I skipped the weekday press preview of this swish exhibition dedicated to all things Aardman Animations so that I could take my kids a few days later. The funny thing is, they were almost the only children there: on its opening Saturday, the Young V&A’s Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends was sold out to what appeared to be around 95 percent child-free east London creative types.
It makes sense. Though the exhibition is nominally aimed at kids aged eight to 14, it’s important to remember that Aardman was founded in 1972, while its totemic animator Nick Park has been on board since 1985 and his first Wallace and Gromit film A Grand Day Out was released in 1989. In other words, Aardman has been part of most British adults’ lives for a lot longer than eight to 14 years.
The original models are fascinating, charming and surprisingly impressive.
I suspect that Aardman-stanning adults snapping up tickets far in advance will have skewed the opening weekend demographics, and that a higher proportion of little ones will end up attending as the run progresses, but there’s plenty in this exhibition for both kinds of visitor. Inside Aardman is a nice mix of nostalgic paraphernalia that will appeal to adults, and hands-on, how-to-make-your-own stop-motion film stuff that youngsters will get a kick out of.
As befits this most self-effacingly British of animation studios, Inside Aardman largely eschews both hagiography and biography. There’s no massive bigging up of Park or crowing over past triumphs, and there’s not a huge amount of contextualisation – for example, I had to explain to my kids who (or what?) Morph was.
But that’s fine: nobody is here because they require a history lesson. The original models are fascinating, charming and surprisingly impressive. From the gargantuan pirate ship from Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! to a series of versions of Wallace & Gromit’s Were-Rabbit that gradually strip it down to its robot skeleton, the models are substantially bigger than I expected. It’s just really cool – and maybe a little moving? – to have them right in front of you and to learn odd details, like the fact that the rivets on the spaceship from A Grand Day Out are painted-over lentils.
Beyond the very cool models, the other big thrust is that it’s actually genuinely quite evangelical about stop-motion animation, and much more committed to trying to explain Aardman’s processes than it is to trumpeting its successes. There’s lots of fun behind-the-scenes type stuff, like a lengthy video of Park amusingly voice-directing Tom Hiddleston. But the substance lies in carefully explaining how claymation works: even in the digital era, each Aardman animator only manages to produce six seconds of it a day, which is just delightful, really.
The obvious highlight for kids is the area where visitors can make their own little stop-motion films. If you’re visiting on a Saturday afternoon, you can expect to wait around a bit, but as it’s not really one for adults I found it blessedly easy to get one of the four spots here when we visited, due to the relative lack of children present. My kids were absolutely entranced by the chance to make a little film with toys, building it up frame by frame.
A sitting area with a big screen at the end lets you finally watch a few highlights of the Aardman back catalogue, which is always a pleasure (as is the opportunity to have a nice sit down).
But it’s a credit to the multigenerational appeal of this exhibition that my children were less bothered about joining the adults watching the old films, and more excited about downloading the (free) Aardman app and getting home to continue making their own little creations.
