Aardman’s 50th anniversary Lightroom exhibition invites you into Wallace & Gromit’s living room
We chatted with the co-founders of the iconic animation studio at the launch of a new 360-degree behind-the-scenes experience in London’s King’s Cross.
2026 marks the 50th anniversary of Aardman Animations, and the Bristol-based stop-motion specialists that gave the world Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run have rightly been making the most of the occasion all year long. Londoners have already been treated to a (still ongoing) exhibition at the Young V&A, as well as an orchestral tribute to the studio’s beloved claymation creations earlier in the year, but the celebrations aren’t finished just yet.
Open now until 4th January, King’s Cross’s Lightroom is inviting you into Aardman’s meticulously handmade worlds with Larger Than Life, an immersive 50-minute journey through the studio's first five decades. Previous Lightroom exhibitions have transformed the storied works of Hockney and David Bowie into towering 360-degree experiences, and for its latest project, the unique venue’s multidisciplinary production team was granted access to Aardman’s archives as it set out to tell the story of a true national treasure.
Exactly how it was going to go about doing that is what appealed to Aardman co-founders and lifelong friends Sir David Sproxton and Sir Peter Lord, both of whom were recently awarded with knighthoods. Both had enjoyed Lightroom’s inaugural exhibition, a collaborative effort with the late David Hockney, and were excited to see how Aardman’s creations would lend themselves to the unique format, which aims to make you feel like you’re an active participant as opposed to a mere observer.
David Sproxton and Peter Lord
“One of the things we were keen on doing was making sure that the audience felt at some point like they were in the studio,” Sproxton tells Shortlist.
"The Lightroom team wanted to do a potted history of the early days and have that timeline running through it, and then we interweave a lot of other stuff. I think they’ve put it all together in a really interesting way. It’s been a bit like a stage show, in that it doesn't fully come together until right at the end.”
A stop-motion history lesson
Aardman has been professionally and painstakingly animating lumps of clay since 1976, but Larger Than Life begins by taking us even further back to the early days of stop-motion, as King Kong and Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts fill every inch of Lightroom’s walls. In enjoyably non-linear fashion, we then bounce between Aardman’s different eras, from the school friends who cut their teeth making various short films before making their big breakthrough with Morph, to the wonderfully British zoo mockumentary Creature Comforts, and of course Nick Park introducing us to Lancashire’s biggest cheese fanatics.
We also learn about how Park and Lord pitched Chicken Run, or ‘The Great Escape with chickens,’ to a delighted Steven Spielberg, while Aardman’s artists, animators and set designers regularly chime in to explain how this ludicrously intricate art form really works. A lot of it is stuff that Aardman enthusiasts will have seen and heard before, but it’s the Lightroom setting that thrillingly brings it all to life.
At one point the original storyboard for the famous train chase scene in The Wrong Trousers wraps around the entire room while the finished sequence plays underneath it. And in the box-hiding scene from the same film, where Gromit resourcefully observes the master criminal Feathers McGraw through a cutout for his eyes, the unused walls of the canvas appear as the other sides of the cardboard box, so it feels like you’re in there with him. If there’s anything to criticise, it’s that a lot of the time there’s so much to look at you can’t help but feel you’re missing out on something without the privilege of having eyes on the back of your head.
Accessible art
The show is also an unabashed love letter to the uniquely handmade nature of stop-frame animation, with concept art and in-house photography of set designers fiddling with their handiwork in dark rooms getting as much attention from the projectors as the finished films we all recognise. Lord and Sproxton might oversee one of the most prestigious animation houses on the planet, but you get the sense that they’ve lost none of their childlike passion for an art form they’ve been messing around with since they were teenagers. And Aardman is always keen to inspire others to embark on a similar journey.
“It is very accessible, and we’re keen to remind people of that,” Lord says.
“When you see the finished result — including with our work — it maybe is quite daunting, so it’s important to show, as I think this exhibition does, that part of the process is actually quite simple. You can make it hellishly complicated, but the essence of it is simple.”
“With an iPhone and a tripod you can make something happen,” Sproxton adds.
The pair believe their very human craft is thriving too, even in a world where people are increasingly able to simply instruct a piece of software to make a film for them. Sproxton reminds us that the likes of Guillermo Del Toro, whose stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio wowed in 2022, has waxed lyrical about the power of the medium. The auteur filmmaker is also on record saying he eventually wants to exclusively make animated movies. Sproxton also namechecks the Coraline studio Laika, often called America’s answer to Aardman, and which is about to release its sixth stop-motion feature film, Wildwood.
100 years of Aardman?
Despite how absurdly time-consuming it is — a few seconds of stop-motion footage can take days to animate — Sproxton thinks the singular way in which the form marries music, art, visuals and sculpture means its appeal will never wane.
“So many people want to be part of it, which is what’s really interesting,” he explains.
“I think it is the handcrafted, handmade nature of what we do that makes people think, ‘I can have a crack at that. I’ve got some ideas.’ In many ways I think our job is already done as there’s so much enthusiasm for stop-frame these days.”
Larger Than Life definitely isn’t going to extinguish any of that fervor. Aardman is nothing if not a film studio for all the family, and as the kids enjoy Morph hopping between Lightroom’s four enormous walls, and slapstick Shaun the Sheep sequences made especially for the new experience, the rest of us will marvel at the fittingly playful way in which it’s all been put together. This still remarkably humble studio has brought so much fun to screens big and small in its first 50 years, and Lightroom’s exhibition plonks you right into the middle of those films and studios in some joyously inventive ways.
And luckily for us, it doesn’t sound like the story of Aardman is anywhere close to being complete either. While its co-founders have enjoyed a reflective year, they’re keen not to rest on their laurels.
“There will be whole new strands, which come from creators, from writers and directors that have a vision, and we depend on that,” Lord tells us.
“Nick’s vision and sensibility was a massive step forward for us, but there are young people coming along with different ideas too. When Aardman turns 100 we’ll still have Wallace and Gromit, but there will be lots of other things before then as well.”
Larger Than Life: Starring Wallace & Gromit, Shaun and More is at Lightroom until 4th January
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