Aardman co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, the company’s star director and Executive Creative Director Sarah Cox hit the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on Sunday for a masterclass celebrating the studio’s 50th anniversary.
There were plenty of anecdotes but the 90-minute talk also looked to the present and future of the award-winning studio behind stop-motion box office break out Chicken Run; Oscar-winner Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and the Shaun The Sheep series among many beloved films and shows.
Cox took the opportunity to announce the BBC-commissioned stop-motion and 2D animated series Let’s Go Timmy! set against the backdrop of Mossy Bottom.
The 30 x 5 minutes episodes sees Bitzer the sheep dog tasked with getting Timmy and his two best friends, Yabba and Apricot, to Mossy Bottom School safe and on time each morning against the odds, with the group regularly side-tracked on route.
The series is directed by Merlin Crossingham and Daniel Bins and produced by Stephanie Miller with Lucy Pryke, the Commissioning Executive for the BBC.
Cox also revealed new production The Almost (Untold) Story Of Danger Delilah, adapted from Once Upon an Alphabet by Oliver Jeffers.
“We’re coming towards the end of our development phase… we’re working very excitingly with an Irish illustrator and writer, Oliver Jeffers, taking some of his characters from his alphabet stories,” said Cox.
She said Lord, Aardman director Åsa Lukander, Senior Development Executive James Higginson had created “a whole new story” from the book and its characters.
“The script is by Pete. It’s about Danger Delilah, a girl who realises her world’s starting to disappear and then that she is a character in someone else’s story that they’re forgetting about… So she has to literally seize the narrative and rewrite her own story. We’ve just finished a phase of development, so we’ll be ready to start pitching it soon,” said Cox.
In other project updates, Cox was joined on stage by Phil Rynda, Director of Original Animation at The Pokémon Company Internationa,l to talk about their previously announced joint project Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu and reveal never-before-seen footage of the protagonists.
Rynda also revealed that the adventure will unfold Pokémon’s Galar region, which shares many geographical similarities with the real-world of the UK.
