Visions: Everything to know about studio Aardman
Star Wars released the nine studios from around the world that will create Star Wars: Visions season two. I’m here to take a closer look at each studio and showcase their work.
Aardman is the company that I might just be the most excited about for the second season of Star Wars: Visions. They are a studio featuring so many movies I grew up with. They are best known for their stop-motion Claymation work being the creators of Wallace & Gromit and still hold the top prize of the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time, Chicken Run.
They’ve worked with major companies like Sony, Lionsgate, and Dreamworks to produce the Shaun the Sheep franchise, Flushed Away, and The Pirates! Band of Misfits. If you are an 80’s kid like me, you definitely saw their work in many of the Claymation shorts created for Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Aardman truly held a strong place in the market on Claymation up until recently when Studio Laika has been really giving them some stiff competition (rightfully so too, because Laika’s work is excellent).
All of this said, I highly doubt the Star Wars: Visions short we get from Aardman will be Claymation. That style of animation takes such an insanely long time to do. Though if anyone could pull it off, it would be Studio Aardman. It would really depend on how much time they had to get this project rolling.
I think the work we will see from Aardman would be on their 2D or 3D CGI side of the company. It would be a step in a new direction for the studio as they’re expanding more into these areas. One example is their Disney XD show, Counterfeit Cat, which is their first series using hand-drawn traditional animation. I don’t know much about Counterfeit Cat, but I do know about their CGI film Arthur Christmas. That movie has slowly risen over the years as a cult holiday classic, creeping more and more into people’s lists of favorite Christmas films.
Aardman has the accolades to prove their work too. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit won multiple awards from the BAFTA to the Academy Awards. Several of their films have nabbed coveted Annie Awards. And every one of their movies has been nominated at some point for a major award. As I mentioned until Laika came along, Aardman truly led the way for the stop-motion world for a long time.
With Magdalena Osinska directing the short, this has become my personal most anticipated episode in Star Wars: Visions season two. Will it be stop motion? Will it be 2D or 3D animation? We’ll just have to wait and see! Until then, check out a bit of Aardman’s work below.