I feel salty.)
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