{"id":717833,"date":"2026-06-21T18:45:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T18:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/717833\/"},"modified":"2026-06-21T18:45:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T18:45:08","slug":"aardman-talks-slate-including-mossy-bottom-set-lets-go-timmy-annecy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/717833\/","title":{"rendered":"Aardman Talks Slate Including Mossy Bottom-Set Let\u2019s Go Timmy!, Annecy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAardman<\/a> co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, the company\u2019s star director Nick Park and Executive Creative Director Sarah Cox hit the Annecy<\/a> International Animation Film Festival on Sunday for a masterclass celebrating the studio\u2019s 50th anniversary.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere were plenty of anecdotes but the 90-minute talk also looked to the present and future of the award-winning studio behind stop-motion box office break out Chicken Run; Oscar-winner Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and the Shaun The Sheep series among many beloved films and shows. <\/p>\n

\n\tCox took the opportunity to announce the BBC-commissioned stop-motion and 2D animated series Let\u2019s Go Timmy! set against the backdrop of Mossy Bottom.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 30 x 5 minutes episodes sees Bitzer the sheep dog tasked with getting Timmy and his two best friends, Yabba and Apricot, to Mossy Bottom School safe and on time each morning against the odds, with the group regularly side-tracked on route. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe series is directed by Merlin Crossingham and Daniel Bins and produced by Stephanie Miller with Lucy Pryke, the Commissioning Executive\u00a0for the BBC.<\/p>\n

\n\tCox also revealed new production The Almost (Untold) Story Of Danger Delilah<\/a>, adapted from Once Upon an Alphabet by Oliver Jeffers.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019re coming towards the end of our development phase\u2026 we\u2019re working very excitingly with an Irish illustrator and writer, Oliver Jeffers, taking some of his characters from his alphabet stories,\u201d said Cox.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe said Lord, Aardman director \u00c5sa Lukander and Senior Development Executive James Higginson had created \u201ca whole new story\u201d from the book and its characters.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe script is by Pete. It\u2019s about Danger Delilah, a girl who realises her world\u2019s starting to disappear and then that she is a character in someone else\u2019s story that they\u2019re forgetting about\u2026 So she has to literally seize the narrative and rewrite her own story. We\u2019ve just finished a phase of development, so we\u2019ll be ready to start pitching it soon,\u201d said Cox.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn other project updates, Cox was joined on stage by Phil Rynda, Director of Original Animation at The Pok\u00e9mon Company International, to talk about their previously announced joint project Pok\u00e9mon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch\u2019d & Pichu and reveal never-before-seen footage of the protagonists.<\/p>\n

\n\tRynda also revealed that the adventure will unfold in Pok\u00e9mon\u2019s Galar region, which\u00a0shares many geographical similarities with the real-world of the UK.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Misadventures of Sirfetch\u2019d & Pichu is a comedy adventure series. And it\u2019s incredible. The team at Aardman has really brought it to life. It\u2019s set in the region of Galar, so if you know the games, it\u2019s featured in our sword and shield games. And the coolest thing about the show is that it\u2019s a Pokemon<\/a> story told from the perspective of Pokemon through the Aardman lens and it\u2019s just a dream come true,\u201d said Rynda.<\/p>\n

\n\tEarlier in the masterclass, Lord and Sproxton recounted how they had first met as 12-year-olds at school.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen we were about 16, we started animating for fun. And then we were in the right place at the right time, and we were lucky, \u00a0we got to have a piece of our work shown on British TV,\u201d said Sproxton referring to a series of simple 2D animations about a clumsy wannabe superhero called Aardman.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBecause when we were 16, we thought that an aardvark was a very funny name for an animal, we took the Aard and the man of Superman made a superhero that we called Aardman.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen the BBC asked who they should make out the payment cheque to, the pair replied Aardman Productions and the name stuck.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a wide-ranging talk, the pair looked at their early foray into clay figures with children\u2019s TV character Morph, which put the company the map, as well as their experimentation with animation for adults with their dark 1986 short Babylon.<\/p>\n

\n\tSproxton talked about the role Channel 4 played in bolstering UK animation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cChannel 4 came on air in 1982 with a remit to make very, very different television. And one of the things they did was commission animated films outside the children\u2019s audience, so adult films.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother development at the time had been connecting with Park, who had reached out to them while a student at the National Film and Television School, and was working on his graduation film which would become Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt that point, he\u2019d shot about six minutes of it\u2026 the deal we did was Nick would come and work with us to help us on Babylon and we would then help on the graduation film,\u201d recounted Sproxton.<\/p>\n

\n\tLord added: \u201cWhen we saw Nick, his early work, we thought, \u2018Wow, this guy\u2019s good. You know, he could do well. Then he came to Aardman and in about a year he was like a superstar because he\u2019s a very effective guy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aardman co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, the company\u2019s star director Nick Park and Executive Creative Director Sarah…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":717834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[309205,207650,274996,88,309206,206,5260,309207,309208],"class_list":["post-717833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-aardman","tag-annecy","tag-annecy-international-animation-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-lets-go-timmy","tag-movies","tag-pokemon","tag-the-almost-untold-story-of-danger-delilah","tag-the-misadventures-of-sirfetchu2019d-pichu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}