Larger Than Life review – Wallace, Gromit and the gang say cheeeese for hilarious Aardman origin story
Nothing is safe from the scourge of immersification. They’ve turned Gustav Klimt and Vincent Van Gogh into vast, projection-mapped digital environments; they’ve told the stories of the moon landings and the dinosaurs and David Bowie as floor-to-ceiling electronic spectacles; and now they’ve come for Aardman. For Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, our national treasures. Is nothing sacred?
The latest immersive cinematic experience at Lightroom is a big, eye-popping celebration of Aardman Animations, the company behind the world’s favourite claymation films and TV shows. It moves between documentary storytelling, behind-the-scenes insight and dazzling immersive renderings of all your wide-grinned, cheeky northern favourites.
We get to hear about how Peter Lord and David Sproxton met in suburban Surrey and started messing around with clay, 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 they first made Morph out of a ball of clay, how the animators hilariously act out all the scenes to camera themselves before moving over to puppets, how they make the mouths form the “eeee” sound of the word cheese, all interspersed with Shaun the Sheep doing a barn-based talent show and clips from their biggest cinematic triumphs.
And it makes a pretty convincing argument for why Aardman is so important, so beloved by so many people. Early on, it cuts to a clip from 1989’s A Grand Day Out, the first Wallace & Gromit film. At this huge scale you see every lump and bump in the clay, every finger print and smudge. It looks so real, so human. Director Lucy Izzard says in a voiceover: “I think people still crave imperfection,” and you think yes, that’s it, that’s why Aardman matters. It’s something incredibly human in an age when things feel so amazingly non-human so much of the time.
Does that hand-made, imperfect, homely aesthetic rub up awkwardly against the technological wizardry of immersive cinema? Sure does. But the bigger issue is that this experience doesn’t really know what it wants to be.
It ends up as half-documentary, half-clip show, becoming sort of neither in the process, and a bit hard to follow too. It doesn’t even take full advantage of Lightroom’s capabilities. It could be bolder, more fun, it could play with the immersive format a bit more.
One good use of the tech are the side screens, which make you feel like you are inside various environments: Shaun the Sheep’s barn, Gromit’s cardboard box as he spies on Feathers McGraw, behind the recording desk as actors do their vocal takes. But it’s not quite enough.
There’s some fun stuff here. It’s great seeing Creature Comforts recreated in living rooms and gardens, it’s nice to see all the concept art and storyboards come to life, it’s pretty joyful watching the amazing video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer at such an enormous scale. It just lacks the crowd-pleasing immersive thrills of Lightroom’s recent Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs.
As a jaded, tired contemporary art critic, I may not be the target audience, so I brought along someone called Solomon. What are his qualifications? Well, he’s four, and yesterday he went to the cinema to see the latest Shaun the Sheep movie, so you could say he’s something of a young cinephile. Also, his father (me) is a critic, so he is probably genetically predisposed to have opinions about this.
Halfway through, I ask what he thinks. He says: “When is the movie starting? This is just ads.” He’s right – the whole thing just feels like an advert for Aardman. “When is the movie starting?” he asks again, more impatient this time, almost pleading. “This is it,” I say. “It’s sort of a documentary.” He stares at me, uncomprehending, and then yawns. Ouch, he really is a critic.
It doesn’t really have enough for kids, and the storytelling isn’t strong enough for adults. It’s gimmick over narrative, as if they didn’t ask: “How can we make an amazing immersive experience?” but instead asked: “How can we tell our story in an immersive-ish way?” And those are two different propositions.
This show doesn’t tarnish Aardman’s stellar reputation, nor detract from all the amazing, quirky, quaint, funny work that they’ve done, but it doesn’t add a huge amount to it either. More of a rubber glove on the head than a crowning achievement.