Making movies is a risky business. Instalments of famous film franchises typically cost more than $300 million and aren’t guaranteed to make a splash at the box office due to declining theater audiences. Movies which cost less than $40 million to make, are fully funded up-front, get global exposure and win Oscars sound like the stuff of fantasy. However, they are all in a day’s work for one studio.
Ask any animation luminary what springs to mind when they think of British pioneers in their industry and Aardman soon comes up. Simpsons creator Matt Groening described its stop-motion productions as “a celebration of the medium of animation” whilst Brad Bird, Oscar-winning director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, has praised them for containing “knockout scene after knockout scene in a row.”
Founded in 1972 by film fans Peter Lord and David Sproxton, Aardman cut its teeth creating animated sequences for Vision On, a BBC series for deaf children. Its unique selling point was that it created anthropomorphic characters from clay with one of its earliest, known as Morph, becoming a beloved icon of British children’s television.
It was such an eye-catching animation style that companies commissioned Aardman to create commercials for them throughout the 1980s and the business blossomed. However, it wasn’t until 1990 that it gained international attention when its Creature Comforts picture won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
The picture broke new ground as it featured clay animals in zoo cages talking in time to an audio track of actual interviews with residents of a housing estate and an old people’s home. It gave the creatures a human-like quality and the stars included Tracey, a depressed female gorilla and a hippopotamus calf who complains about the cold weather, the cramped quality of its enclosure and the lack of freedom. Creature Comforts was the brainchild of animator Nick Park and although he had won the highest accolade in his industry, his best work was yet to come.
Instead of resting on his laurels after winning an Oscar, Park set to work on creating his most expressive characters yet. Called Wallace & Gromit, the former is a bald British mad inventor with a love of cheese whilst the latter is an intelligent but silent dog. The duo first starred in the 1989 BBC short A Grand Day Out but shot to superstardom four years later when their 30-minute film The Wrong Trousers won an Oscar.
The film was directed by Park and introduced a cute but cunning penguin called Feathers McGraw who quickly became a fan-favorite. Posing as a lodger, Feathers takes control of Wallace’s remote-control techno-trousers to get him to steal a diamond from the city museum while he is asleep.
The film is famed for its slapstick humor with the penguin disguising itself at one point as a chicken by donning a red rubber glove on his head. The adventure culminates in a high speed chase which is widely regarded as one of the most ingenious sequences of stop-motion animation ever created as it features Gromit pursuing the penguin atop a model train laying fresh rails with his paws a blur as it races forward.
Only in Hollywood could lightning strike twice and in 1995 Park won another Oscar for his next Wallace & Gromit film, A Close Shave. It put Aardman on the radar of movie giant DreamWorks Animation which partnered with it on a string of movies. DreamWorks co-financed and distributed Flushed Away, Aardman’s first computer-animated movie, and Chicken Run which featured the voice of Mel Gibson and became the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time with takings of $224.9 million according to Box Office Mojo.
Producing stop motion movies is painstaking work as the animators have to make minute movements to the characters before shooting each frame. Each second of footage comprises 24 frames meaning that 1,440 separate shots are required just for a minute of screen time.
This explains why Wallace and Gromit were absent for a decade before Park directed their next outing in October 2005 – The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. At 85 minutes long it was Wallace and Gromit’s first-ever feature film and remained number one at the worldwide box office for three weeks in a row. It ended up grossing $192.7 million giving it the second-highest takings in history for a stop-motion animated film.
A parody of classic monster movies and Hammer Horror films, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit sees Wallace and Gromit launching the Anti-Pesto pest control company which takes on an infestation of rabbits before an annual Giant Vegetable Competition. They soon find out that a burly bunny is actually to blame and in an attempt to stop it, Wallace’s personality accidentally becomes switched with it turning the inventor into the were-rabbit.
By now, A Listers were queuing up to voice Wallace & Gromit characters with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit featuring Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes. Its extended length enabled it to run for the Best Animated Feature Film and it took top honors at the 2006 Academy Awards giving Wallace & Gromit a hat trick of Oscars. In turn, this gave Aardman confidence that there was still appeal in claymation rather than the computer animation that DreamWorks was famous for and the two parted ways in 2007.
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit took a lot out of Aardman with Wallace’s spooky transformation scene alone taking an entire year to film according to Park. After that exertion it’s perhaps no surprise that Aardman’s next production was far shorter though it still took three years to make.
Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death was a 29-minute short that debuted on ABC1 in Australia on December 3, 2008 before premiering on the United Kingdom’s BBC One network on Christmas Day. With a peak average audience of 14.3 million it didn’t just attract the highest viewers of any programme in the U.K. on Christmas Day, it was the most-watched programme of the year.
A series of further feature films followed including The Pirates! Band of Misfits and 2023 sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. Although they were critically-acclaimed they didn’t have the pulling power of Wallace & Gromit. Mindful of the duo’s legacy, Aardman didn’t want to rush into another production and its first family remained on hiatus. Until now.
