All 10 Aardman Animated Films, Ranked

In an age where CGI animation reigns supreme, traditional 2D animation is all but dead in movie theaters, and we’re regularly subjected to photorealistic monstrosities from mega-corporations like Disney, a new film from Aardman Animations feels like an oasis in a desert. While they’ve of course dabbled with some CGI films, the Bristol-based studio has otherwise stayed committed to a style of filmmaking that feels handmade: quite literally. On the models of the Plasticine-based characters that populate an Aardman film, you can sometimes spot the fingerprints of the directors who painstakingly move them around to create the thrilling action and laugh-out loud comedy. With cinema increasingly becoming in danger of going AI-generated, it’s comforting to see a movie that’s so unambiguously made by humans.

Although they made their feature film debut in 2000 with the beloved “Chicken Run,” Aardman Animations goes all the way back to 1972, when Peter Lord and David Sproxton founded the company as a low-budget project that produced shorts for TV and animated sequences in music videos (most notably Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”) The studio came to prominence in the late ’80s when they hired young animator Nick Park, who released two shorts in 1989. The first was “Creature Comforts,” a short film about animals getting interviewed about their living conditions at a zoo that won the Animated Short Film Oscar. The second was “A Grand Day Out,” which introduced the lovable duo of Wallace and Gromit, still the company’s most successful creations. Two Oscars for shorts starring the duo followed, and suddenly Aardman had enough clout to co-produce a feature with Dreamworks Animation 28 years after their foundation.

Since “Chicken Run,” Aardman has bounced from American partner to American partner, going from a deal with Sony Pictures to a current run with Netflix. They’ve also gotten into making sequels of their most iconic films, including a “Chicken Run” follow-up, a new “Shaun the Sheep” movie, and, yes, more “Wallace & Gromit.” If that’s a worrying trend for a company that has always strived for a singular style, then luckily these films largely retain the trademarks that make Aardman movies special: The whimsical, extremely British humor, the cozy and inventively created worlds, and, yes, that gorgeous, unique Plasticine look that makes every Aardman film immediately identifiable.

With “Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” now on Netflix, IndieWire is taking a look at the charmers of Aardman’s past to see which one holds up the best. This list focuses on Aardman’s feature film output, and does not include any of the “Wallace and Gromit” shorts or the “Shaun the Sheep” television series. Read on for all 10 Aardman Animations films, ranked from worst to best.