Children love play dough. And so it’s no surprise that the Aardman studio’s claymation films have become huge hits with audiences, from the Wallace and Gromit shorts to television and merchandising successes such as Shaun the Sheep.
But now the film business is having unexpected problems, and they have nothing to do with the fact that a film flopped. As the British Telegraph reports, Newclay Products, the company that has long supplied Aardman with a special plasticine called Newplast, has gone out of business.
It might not seem like a big deal at first glance, but the clay that Aardman has been using for a long time is what gives the films their special look. The news of the company’s closure was such a shock to the studio that they bought out the last remnants of Newplast.
Now they have – no joke! – only enough dough for one more film, namely the new “Wallace & Gromit” film planned for next year.
“Wallace & Gromit” will definitely sound different
For fans of the small films that have been delighting cineastes and their offspring since 1989, there is already a downer (at least in the British original): when the film hits cinemas, Peter Sallis will be the voice of the crazy inventor and cheese lover Wallace will no longer be there. Sallis died in 2017 and was last heard in the short film “On Life and Bread” in 2008.
The feature-length versions of “Wallace & Gromit” are generally not under a good star. In 2005, there was a major fire in the warehouses of the Aardman studios in Bristol, just at the premiere of the first cinema adventure (“Wallace & Gromit – The Hunt for the Giant Rabbit”). The studio archive was completely destroyed. All props from the short films and also those from “Chicken Run”, which became a real animated film blockbuster in 2000, fell victim to the fire.
Aardman was founded in the 1970s. But it only became a successful company when Nick Park joined in 1985. He provided the first exclamation mark when the studio supported the music video for “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel in 1986 with his clay animations and caused a stir in the industry. Then work began on “Wallace and Gromit” – and Aardman made film history that was rewarded with several Oscars.
If they had produced a few fewer “Shaun the Sheep” films…May Aardman get the right dough for the future.