After it was used for a perfume ad, Nina Simone’s jazz classic made it into the top 10 in the autumn of 1987. Inspired, no doubt, by the (non-Aardman) video for a successful re-release of Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite earlier in the year, this music video became a second bite at claymation-meets-1950s. Peter Lord, who directed, went with a sultry singing cat and some artistic shots of piano keys.

19. Next (1990)



Aardman Animation secured a high-profile commission from Channel 4 at the end of the 80s: a five-part short film series called Lip Sync, mostly comprising animation of pre-recorded interview material. Next, directed by Barry Purves, deviates from the concept: its basic gag is that William Shakespeare himself is auditioning for an uninterested Peter Hall. On the stage, Shakespeare whizzes through references to every one of his plays; Hall couldn’t be less impressed. Clever.

18. Going Equipped (1990)



A more orthodox interpretation of the Lip Sync concept: a small-time offender talks bluntly about prison life and how he became a law-breaker. It may not have the comedy disjunction of the more famous Creature Comforts short, from the same series, but the direct, untricksy treatment remains melancholy and even haunting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Where it all began: Aardman founders David Sproxton and Peter Lord with one of their early creations, Morph. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt

Steve Box, who would go on to direct the unlovely Spice Girls Viva Forever video and co-direct Curse of the Were-Rabbit, made his directorial debut with this impressive 11-minute short that mixes Nick Park-ish ingredients to considerably creepier effect. A vaudeville-act dog trainer called Tiny loses his confidence after clashing with Arnold, a hulking silent-film actor; it all ends up a bit Phantom of the Opera. There’s something a little bit freaky about it.

Lord was nominated for his first Oscar for this funny short, which showcases his more fingery, freeform style – compared to Park’s smoothly-polished modelling. A stream of jokes about the first created human, perched atop a tiny planet Earth, keeps this ticking along, with the real-flesh “hand of God” hammering points home. Not to get too meta, but there is some fun comment here on the god-like processes of claymation: Adam, after all, was fashioned out of clay in the first place. By the Lord. A coincidence? I think not.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch the video for Peter Gabriel’s single Sledgehammer

Aardman was founded by Lord and Dave Sproxton in 1972, and early jobs included the opening credits for The Great Egg Race and squeaking homunculus Morph on Take Hart. But it was its involvement in the amazingly successful promo for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer single in 1986 that put it firmly on the map. Sledgehammer wasn’t strictly an Aardman production – it was directed by Stephen R Johnson (famous for Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere) – but they did craft the still-spectacular animated sequences, which include painted clouds flitting across Gabriel’s face, Arcimboldo-esque singing vegetables and Park’s legendary dancing chickens. Even if it runs out of ideas a bit in the final third, it’s still a great watch.

Lord stretched his narrative muscles with this rather lovely 11-minute short, which resulted in his second Oscar nomination. There is something of Monty Python in its medieval setting: twin princes, separated at birth, one growing up in the castle, the other in a hovel just outside. It’s the latter, of course, who has got the eponymous pig, the typically anthropomorphised critter beloved by Aardman, although perhaps not quite so instrumental to the narrative as Gromit. Lord’s deployment of a split screen, to parallel the brothers’ development, is inspired.

Reports at the time suggested the production of this rodenty feature wasn’t the happiest experience for Aardman, as backers Dreamworks put the hammer down after disappointing box-office figures for their previous collaboration, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It shows on screen and led directly to the companies ending their agreement. Even if Aardman seems incapable of making a bad film, such is its iron grip on quality control, the pressure to abandon claymation and move into computer-generated animation led to a charm deficit. The film has got all the Aardman ingredients – quirky characters, relentless gags, top-notch voice cast – but there’s something a tiny bit inauthentic about its vision of an underground London and, of course, the shiny, flaw-free visuals are a long way from the Aardman stock-in-trade.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An animator makes adjustments on a character during the making of Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

The jewel in the crown of the Lip Synch series, and endlessly recycled since. Only five minutes long, Park’s film manages to be both brilliantly simple and fantastically audacious at the same time; building on the idea of animating a vox pop interview (see Going Equipped, above) but switching in zoo animals to create a hilarious disjunction between voice and visuals. Not only did it nab the company’s first Oscar, but it also turned into Aardman’s financial safety net, via a string of popular TV ads in the 1990s and an ITV series in the 2000s.

Aardman’s ability to attract the cream of British acting talent has been one of its strengths, but to get Eddie Redmayne hot off his Oscar win for The Theory of Everything was a major coup. He plays Dug, a bucktoothed cave-kid who spearheads a stone age tribe’s contest with a more sophisticated bronze age civilisation through the medium of football. Conceived, as usual, with Aardman’s amazing attention to detail, there’s something a little CBBC about the basic football-match idea in a World Cup year, a slightly anxious attempt to try to reach a mass audience. It’s still cute and funny, naturally.

Adapted from Gideon Defoe’s Pirates! book, this is rather openly aimed at the primary school audience, with that title namechecking two key obsessions of the bookish kid. A great cast (including Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton and David Tennant) give it their all; if anything, they are hampered a little by an over-complex plot that shoehorns in a Pirate of the Year contest, Charles Darwin and a murderous Queen Victoria. It sounds great on paper, but ends up a little frenetic on screen.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch the trailer for A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon

Deriving from a throwaway gag in A Close Shave, Shaun the Sheep has become a safety blanket franchise for Aardman: after 150 episodes of the kid-friendly TV show, the second feature is just about to hit cinemas. I can report that it’s well up to scratch: a Spielbergian story of Shaun’s encounter with a blue-and-pink alien bunny who crash lands on a local pizza joint and ends up on Mossy Bottom farm. As charming and unpretentious as it gets.

