To visit Aardman Animations’ studios is to travel back in time.
From the outside, there’s not much to look at. The home of Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run is an anonymous breeze-block building, Unit 1410, in the inappropriately named Aztec West business park on the outskirts of Bristol, an industrial city in southwest England.
Step inside, though, and you’re transported to a bucolic Britain of rolling hills and village greens, bumbling eccentrics and cute, clever farm animals. All of it is in miniature, and most of it made from plasticine.
To mark its 50th anniversary and showcase production on its latest stop-motion feature, the Halloween-themed Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, Aardman invited international journalists into its claymation sanctum. Around 30 animators worked across 40 tiny sets, painstakingly constructing a feature-length film frame by frame.
The tour ends with a lesson in sculpting Shaun — the silent ungulate star of Aardman’s hit preteen TV series and three features: Shaun the Sheep Movie, Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon and now The Beast of Mossy Bottom — from a few lumps of clay. The results, to put it mildly, aren’t camera-ready. A few, with their gouged eyes and elongated heads, might frighten a Tim Burton fan. But that, it seems, is sort of the point. At Aardman, the visible imprint of the human hand, the “thumbiness” of claymation, is the quality that distinguishes the studio’s work.
At a time when the animated film industry is threatened by corporate consolidation and the rise of AI, Aardman is betting its reliance on the human touch (albeit humans more talented than your average entertainment journalist) will prove a competitive edge.
Founded in 1976 by school friends Peter Lord and David Sproxton (now Sir Peter and Sir David — both were knighted earlier this year), Aardman is one of indie animation‘s great success stories. In 50 years of operation, the studio can point to its four Oscars, 18 BAFTAs and string of commercial hits as proof of concept. Nick Park’s Chicken Run, the studio’s first feature, grossed $230 million worldwide, a record for a stop-motion feature, only recently topped by Laika’s Coraline, following multiple re-releases for the latter. Park’s last feature, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl smashed a TV record in its U.K. release, becoming the BBC’s most-watched scripted show in two decades when it aired on Christmas Day in 2024 (Netflix released the film internationally).
Through it all, Aardman has remained independent of corporate investment or interference. The studio has successfully teamed up with European and U.S. backers on a project-by-project basis, rather than committing its future to a single backer. Dreamworks Animation Studios co-produced and released Chicken Run. Netflix backed the 2023 sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. France’s Studiocanal co-produces the Shaun the Sheep franchise as well as handling global sales. Lionsgate released the first Shaun the Sheep film in the U.S. Netflix handled Farmageddon, while GKids came on as the domestic distributor for The Beast of Mossy Bottom.
In 2018, Lord and Sproxton cemented Aardman’s independence by transferring the majority of the company’s shares into a trust held on behalf of its workforce, putting the studio beyond the reach of a conventional buyer. “It’s not a business to us, it’s everything,” Lord told THR at the time.
Employee ownership, however, has not insulated the studio from financial pressures. Its latest accounts, released last week, show a jump in revenue, up 8 percent to £20.4 million ($27 million) last year, but also a £1.1 million ($1.5 million) annual loss, which the company put down to production delays, the timing of major deals and challenging conditions in the children’s content market.
Aardman’s model remains a risky proposition. Stop-motion is labor-intensive, requiring armies of artists and technicians to produce footage at a fraction of the speed of conventional live-action filmmaking. The studio had an eight-month shoot for The Beast of Mossy Bottom, cracking out footage at the breakneck pace of nearly two seconds per day.
That painstaking process is central to the film’s appeal. But it also makes Aardman’s latest Shaun the Sheep adventure a useful test of how far the studio can push its craft while keeping production manageable.
The Beast of Mossy Bottom was directed by longtime franchise veterans Steve Cox and Matthew Walker — both of whom worked on the Shaun the Sheep TV series, with Cox helming the half-hour holiday special Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas — in their feature debut.
