Animation studio narrows annual loss to £1.1m amid ‘challenging market’ in children’s content

Don’t break out the celebratory Wensleydale just yet. Aardman, the British animation studio behind the cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his beloved dog Gromit, has fallen short of a target to get back in the black, its accounts show.

The employee-owned business was aiming to record a small profit in 2025 after two years of consecutive losses but was hit by production delays and a “challenging market” in children’s content.

Wallace and Gromit stop-motion models and other beloved creations raise money to train new generations of animators

Wallace’s reaction as the auction got into full swing might have been a trademark “good grief!” – and the enthusiasm of some of the bidding could have caused even the phlegmatic Gromit to show surprise.

Fans of Wallace and Gromit and other beloved creations of Aardman Animations seized the chance to grab souvenirs when more than 200 pieces – including Wallace, Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run puppets from Aardman productions – went under the hammer on Thursday.

There’s trouble afoot when Shaun’s pumpkin-supersizing serum ends up in a balding farmer’s hair growth bottle in this third cinematic adventure

Summer is over and Halloween is on the way … not for a fair bit, of course, but if all the UK’s Halloween merch and continuing pop culture content is up to the standard of this film, then no one is going to be complaining. This is the third in Aardman’s thoroughly enjoyable and cleverly written Shaun the Sheep stop-motion franchise of what are effectively silent movies, with a few intelligible words. It is the story of gutsy and heroic sheep involved in amazing adventures in the sleepy village of Mossy Bottom, starring characters who first appeared in the Wallace and Gromit short film A Close Shave.

This one is another excellent family film, crammed as ever with top visual gags, great throwaway references and, of course, a homemade Heath Robinson contraption, so often to be found in Aardman films. We get nods to The Archers, The Wombles and The Simpsons; there’s a wacky chase worthy of What’s Up, Doc?; a homage to the notorious waxing scene from Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin; and even what appears to be a brief visual walk-on for George Bernard Shaw as Bigfoot. As ever with Shaun the Sheep and Aardman Animations generally, the standard of writing is extremely high and the script here, from Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, sparkles with good-natured fun. One high-street hairdressing salon in the wool-producing district where it’s set is called Barber Black Sheep – and if no real-life shop has stolen this joke yet, they ought to.

Aardman’s hero is back in The Beast of Mossy Bottom – a terrifying tale of frankenfood, pitchfork-wielding villagers and a monster with suspiciously stiff orange hair. Our writer meets its makers and moulds her very own Shaun

The Aztec West industrial estate in Bristol was opened by Margaret Thatcher in December 1989. One hundred and sixty acres of breeze block and mirrored glass, it is home to about 7,000 employees and 100 companies, including EDF, EE, HSBC, Co-op Legal and Spandex. It has its own gym, spa, church and morgue. Step inside Unit 1410, though, and bucolic England is magically restored. A farm complete with sheep. Rolling fields in autumn colours. A small parish town boasting post office, war memorial, chippy. It looks lush. But before you hit up Rightmove, I should say: Mossingham is only two feet tall. And plasticine.

It’s January 2026 and Aardman animations are about halfway through production on Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom. The 300-odd staff in this shed are full speed ahead – which means each of the 30 animators is rattling out almost two seconds of footage a day.

Nick Park began modelling the character as a feline, before finding it too difficult and changing him to a dog

The creator of Wallace and Gromit has revealed that the world’s most famous stop-motion animated dog was nearly a cat.

As Aardman Animations marks its 50th anniversary, Nick Park, who joined the studio in 1985, told the BBC he had originally modelled Gromit as a feline companion for Wallace.

The ​s​tudio’s co-founders on ​accidentally creating Morph, not wanting a yacht in the Maldives and being each other’s best ally

Peter Lord and David Sproxton are the founders of Aardman Animations, which turns 50 this year. The pair began animating as teenagers, selling their first short – starring a superhero called Aardman – to the BBC’s Vision On in 1972. In 1977, they created Morph for the children’s programme Take Hart. The studio’s breakthrough into adult audiences came via Channel 4’s Conversation Pieces series, and its animators, including a young Nick Park, went on to make Wallace & Gromit, whose films have won multiple Academy Awards. Aardman became employee-owned in 2018, with Lord and Sproxton transferring majority ownership to staff to safeguard the company’s independence. They were knighted earlier this year.

These two half-hour classics of stop-motion pack in nods to more earnest cinema but are never distracted from producing pristinely beguiling family entertainment

Nick Park’s stop-motion Wallace and Gromit animations have an amazing ability to deliver an entire action adventure feature film at just 30 minutes complete with romantic subplot and loads of great visual gags thrown in, and A Close Shave (★★★★★) from 1995 is just another example of it. The situation is that Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) is working on his latest invention in his cellar, a giant machine, like a bungalow-sized cauldron, that automatically shears sheep and knits the product into lovely woolly jumpers.

While they are waiting for this to become a success, Wallace and Gromit run a window-cleaning business, and it is in this capacity that they meet Wendolene Ramsbottom (voiced by Anne Reid) who owns a wool-selling business oddly unaffected by the wool shortage. Wallace falls for the comely Wendolene and their intensely English and shy romance forms an ironic counterpoint to the fact that Wendolene has been coerced by her sinister dog Preston into being complicit in this hateful canine’s sheep-rustling business – as a result of which a runaway sheep finds its way into Wallace and Gromit’s house.

After ‘bottling everything up for a long time’ the faithful pet, who has remained silent for many years, will spill the beans on the pair’s ‘pet hates and fur-vent passions’

Gromit, the canine star of the Wallace and Gromit animations, is “breaking his silence” and writing a memoir.

After “bottling everything up for a long time”, the moment has come for him to “spill the beans”, according to publisher Ebury.

Children are encouraged to get hands-on as the world’s leading stop-motion studio showcases its work in east London

What would Wallace – everyone’s favourite amateur Yorkshire inventor – look like with a moustache, straw boater and postal worker’s coat? Would a massive set of teeth suit his faithful beagle, Gromit? How about a nose shaped like a banana?

Such questions are answered by an illuminating and sometimes alarming exhibition at east London’s Young V&A that showcases the work of the world’s leading stop-motion outfit, the Bristol-based Aardman studios. Early sketches for Nick Park’s much-loved characters reveal that Wallace was once just a few bristles short of Hitler, while Gromit had fangs and the ability to speak.

Aardman’s tale of a group of plucky hens standing up to their pie-making masters was a favourite in our house, and – I realised – incompatible with my taste for burgers

By the age of 15, I was already torn between my love of animals and the deliciousness of a 99p McDonald’s Mayo Chicken. As a child I was a fussy eater, with meat and carbs being the mainstays, but as I got older I found it harder to justify eating meat. A lifelong animal lover and one of those annoying people who jokes about their “connection to animals”, I never missed an opportunity to pet a neighbourhood dog or say hello to a group of cows in a field.

So, going into my teenage years, I knew that eating meat was not really compatible with my way of thinking. But like most I found it easy enough to put those concerns to one side when I was scoffing a Greggs steak bake. Until at 15 I got the nudge I needed to take the leap into vegetarianism.