Aardman is turning 50, and it's marking the occasion by letting collectors buy the actual puppets. The studio behind Wallace & Gromit has partnered with Propstore for a 50th Anniversary Live Auction running more than 220 lots, with the live sale concluding on September 24th in London.
Bidding opens at £100 on some lots, which is roughly $132. Prop auctions with this kind of pedigree normally start somewhere north of a used car, so that entry point is going to bring out people who have never bid on anything in their lives.
The headline pieces are screen-used puppets from Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the 2024 feature that brought back Feathers McGraw after 31 years. Wallace, Gromit, Feathers and Norbot are all in the sale. There's also a Shaun puppet from Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, which hasn't even reached cinemas yet.
The sale includes original clay Morph and Chas figures sculpted by Aardman co-founder Peter Lord, and Morph goes back to 1977, predating almost everything the studio is famous for.
Morph started as a small brown plasticine man who lived on Tony Hart's desk on the BBC's Take Hart, climbing out of a pencil pot to annoy the presenter. He predates Wallace by more than a decade and he's the reason a lot of British kids knew what stop-motion was before they knew the word for it.
Screen-used stop-motion puppets are a different kind of collectible from most film memorabilia. These are working objects. Animators handled them frame by frame for months, which means the wear is part of the artifact rather than damage to it, and the fingerprints pressed into the plasticine belong to whoever animated that shot.
Feathers McGraw is the one likely to draw the biggest bid. The silent penguin from The Wrong Trousers has spent three decades as the most menacing villain in British animation, and he manages it without a single line of dialogue or a change of expression, and Vengeance Most Fowl brought him back in 2024 to an audience that had been waiting since 1993.
Where the money will go is a little unusual… Rather than a third-party charity, proceeds fund Aardman's own talent pipeline: bursaries for the Aardman Academy, skills programmes, and opportunities for emerging animators. The studio went employee-owned in 2018, so this is staff selling their own history to train the people who come next.
There's a lot of Aardman about at the moment. The Beast of Mossy Bottom arrives September 18th through GKIDS in the States, directed by Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, and the studio recently landed a global Pokemon deal with Disney for a new stop-motion series.
Fifty years of fingerprints in plasticine, and you can own a set of them!
Which lot would you actually bid on?
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