In 2021 Aardman gave the green light to a new Wallace & Gromit feature film, originally entitled A Tall Tale. Along the way, its name was changed to Vengeance Most Fowl and after months of build-up it premiered on the closing day of the AFI Fest on October 27, 2024 at the historic Chinese Theatre in Hollywood followed by a limited theatrical release.
Picking up after the events of The Wrong Trousers, Vengeance Most Fowl brings back Feathers McGraw who had supposedly been imprisoned in a zoo for stealing the diamond in the previous film. From his cell, the pilfering penguin takes remote control of a robotic gnome developed by Wallace and hatches a daring escape plan followed by another botched attempt to get his flippers on the diamond.
Vengeance Most Fowl premiered on BBC One on Christmas Day last year to an audience of 9.38 million viewers making it the second-most-watched broadcast in the U.K. since 2022, after the Christmas special of sitcom Gavin & Stacey which was broadcast on the same day. The film was released on Netflix on Friday and has had unanimous praise earning it a perfect 100% score from critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
It gives Aardman another crack at adding to its silverware as Vengeance Most Fowl is up for a Golden Globe tonight and is hotly-tipped to be a frontrunner in the Best Animated Feature category at this year’s Academy Awards.
Aardman’s relationship with Netflix stretches far beyond distribution as it was integral to the production of the film. This is revealed in the latest earnings statement for the Aardman subsidiary responsible for producing Vengeance Most Fowl.
Called Working At Gnome limited, in a nod to the movie’s robotic star and the pandemic restrictions in place when the film was green lit, the earnings statement says “the production of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is being funded by a combination of pre-agreed licensing arrangements, TV tax credits and bank finance which was secured in February 2024.”
The finance is a $6.9 million (£5.4 million) loan from historic British bank Coutts & Company which incurs interest at 1.5% above the base rate. The TV tax credits come in the form of a reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money that studios spend on production in the U.K. Then comes the licensing arrangements.
The earnings statement shows a sum of $19.4 million (£15.2 million) under the category of accruals and deferred income which refers to money a company receives for goods or services that haven’t yet been delivered to the customer. It’s an upfront payment and below the $19.4 million sum, the earnings statement explains that “amounts received from the licensee are secured on the rights to the production until release of the production. Netflix Worldwide Entertainment LLC holds a fixed and floating charge over the company’s assets.” In other words, Netflix – the licensee – covered part of the cost of the movie and had security over it until it was released by the studio on Friday.
The amount paid by the licensee is almost equivalent to the $19 million (£14.9 million) value of the work in progress which the earnings statement says “comprises the production cost of the film.” The earnings statement is dated December 31, 2023 which was ten months before Vengeance Most Fowl premiered so an increase in the cost is expected. This would put it roughly in line with the £19.1 million ($36.8 million at the time) costs and overheads of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit shown in the 2004 filings for Anti Pesto limited which produced the movie.
It’s not just a fraction of the cost of live action blockbusters but also computer-animated movies from major studios. Even a more minor picture such as 2011’s animated romantic comedy Gnomeo & Juliet cost $71.2 million (£43.2 million) to make according to filings by Disney which distributed it. Stop-motion animated movies are even cheaper to make as they don’t require any digital effects. Instead, they depend on a small number of dedicated employees.
Vengeance Most Fowl peaked at 106 employees whilst The Curse of the Were-Rabbit topped out at 126 in 2004 with their average pay coming to just $63,000 (£32,498). It may not sound like much but the employees of Aardman have an advantage over those of any other major motion picture studio – they own it.
That’s because the company’s founders Lord and Sproxton handed over control of its parent company, Aardman Holdings, to its employees in 2018 to protect its independence.
Its latest financial statements show that in the year-ending December 31, 2023 it had 417 employees who were paid a total of $27.8 million (£21.8 million) giving them an average salary of $67,000. Its highest-paid director received just $216,023 (£169,692) which is a world away from the total banked by heads of other studios such as the $31.6 million compensation package paid to Disney’s boss Bob Iger in 2023.
Overall, Aardman Holdings made a $3.4 million (£2.7 million) net loss on $34 million (£26.7 million) of revenue in 2023 but it didn’t dent the dedication of its staff one bit.
Vengeance Most Fowl reportedly required over 40 shooting units, 30 animators and 30 set dressers and the secret to their success is patience and persistence. Wallace has a different mouth for each phonetic sound, clay desks are artificially rusted and 60 versions of the gnome robot alone were created. All told it can take each animator as long as a week to capture just five seconds of film.
Their approach proves that if there is enough determination it is possible to produce a blockbuster on a shoestring of a budget. It has proven to be a dream ticket and as the financial risks of film-making increase, it sets a fine example for the rest of Hollywood to follow.
Read the full article here