Say cheese! Wallace & Gromit expo puts kids into motion
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People look at the Dining Room set model from Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024).
PHOTO: AFP
LONDON - A new London exhibition is aiming to inspire children to follow in the footsteps of the creators of Wallace & Gromit (1989 to present) and their beloved animated world.
The British capital’s biggest children’s museum is giving a behind-the-scenes look at Aardman, the studio that created the popular stop-motion favourites, Shaun The Sheep (2007 to present) and others.
Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit And Friends, which opened at the Young V&A museum in east London on Feb 12, uses interactive and colourful displays to explore how the British studio’s iconic clay characters are brought to life.
People look at the Gromit In The Greenhouse set from Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit (2005).
PHOTO: AFP
Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Aardman’s first production and showcasing over 150 objects – including models, sets and storyboards from the studio’s archives – the exhibition took nearly two years to prepare, said chief curator Alex Newson.
“It’s really celebrating... how those characters have survived the test of time, and if anything, are more loved today than they were when they kind of first came out,” he told AFP.
“We really also wanted to show the process behind how they are made,” said the curator, including how the creators came up with characters like the hapless, cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his floppy-eared dog Gromit.
A visitor looks at a Fun-Land Farms model used in filming of Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget (2023).
PHOTO: EPA
“But more than that, we wanted to use those... to inspire children to become kind of the next animators and the animators of the future.”
Despite the rise of children’s exposure to screen time, Mr Newson believes “people want to make things by hand still”.
“I know that in today’s increasingly digital world, it’s easy to create something without having to do anything. But there is a real thirst to make things, and there’s also a real thirst to see things that have been made by people.”
Aardman, based in Bristol in southwest England, uses the word “thumbiness” to describe how viewers can almost see the fingerprints of the people who make the puppets and scenes.
“You can understand that this was a handmade thing, and there was love, sweat and tears that have gone into the creation of it,” said Mr Newson.
‘Beast Of Mossy Bottom’
A visitor poses with a Timmy puppet used in the filming of Timmy Time.
PHOTO: EPA
To mark its half-century, Aardman will release a new movie later in 2026: Shaun The Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom.
Schoolchildren previewing the exhibition, which runs to Nov 15, enjoyed the interactive displays, which included a praxinoscope – an animation device – and character design stations.
They also saw lighting experiments on a film set from Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), the process behind stop-motion video creation, and how animators make sound effects.
“It’s very fun,” said Zahre, aged eight, whose favourite character is Gromit.
Founded in 1972, Aardman began with friends Peter Lord and David Sproxton making animations together on their kitchen table while they were still at school.
The studio went on to become one of Britain’s largest animation production companies, producing hits including Chicken Run (2000), Flushed Away (2006) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit (2005), which won the 2006 Oscar for Best Animated Feature. AFP
