A History of Clay Animation

July 10 -- Nick Park and Peter Lord’s latest creation is like a goose that laid a golden egg. Except the goose is actually a hen and it’s made of clay. Well, the egg is clay. But it’s becoming clear: These feats of clay are worth millions.

Chicken Run has become the first feature-length work of clay animation to fill movie theaters, grossing $17.5 million its first weekend and over $45 million in the two weeks since.

That’s a lot of Play-doh.

But the success begs the questions: Why hasn’t clay animation been tried more often? And why did two previous attempts at full-length clay features stall at the box office?

For one thing, clay does not fit the model of the Hollywood dream factory. In “traditional” animation, like Aladdin or Bugs Bunny cartoons, the images are painted on clear celluloid sheets, known as “cel” animation, one frame at a time. This type of animation can be broken down infinitely into tiny tasks: Thousands of workers crank out cels simultaneously, with the movie assembled by a director at the end.

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Stop-motion animation is closer to a handmade art form.“That’s why clay was marginalized,” says Michael Frierson, author of the 1994 book Clay Animation: American Highlights, 1908 to the Present. “Cel animation and the Hollywood cartoon didn’t become the dominant form because it’s better. Hollywood prefers it because it keeps costs down.

“It’s like an assembly line,” says Frierson of “traditional” cartoons. “But in clay, it’s not that at all. It’s one or two animators working in front of a camera.”

In the case of Chicken Run, the two animators are Lord, a founder of the very British Aardman Studios, and Park, who made good with his short Wallace and Gromit films for the BBC after being invited to join Aardman in 1985. Featuring Wallace, a cheese-loving inventor, and Gromit, the trusty dog that bears the brunt of his buffoonery, the film noir-ish Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995) were Oscar winners that built an audience — which is now showing up for Chicken Run.