Aardman Animations: Beyond Stop-motion

Description

The Bristol-based animation company Aardman is best known for its most famous creations Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. But despite the quintessentially British aesthetic and tone of its movies, this very British studio continues to enjoy international box office success with movies such as Shaun the Sheep Movie, Flushed Away and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Aardman has always been closely linked with one of its key animators, Nick Park, and its stop motion, Plasticine-modelled family films, but it has more recently begun to experiment with modern digital filmmaking effects that either emulate 'Claymation' methods or form a hybrid animation style. This unique volume brings together leading film and animation scholars with children's media/animation professionals to explore the production practices behind Aardman's creativity, its history from its early shorts to contemporary hits, how its films fit within traditions of British animation, social realism and fantasy cinema, the key personalities who have formed its ethos, its representations of 'British-ness' on screen and the implications of traditional animation methods in a digital era. Cover Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Understanding Aardman Annabelle Honess Roe Section One Identity and Brand 1 ‘All you do is call me, I’ll be anything you need’: Aardman Animations, Music Videos and Commercials Malcolm Cook 2 Music, Sound and Northernness in the Wallace and Gromit Films Joseph Darlington 3 ‘Yahoo! My last moment has come’: Peter Lord and the Literacy of Wit and Nostalgia Paul Wells 4 From Europe to Hollywood and Back Again: Aardman and Its Studio Partners Christopher Meir Section Two Cultural Contexts 5 Aardman’s Early Shorts and the British Social Realist Tradition Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib 6 A Darker Heartland: Otherness, Dysfunction and the Uncanny in Aardman’s Short Films Jane Batkin 7 Washed Up: Animating Literary Corpses in The Pearce Sisters Nicholas Andrew Miller 8 Wallace and Gromit and the British Fantasy Tradition Alexander Sergeant Section Three Process and Production 9 Animation Storyboarding as Part of the Pre-Production Process: An Aardman Case Study Paul Ward 10 Life’s a Treat: Shaun, Timmy, Aardman and Children’s Television Linda Simensky 11 Shaun the Sheep – Buster Keaton Reborn? Richard Haynes Section Four Surface and Performance 12 Aardman’s Neo-Baroque: The Dual Nature of Special Effects in Aardman’s Feature Film Production Thomas Walsh 13 Performing Authenticity through Clay in the Wallace and Gromit Films Laura Ivins 14 Between Plasticine and Pixel: Aardman’s Digital Thumbprint Christopher Holliday 15 Aardman! In an Entanglement with CGI! Aylish Wood Select Bibliography Index