The story began as an idea for a half-hour Valentine’s Day special in which the Farmer, voiced by John Sparkes, went on a date and Shaun, voiced by Justin Fletcher, turned him into a monster. Writers Giles Pilbrow and Mark Burton moved the action to Halloween, and the project grew into an 80-minute feature.
When the Farmer destroys the flock’s pumpkin patch, Shaun turns mad scientist, concocting a growth potion to put things right. The experiment goes wrong, the Farmer disappears and a large, hairy creature begins roaming the woods around Mossingham. Nina Sosanya voices the local veterinarian, who discovers strange objects inside her animal patients and suspects Bigfoot is on the loose, while Bitzer sets out to find his missing master.
For Cox and Walker, the challenge was to introduce horror-film conventions without frightening the franchise’s youngest viewers. The film draws on 1980s supernatural comedies, including Back to the Future, Ghostbusters and The Addams Family, alongside classic monster movies and horror spoofs.
“We wanted a little bit of tension and a little bit of scariness, but not too much,” Walker told THR. “There were a few sequences where, in early versions, we went a bit too far and made it a bit too scary, so we had to dial them back.”
“Any time we had a tense moment, we would undercut it with some comedy so the audience could feel safe again and laugh,” he said.
An early home-invasion sequence, said Walker, was originally told entirely from the flock’s point of view, but proved too intense. The directors reworked it to cut between the sheep and the monster outside, using comic business to break the tension. A dramatic prologue involving thunder, lightning and ships at sea was also removed, although the ship survived.
But there are still plenty of Easter eggs for grown-up horror fans. The piercing strings of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho soundtrack play over a shower scene (before the directors cut to a shot of a sheep flossing). There’s a burger van called Cronenburgers and a pub named The Shine Inn. Feathers McGraw, the sinister penguin villain from the Wallace & Gromit films, also makes a Hitchcockian cameo.
The monster and its world also provide an opportunity to demonstrate the practical ingenuity behind Aardman’s films. For The Beast of Mossy Bottom, the studio built 285 puppets, including around 20 versions of Shaun. The Beast, the tallest puppet at around 15 inches, was built in 10 versions from specially dyed and stiffened faux fur to prevent the distracting surface shimmer known as “boiling,” sometimes visible in stop-motion animation.
The detail extends to the smallest props. Laboratory glassware was blown by hand by the scientific glassblower at Oxford University’s chemistry department. Shaun’s mad-scientist look includes singed hair, a hand-sewn lab coat with wired seams and rubber gloves with individually wired fingers.
That insistence on physical craftsmanship does not mean Aardman rejects technology. The studio draws a sharp line when it comes to the use of generative AI, but it is open to digital tools that improve production efficiency. On The Beast of Mossy Bottom, the team used Gaussian splatting, a 3D-capture technique, to accommodate more locations within the available studio space. The technology helped accelerate production without replacing the physical sets and puppets.
For a company facing rising costs and an uncertain market, the commitment to handmade production is both a creative principle and a business risk. As it moves into its second half-century, Aardman is looking to expand its characters and production capabilities without losing the qualities that set it apart.
At the Annecy animation film festival this year, the studio announced Let’s Go Timmy!, a BBC-commissioned preschool series set in Shaun the Sheep universe, that will combine stop-motion and 2D animation. It also unveiled The (Almost) Untold Story of Danger Delilah, an upcoming YA adaptation of Oliver Jeffers’ Once Upon an Alphabet that features a mixed-media aesthetic; and details of Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu, a collaboration with The Pokémon Company that, according to Pokémon director of original animation, Phil Rynda, will be “a Pokémon story told from the perspective of Pokémon through the Aardman lens.”
The challenge for Aardman is to make all the pieces work together: to build global partnerships and expand its production capabilities without sacrificing the creative control, employee ownership and handmade craft that have kept it independent for 50 years. At its home in that anonymous business park outside Bristol, the studio is still leaving its mark, one thumbprint at a time. That’s the whole point.
Shaun The Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is available for digital rental and purchase on all major platforms. GKids will release the film on Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 2027 through Radial Entertainment.