With their Rube Goldberg contraptions and quaint, cheese-heavy lifestyle, you wouldn't expect Wallace & Gromit to be at the forefront of AV tech. But a new exhibition casts them and the rest of the Aardman crew into an immersive, audio-visual extravaganza.
Prepare to see Shaun The Sheep, Morph and, of course, Feathers McGraw like never before.
Larger Than Life: The Aardman Story at the Lightroom in King's Cross is a fascinating look at the legendary animation studio and its considerable body of work over the last 50 years. And it's heavy on bespoke animation, including the iconic model train chase scene from the Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers.
The right fit
If you haven't been to the Lightroom before, you can read more about it here, but it's basically an immersive experience with projectors beaming footage onto the four walls and floor with the audience plonked in the middle of it.
The model train chase scene from The Wrong Trousers shows the venue's capabilities at their best, with Gromit in hot pursuit of villainous penguin Feathers McGraw, the former laying down track pieces mere millimetres in front of his train. Except instead of following the director's shots, the chase happens on the walls around us, the audience, with the rest of the walls adorned with alternative angles, storyboard stills, initial sketches and more.
It's a loving recreation of an iconic scene, one which was described by Danny Boyle as one of the greatest ever action sequences. Though if I have one criticism, it's that Lightroom's projectors can't quite keep up with Gromit's speed-laying-down of track pieces, his arms at times becoming a literal blur.
A joy
But that's nitpicking. The show is a joy, pure and simple. Which is fitting, given the immense admiration that Aardman's work attracts.
From the cabaret-style intro, through a brief history of stop-motion animation, to the studio's early successes on Vision On to global recognition via A Grand Day Out (seven years in the making) and the music video for Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, it captures the spirit and playfulness that the studio brings to every project.
Not that it's comprehensive. The music video for Nina Simone's My Baby Just Cares For Me is nowhere to be seen, which is a shame. Nor is it presented in chronological order. Rather, as with previous Lightroom shows, it's divided up into chapters ('Characters', 'Miniature Worlds' etc) with the whole show running on a continuous loop.
But it has more of a coherent beginning and end than the venue's previous shows, top and tailed respectively by the cabaret intro – featuring the studio's most famous characters pumped out of a machine that takes in balls of clay – and Morph closing the lid on the whole presentation (but not before pointing and laughing at the audience, as if we're tiny creatures placed there for his amusement in a neat reversal of the usual viewer-character dynamic).
While completists might be better served elsewhere, it is still full of great tidbits. I was interested to learn that the studio takes its name from an early character it created (an underwhelming superhero whose name is a pun on Aardman, "Hard Man"). And I couldn't help but snigger at Steven Spielberg's response when pitched Chicken Run (sold as The Great Escape with chickens): "The Great Escape is one of my all-time favourite movies, and I've got 300 chickens."
We also get a peek behind the scenes of the studio's plywood panels and kept-dark stages to witness the painstaking animation process first-hand. Younger visitors might find these sections a bit dull, but for those of us old enough to remember A Grand Day Out airing on TV in the late ’80s, it's fascinating.
According to the head of the Lightroom, the show was between two and four years in the making (no one quite knows exactly when they started talking to Aardman about creating it). And it shows: as with all Aardman productions, a lot of love has gone into it, and as the studio's considerable body of work proves, if you want to get it right, it's worth taking your time over these things.
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