Wallace and Gromit fans will be treated to a grand day out in Melbourne next year as Aardman – the studio responsible for some of the world’s most successful animated films – brings a major collection of sets, props and design materials from their award-winning films to the Australian Centre for Moving Image.
Wallace Gromit and Friends: The Magic of Aardman, which premiered in Paris last year at Art Ludique – Le Musée, will feature 350 original artworks and more than 50 set pieces from the studio responsible for Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run. Sketchbooks, concept drawings and storyboards will be on show, as well as handmade puppets. The flying machine from Chicken Run will be on display, and a whole section of the exhibition is focused on Wallace’s inventions.
Exclusive to the Melbourne exhibition will be a number of artworks from the studio’s feature film in-progress, Early Man, which is due out in 2018.
Aardman is most famous for its stop-motion clay animation films, and in particular for the characters of Wallace and Gromit – a cheese-loving inventor and his very intelligent dog. The pair came to public attention in 1989 with the premiere of the short film A Grand Day Out. Only 24 minutes long, it was followed up in 1993 and 1995 with The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave respectively, both of which won Oscars.
Aardman has since released a number of feature films using this stop-motion technique, including Chicken Run in 2000, and Wallace and Gromit’s fourth outing, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, in 2005, for which they won an Academy Award and a Bafta.
Aardman co-founder and executive chair David Sproxton said the exhibition, which marks the studio’s 40th anniversary, would give audiences the opportunity to see behind-the-scenes material that “demonstrates not only the amount of work it takes to get to a finished film but also the imagination and skill of the large number of artists the studio depends on”.
Speaking to Guardian Australia, Sproxton said he looked forward to sharing the collection with Australians. “There is a strong connection between the humour enjoyed by the Brits and the Aussies; some of this stems from the language itself but mostly because both populations don’t take themselves too seriously and are happy to laugh at themselves readily,” he said. “And of course the Aussies love laughing at the Brits!”
• Wallace Gromit and Friends: The Magic of Aardman will be showing at Acmi from 28 June 2017 as part of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series.
