Immersive exhibitions have become a cultural staple, transforming iconic subjects like Vincent Van Gogh, the moon landings, and David Bowie into floor-to-ceiling electronic spectacles. Now, Aardman Animations—the studio behind beloved classics like Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep—has joined the trend at London’s Lightroom. While the exhibition offers a vibrant celebration of the company’s work, it often feels caught between a documentary-style retrospective and a grand, immersive installation, ultimately struggling to fully commit to either format. N othing is safe from the scourge of immersification. Behind-the-scenes insight and dazzling immersive renderings of all your wide-grinned, cheeky northern favourites, it moves between documentary storytelling. So beloved by so many people, and it makes a pretty convincing argument for why Aardman is so important.
The show details the company’s origin story, tracing how Peter Lord and David Sproxton began experimenting with clay in suburban Surrey. It highlights their eventual collaboration with Nick Park and the rise of their studio from Woking to international acclaim. Visitors are guided through the creative process, from the initial creation of Morph to the meticulous techniques used to animate puppets. The experience includes behind-the-scenes glimpses of animators acting out scenes for reference and the specific efforts to make clay mouths form the “eeee” sound for cheese, all set against a backdrop of cinematic highlights. Before joining forces with Nick Park and setting in motion a series of events that would take them from Woking to the stars, we get to hear about how Peter Lord and David Sproxton met in suburban Surrey and started messing around with clay.
A clear strength of the exhibition is its appreciation for the tactile nature of claymation. Early in the show, a clip from the 1989 film A Grand Day Out displays every thumbprint and smudge on the clay. As director Lucy Izzard notes in a voiceover, “I think people still crave imperfection,” a sentiment that perfectly captures why the studio’s work resonates so deeply in an increasingly digital world. This handcrafted aesthetic is powerful, though it occasionally clashes with the high-tech, projection-mapped environment surrounding it. Every finger print and smudge, at this huge scale you see every lump and bump in the clay.
The technical implementation at Lightroom is a mixed success. The side screens effectively place viewers inside iconic settings—such as Shaun the Sheep’s barn, Gromit’s cardboard box, or the recording studio during vocal sessions. However, the experience feels somewhat disjointed. It does not fully leverage the potential of the venue, missing opportunities to be bolder or more playful with the immersive medium. While moments like seeing the video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer projected on such a massive scale are undeniably joyful, the show lacks the cohesive, crowd-pleasing momentum of Lightroom’s previous Prehistoric Planet exhibition. Imperfect, homely aesthetic rub up awkwardly against the technological wizardry of immersive cinema, does that hand-made.
To gauge the impact of the display, the reviewer visited with four-year-old Solomon, an avid fan of Shaun the Sheep. His reaction highlighted a fundamental structural flaw: “When is the movie starting? This is just ads,” he remarked halfway through. The presentation often feels less like an immersive journey and more like a lengthy promotional reel for the studio. When informed the experience was intended as a documentary, the young viewer was left unimpressed, suggesting the narrative lacks the focus required to captivate children or the depth needed to truly satisfy adults. More impatient this time, almost pleading. “This is it,” I say. “It’s sort of a documentary, he’s right – the whole thing just feels like an advert for Aardman. “When is the movie starting?” he asks again. It’s something incredibly human in an age when things feel so amazingly non-human so much of the time.
Ultimately, the exhibition places spectacle over storytelling. It appears the organizers asked how to present their history in an “immersive-ish” way rather than how to craft a truly immersive experience from the ground up. While the show does not diminish Aardman’s stellar reputation or the charm of their previous work, it serves as a modest addition to their legacy rather than a landmark achievement. It is a visually interesting display, yet one that remains a bit hard to follow and ultimately feels like an incomplete experiment in digital storytelling.
