Aardman co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, the company’s star director Nick Park and Executive Creative Director Sarah Cox hit the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on Sunday for a masterclass celebrating the studio’s 50th anniversary.
There were plenty of anecdotes but the 90-minute talk also looked to the present and future of the award-winning studio behind stop-motion box office break out Chicken Run; Oscar-winner Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and the Shaun The Sheep series among many beloved films and shows.
Cox took the opportunity to announce the BBC-commissioned stop-motion and 2D animated series Let’s Go Timmy! set against the backdrop of Mossy Bottom.
The 30 x 5 minutes episodes sees Bitzer the sheep dog tasked with getting Timmy and his two best friends, Yabba and Apricot, to Mossy Bottom School safe and on time each morning against the odds, with the group regularly side-tracked on route.
The series is directed by Merlin Crossingham and Daniel Bins and produced by Stephanie Miller with Lucy Pryke, the Commissioning Executive for the BBC.
Cox also revealed new production The Almost (Untold) Story Of Danger Delilah, adapted from Once Upon an Alphabet by Oliver Jeffers.
“We’re coming towards the end of our development phase… we’re working very excitingly with an Irish illustrator and writer, Oliver Jeffers, taking some of his characters from his alphabet stories,” said Cox.
She said Lord, Aardman director Åsa Lukander and Senior Development Executive James Higginson had created “a whole new story” from the book and its characters.
“The script is by Pete. It’s about Danger Delilah, a girl who realises her world’s starting to disappear and then that she is a character in someone else’s story that they’re forgetting about… So she has to literally seize the narrative and rewrite her own story. We’ve just finished a phase of development, so we’ll be ready to start pitching it soon,” said Cox.
In other project updates, Cox was joined on stage by Phil Rynda, Director of Original Animation at The Pokémon Company International, to talk about their previously announced joint project Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu and reveal never-before-seen footage of the protagonists.
Rynda also revealed that the adventure will unfold in Pokémon’s Galar region, which shares many geographical similarities with the real-world of the UK.
“The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu is a comedy adventure series. And it’s incredible. The team at Aardman has really brought it to life. It’s set in the region of Galar, so if you know the games, it’s featured in our sword and shield games. And the coolest thing about the show is that it’s a Pokemon story told from the perspective of Pokemon through the Aardman lens and it’s just a dream come true,” said Rynda.
Earlier in the masterclass, Lord and Sproxton recounted how they had first met as 12-year-olds at school.
“When we were about 16, we started animating for fun. And then we were in the right place at the right time, and we were lucky, we got to have a piece of our work shown on British TV,” said Sproxton referring to a series of simple 2D animations about a clumsy wannabe superhero called Aardman.
“Because when we were 16, we thought that an aardvark was a very funny name for an animal, we took the Aard and the man of Superman made a superhero that we called Aardman.”
When the BBC asked who they should make out the payment cheque to, the pair replied Aardman Productions and the name stuck.
In a wide-ranging talk, the pair looked at their early foray into clay figures with children’s TV character Morph, which put the company the map, as well as their experimentation with animation for adults with their dark 1986 short Babylon.
Sproxton talked about the role Channel 4 played in bolstering UK animation.
“Channel 4 came on air in 1982 with a remit to make very, very different television. And one of the things they did was commission animated films outside the children’s audience, so adult films.”
Another development at the time had been connecting with Park, who had reached out to them while a student at the National Film and Television School, and was working on his graduation film which would become Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out.
“At that point, he’d shot about six minutes of it… the deal we did was Nick would come and work with us to help us on Babylon and we would then help on the graduation film,” recounted Sproxton.
Lord added: “When we saw Nick, his early work, we thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s good. You know, he could do well. Then he came to Aardman and in about a year he was like a superstar because he’s a very effective guy.”