Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends
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...