Book Review: A Grand Success! by Peter Lord and David Sproxton

A Grand Success! The Aardman Journey, One Frame at a Time
by Peter Lord and David Sproxton (791.433 Lor)

I really wanted to love this book, considering how much I love the short and feature-length films put out by Aardman Animation. But, while I do still recommend this book, it ended up not being quite what I anticipated.

Aardman Animation is the company behind the Wallace & Gromit series of films, Chicken Run, Early Man, and the Shaun the Sheep series. They specialize in stop motion animation, an old-school form of animating figures by moving clay or plasticine figures a tiny amount and shooting a single frame of film. The artists of Aardman have collectively won several Academy Awards and other film industry honors for their work.

This novel tells the story of the company’s founders and how they first got into film-making, and how they initially founded Aardman back in the 1970s. The book then jumps back and forth, exploring the expansion of the company over the years, the various production deals they had with several other studios, both in Hollywood and in their home base of England, and descriptions of many of the artists who are associated with the company. The book spends a lot of time talking about the Aardman business model — the philosophies that the founders have about how Aardman should be run — in fact, a large chunk of the latter third of the book goes into this in great detail…which detracted from the information about their actual productions (which is what I was most interested in).

I definitely learned a lot about the company, and a few tidbits about the production of some of their iconic films and videos (they did the animation for the music video of “Sledgehammer”!). But much of the second half of the book was a bit dry and business-like and I ultimately ended up skipping past sections to get to the more interesting stuff. If you, as a reader and viewer, are interested in the minutiae of running a company in a smaller city in England, you may find it more interesting than I did.

All in all, an interesting book.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to view the films/TV-series Chicken Run, Early Man, Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep or Flushed Away, all by the Aardman Animation studio. They also have multiple YouTube channels available for viewing their work.]

[ publisher’s official A Grand Success! web page ] | [ official Aardman Animation web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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