Pull up a chair and let us introduce you to a little-known animation studio called Aardman Animations. Just kidding: this legendary British powerhouse has been treating us to incredibly successful and astonishingly funny stop-motion clay animation productions for many years now.

While Aardman Animations is probably best known for their series of shorter and longer films based on the Wallace and Gromit characters, their animated feature Chicken Run (Peter Lord & Nick Park, 2000) ranks as the highest-grossing stop-motion film in the history of forever. And Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Nick Park & Steve Box, 2005) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.

But what’s way more important than praise and money: Aardman has blessed us with some of the most visually and comically stunning animation of the last couple of decades. And our program Focus on Aardman should make that very loud and very clear.