Claymation Pioneer Peter Lord Explains the Magic Behind 'Wallace and Gromit'

Wallace and Gromit stars an eccentric inventor—always tinkering away at bizarre and magical projects. Aardman, the British stop-motion animation studio behind the beloved character and his trusty canine sidekick, goes about things in much the same spirit. Although its inventions have been met with much more success than Wallace's, it must be said.

All this becomes clear upon viewing a new retrospective of Aardman's animation work at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image. Using objects originally displayed at the Musee Art Ludique in Paris, Wallace and Gromit and Friends: The Magic of Aardman puts 40 years of plasticine characters on show. It's a rare insight into how Aardman pioneered claymation and brought its beloved characters to life with stunning care and attention to detail. Also how it helped animate a Peter Gabriel video back in the 80s.

Creators spoke to Aardman co-founder and Creative Director Peter Lord about the exhibition, his career, and the future of stop motion animation in a CGI world.

Creators: How does it feel to put your life's work in an art gallery?
Peter Lord: Well it's a very rare experience, I suppose. We've been going for more than 40 years now and to put together such a big retrospective is a fantastic opportunity. In our films we collect quite an amazing archive of stuff. Because model animation is three dimensional, you're collecting all this beautiful stuff—houses, interiors, furniture, props, models, and the pieces that go to make models. We have a huge storage facility in Bristol and so it's a strong position to be in. When the idea came up, we could look at this incredible archive and find the best pieces and the most fun pieces for the exhibition. The truth is you can imagine that we have less to show from the early days, especially because we had a big fire that was a real pain in the neck. So we lost some of our early material in that fire, which is a shame. But still we have so much material that it was still a challenge to choose what to include.

What's nice about the show is that it includes objects from every part of the process.
Yes. The objects of course are the very end of the process, when you make a film. You start with stories and designs and ideas. And then eventually you build your puppets and so on. And we're showing parts of that in the exhibition, so the models and the sets are the end but there are also completely amazing designs and drawings. Some of them are big spectacular paintings, some of them are very simple rough sketches. And some of those are really interesting.

Aardman feels like this boyish dream that came to life—you and David Sproxton have built a career around something that seems like the most fun ever. Take me back to the beginning.
The very first animation we ever sold, the first time we ever made money out of an animation, was a drawn animation called "Aardman" which we got the company name from. But we weren't very good at it! So we broke into 3D and that proved to be a really great idea.

Now why did we do that? There was one particular influence actually, an American animator called Eliot Noyes, and he made a film using modelling clay back in the 60s. We saw it just once, because these are the days before repeats on TV, before the internet, before VHS recording. Chances were, you'd only see it once, you'd never see it again. It wasn't a funny film, there was no story at all, it was just clay—living modelling clay. Coming to life, changing shape and so on. And we thought that was a very interesting look. And because we'd seen that, we decided to experiment. That little glimpse. We hadn't even seen the whole film, but that little glimpse was really, really influential.

Apart from that there was also Ray Harryhausen. He was a British animator from the 50s up until the 80s, and he did what we'd now call special effects. Monsters in movies now are computer animation, but back in the day that didn't exist, and Ray made the film Jason and the Argonauts with all these handmade skeletons and statues. Very, very impressive and incredibly memorable to a ten-year-old kid!

The third important influence was the European tradition of puppet animation. Kids' TV series often used stop motion, we saw a lot of that as well.

It's like you anticipated demand for claymation way before anyone else did.
We took the modelling clay, the plasticine, and made it our speciality. When we were only eighteen we did this "Aardman" drawn animation and there was a whole world of people doing the same thing. We were at the very bottom. But then when we went into plasticine animation, we were the only people in the world doing it, as far as we knew. It was a great position to be in, and it helped us to grow and flourish.

And as you said, it's a fun thing to do. Drawn animation, you spend your life at a desk drawing. But with puppet animation, it's way more fun! You're building things and characters and sets and puppets. And you're building things, it's a lovely and creative process.

I love that tactile nature of it. It really comes through—when you're watching these movies and shorts you want to reach out and touch the characters.
I so agree. I actually often say that myself. When you watch it, you know you can touch it, it's real. It's alive, even though it's not really alive. You've taken something which isn't alive and made it alive and you know that the whole time. Whereas I suppose with computer animation, it's just zeroes and ones in a box, there's no reacting to it. That tangibility, that tactile quality—there's nothing to touch.

Absolutely. Having said that Aardman has shown a lot of interest in using new technology, which is cool.
Yes, absolutely. We've got really quite a big CGI department permanently. If you were in the studio today, we're making a new movie, which is puppet animation—traditional. But we're also doing a really lovely and rather experimental computer game. We're also always working on VR projects, and that's exciting too. We're always using our YouTube channel and we're experimenting with a computer-enhanced theme park ride where you go on the rollercoaster wearing a headset. So you're having a real experience of a rollercoaster but the world around you is totally huge and amazing.

I think as artists we're interested in telling stories, that's the most important thing. And although I love the puppet animation, that's our first love, there are other stories for which it's not the best medium. Where computer animation is better. We do this rather wonderful, beautiful, old-fashioned thing—the puppet animation. But we're realists as well.

To be real, though—as older forms of animation die out altogether, how can we keep the magic alive?
A big part of it is the tangibility we were talking about. My analogy I like to use is the art of physical puppetry. Kermit the Frog is amazing because you believe in him, you know him, he is a character, he has a personality and a sense of humour. You know him as if he were real, and he's a puppet. He's not a living thing at all. So every time you're watching Kermit you're very happy to believe it. And I think that is a wonderful thing. I think our animation achieves a similar sort of effect. True magic is seeing two things at the same time—a beautiful puppet and a living thing. Wallace, or Shawn the Sheep. It speaks to something quite deep in human experience, I think. Puppetry has been a part of all cultures for thousands of years. But it must be said that part of that ideal is that the public must want it.

As long as the public keeps wanting these films made by hand, with love, they'll keep being made.

I think so too.

'Wallace and Gromit and Friends: The Magic of Aardman' continues at ACMI until October 29. Find out more about the exhibition here.

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