In retrospect, it seems quixotic that this opening salvo in the Wallace and Gromit series should have lost to Creature Comforts at the 1991 Oscars. Of course, thoughts of a national-treasure franchise were unlikely to be on anyone’s mind at the time, but this 25-minute tea-cosy space epic rendered in Plasticine was surely robbed, if only by Nick Park himself. All the series’ key elements are here: the script’s north of England mannerisms; the Jeeves-and-Wooster relationship of the central pair; the sheer fiendish delight in the Heath Robinson contraption Wallace comes up with; and the gentle knowingness of the film references. Compared with later efforts, it is perhaps not as drum-tight, story-wise (the wheeled cooker that wants to ski is still a headscratcher), but for a film school effort, it’s pretty sensational.

Aardman had more success with its second stab at computer-animation: a fun Christmas movie directed by Sarah Smith and written by Peter Baynham. Like most Aardman films, this is notable for its terrific action sequences – kicking off with a legion of elf-ninjas slamming millions of presents across the planet on Christmas Eve. Although there are family resemblances, this is actually pretty different from your traditional Aardman film: less obviously idiosyncratic and a little more conventional in story terms, reflecting the non-Aardman pedigree of the key talent. But it is impeccably put together and goes down a treat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch the chase scene from A Close Shave

Park was fully into his stride with this third in the Wallace and Gromit series and it got him yet another Oscar as well as a prime Christmas slot on the BBC. Adopting a similar genre backstop as The Wrong Trousers – a robot dog plots to steal sheep – this non-stop cavalcade of whimsy introduces the concept of Wallace’s love life and a superb chase scene with Gromit’s detachable sidecar. As ever, the attention to detail and sense of atmosphere is fantastic.

I have bit of a soft spot for this as I saw this being made; the patina of tea-time cheeriness masks a painstaking labour of love for everyone who worked on it. Perhaps not the massive hit Aardman has always been searching for, but it is an undeniably successful foray into cross-platform franchising. If that sounds mercenary, it doesn’t come out in the film: it’s the most basically good-natured of Aardman’s films, with only gentle sparring between the enterprising Shaun and officious dog Bitzer.

More romance for Wallace in what would turn out to be Peter Sallis’s last time in the role; Wallace’s yearning for former model Piella Bakewell achieves an implausibly tragic dimension after Piella is unmasked as a serial killer, shortly before ending up as crocodile food. Conceived on near-identical lines to A Close Shave, this is faultlessly realised, with a magnificent example of the by-now traditional high-speed chase as Wallace takes off after Piella’s runaway bike. At the other end of the scale, Park shoehorns in a reference to James Cameron’s Aliens.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest By e’eck, Gromit1: 1993’s The Wrong Trousers. Photograph: Allstar/Aardman

Clearly, it is hard to choose between the Wallace and Gromit shorts, especially as Park hit such a high standard so early and maintained it so well. But The Wrong Trousers gets the nod because it crystallised so much of what Aardman brought to the table: the jokey/sinister crime story; the homely details; and the astonishing application of real-world physics. The train chase scene has been rightly acclaimed – as exciting to watch as anything in Raiders of the Lost Ark – while Feathers McGraw, the penguin with the glove on his head, is an inscrutably memorable villain. Just as good 26 years on.

A W&G feature was no doubt inevitable, and after years of planning it finally emerged in 2005, in between the third and fourth shorts. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it was clearly the motto: a genre-movie superstructure (Hammer horror); a lovelorn Wallace; ridiculously complicated home inventions; and thrillingly inventive chases. The directors, Nick Park and Steve Box, imported major guest-acting talent, in the shape of Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes – and it’s possible that Aardman unlocked Fiennes’s comedy gene, more recently seen in The Grand Budapest Hotel and A Bigger Splash. Were-Rabbit does all that the short films do, only on a bigger canvas; the payoff for the audience is proportionately larger.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch the (Not So) Great Escape scene from Chicken Run

1. Chicken Run (2000)



I will admit that I was bit of a sceptic when Aardman announced it would move into feature films after it had signed its deal with Dreamworks. Could this comfy-cardigan cottage industry outfit with a few TV shorts behind it really do it on the big stage? But Aardman’s first full-length film, masterminded by Park and Lord, remains a treat that even the ensuing disgrace of Mel Gibson can’t ruin. Like all Aardman films, this has a simple premise – The Great Escape with chickens – but such is the animators’ ability to humanise the birds’ plight that it turns into an improbably emotional epic. It is also arguably Julia Sawalha’s finest hour – she voices Ginger, the feisty hen who practically forces her dozy fellow chickens to save themselves – while Gibson does a fine job of Rocky, the rooster who becomes the great hope of saving everyone from the dreaded pie machine. The film proved that Aardman could hold its own with Hollywood’s great animation traditions, as a beautifully judged balance was struck between the two. Chicken Run was a massive hit, too, giving Aardman some elbow room; but it didn’t last long. In retrospect, Chicken Run actually looks a little miraculous: how on earth did Aardman pull it off?