Aardman Animations maintains its stop-motion ideal of a simpler England

Reflecting on the genre-bending success of his 1989 college project A Grand Day Out, filmmaker Nick Park claimed that the inspiration was relatively simple. “I had this idea about an English guy who builds a rocket, and the joke was he built it in the basement of his house. I was thinking he may have a pet, probably a cat…” The genesis of the Academy Award-winning duo Wallace and Gromit is that simple: an Englishman, a pet, and a project. A Grand Day Out is a loose extension of that seed, soaring higher and higher but rarely straying into typical narrative conceits. Rather than leading with a plot, the short’s enlightening elements are contained in the texture and movement of Park’s stop-motion figurines. Even under Park’s relatively unpracticed hand, metal appears hard and shiny, wood is worn and grooved, the thick wool of Wallace’s sweater is chunky and uneven. That “artificial authenticity” (a term Greta Gerwig popularized in her press tour for Barbie) is what drew audiences to A Grand Day Out, and which still calls people to Aardman Animations’ productions. But just as the idea of Englishness has been subjected to necessary change in the decades following A Grand Day Out, Park’s early idea of “an English guy” doesn’t necessarily hold the same meaning it did upon its genesis.

While CGI now dominates as the main way to make the impossible real, Aardman Animations sticks to the back-breaking, time-consuming process of stop-motion animation. At its best, stop-motion is a magic trick on top of a magic trick, its painstaking process felt in every mundane moment, distracting from any secondary contextual conceits. The effort required to make every cinematic frame possible isn’t necessarily spelled out, but it’s felt in the inexact motion, or slightly overblown facial features. Instead of prompting incredulity, the experience blurs into a kind of pleasant awe, like eating a home-cooked meal that has taken hours to prepare: hard-earned and delicious. 

But though they still hold to the same technique, Aardman’s projects have developed in complexity from the early days of The Great Egg Race commercial and Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” music video. Its early pièce de résistance remains 1993’s The Wrong Trousers. The Wrong Trousers granted viewers access to Wallace and Gromit’s wider ecosystem, introducing a quaint Yorkshire village, complete with semi-attached cul-de-sacs, cobblestone streets, and single-room museums. All of this has been made possible through the expansion of David Sproxton and Peter Lord’s two-man endeavor, to a group encompassing exciting up-and-comers (including Park and Shaun The Sheep creator Richard Starzak), to a team of more than 30 animators, working simultaneously on as many soundstages. Ambition has blown open the potential of each subsequent project, but the texture and tangibility of their creations remains paramount, each capable of reflecting their historical moment.

The Wrong Trousers was broadcast to a country gripped by a new interpretation of “Britishness,” heralded by Britpop. In 1993, Blur released their sophomore album Modern Life Is Rubbish and The Verve debuted with A Storm In Heaven—both of which offered a serrated and cool interpretation of the national identity. This music was defined by observational songwriting and speak-singing rejections of Margaret Thatcher’s ’80s reign. Britpop’s edgy nihilism aligned with the country struggling in the wake of Black Wednesday’s economic crash (when the U.K. withdrew the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism). In response to a shifting national identity and a floundering economy, Wallace and Gromit represented an alternative, actively retreating from such city-based strife and further embedding themselves in an idealized rural life. Each of their inventions are organized to optimize the minutiae of their lives, all their machinery fine-tuned to make sure the things they most value—tea, jam on toast, fluffy slippers—are all readily available. This pared-back lifestyle represented a retro-countercultural approach in a country that valued economic expansion until the 2008 financial crash.

Shaun The Sheep and Chicken Run followed in these footsteps, upholding uninterrupted country life as a kind of utopia. Indeed, Chicken Run feels uniquely positioned to comment on the distinction between England as it is and England as it could be, purposely illustrating the opposite of idealized country living as its flock longs to wander freely across picturesque hills. This was Aardman’s first feature film, an overtly political work that imagines a Great Escape-esque caper where a group of plucky chickens attempt to escape being baked into pies. It’s an apt analogy for leftist resistance to an increasingly fascistic state—moving in its childlike simplicity. Rolling fields, hand-painted as an idyllic counterpoint to the cartoonish chaos taking center stage in most Aardman projects, are replaced by the muddy hues of Mrs. Tweedy’s chicken farm, brown dirt stretching on like a wet, sludgy carpet. This ugliness is what spurs the plot forward, functioning as more than just a backdrop, but as the story’s binding force.

But it wouldn’t be fair to characterize the non-Chicken Run Aardman animations as apolitical. All of their projects invest in the happiness of unencumbered country living, and propose pathways by which anyone, regardless of income (as evidenced by Wallace and Gromit’s perpetually flailing personal finances), can live in relative simplicity. In 2015, Shaun The Sheep Movie followed the successful children’s show, offering a series of hijinks that leads Shaun and his flock to chase their farmer into the (anonymous) city. Unlike its stop-motion siblings, Shaun The Sheep is wholly nonverbal storytelling, meaning that there is no way for these characters to reason with their extreme shift in surroundings. As such, the city is an incomprehensible sequence of noises, as loud and imposing as the anonymous farm is open and playful. This development is made explicit when a menacing pest control officer attempts to apprehend the herd. Shaun’s egalitarian existence on the farm is upended by the city, where an archaic sense of order and control supersedes reasonable logic. He goes from living in relative harmony with Blitzer (the sheepdog) and the farmer to being subjected to insufficient laws that seem randomly imposed.

Aardman expresses the urban power imbalance in the texture of the animation, while the flexibility of farm life is made real through the transience of the geographical layout. Sheep can careen through leafy hedges and pigs can drive through piles of mud, reorienting the facets of the landscape; in contrast, the city is all concrete alleyways that refuse to shift according to protagonists’ needs. This is also the textural distinction that makes up the main problems comprising Wallace & Gromit films, including the most recent offering Vengeance Most Fowl. In that installment, Wallace creates the robotic gnome Norbot to assist Gromit in the garden, but in a pleasantly predictable twist, Norbot is re-programmed for evil by the duo’s nemesis, Feathers McGraw. Evil is heralded by the sound of mechanical whirring and metallic stomping, as an army of robot gnomes swarm 62 West Wallaby Street. But eventually Norbot finds peace with the town, an occasional helping hand rather than a statement of modern progress. Wallace and Gromit return to peaceful coexistence, relying on one another and the lived experience that bonds them.

Aardman’s idea of Englishness is somewhat reductive, all cheese and crackers and afternoons in the suspiciously sunny garden, but it is also hopeful that the things really worth preserving are small, as simple as a hand-brewed pot of tea. That first envisioning that Park described, of a wacky “English guy who builds a rocket,” has remained foundational, more than just the barely discernible basis of the Aardman project, but the aspirational promise of each cinematic endeavor. Wallace and Gromit still long to fulfill these basic roles, Chicken Run’s Ginger and Shaun The Sheep’s Shaun both long for a similarly unburdened creativity; for Aardman’s stop-motion animators, the stories worth telling are happening off the beaten path, where industry forces have yet to envelop and subdue them. Vengeance Most Fowl returns to remind audiences that while Wallace & Gromit’s popularity has grown, their stories always end where they started: an Englishman, a pet, and a project.