Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
This is the sort of news that can get your day off to a rotten start. I woke up a few minutes ago and checked the e-mail box, only to see dozens of e-mails, all with variations on the same name. “Aardman Fire!” “Wallace And Gromit Fire!” At first, I thought you guys had put together a number of similar entries for the contest we’re running, until I clicked on that first e-mail and followed the link to the BBC news site, where I learned that the warehouse where the entire history of Aardman, all the way back to Morph, one of their earliest characters, has burned.
Sure, they can try to put it in perspective and say, “Compared with other tragedies, this is no big deal,” but it is. One of the reasons that animation fans around the world adore Aardman is because of the handmade nature of their films, and their history. Each film represented a technical leap from the one before, and each time out, you could literally see the fingerprints of all the amazing artists involved. Because they built their characters and their sets, they were able to preserve them and display them in a way that would hopefully inspire younger generations to become involved in what is an increasingly rare form of the art. It’s one thing to see WALLACE & GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT in a theater. It would be another thing altogether to be able to walk through a museum exhibit of all the sets and characters so you can see the scale of a production like that.
This is a sad, sad day for the company, especially coming on the heels of their tremendous opening weekend triumph, and I wish everyone at Aardman as well as can be expected in light of this news. Our thoughts are with you today.
"Moriarty" out.
