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.

Annabelle Honess Roe is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Surrey, UK. She is the author of Animated Documentary (2013) which won the 2015 Society for Animation Studies McLaren-Lambart Award for Best Book. She is co-editor of Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Animation Studies Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018).

In this book, the authors engage with all things Aardman through scholarly, diverse, accessible and ultimately intriguing approaches. It is essential reading for scholars, students and practitioners of stop motion animation and beyond. -- Dan Torre, Senior Lecturer, RMIT University, Australia