Gromit Unleashed

Nick Park inspects Julie Vernon's mosaic Gromit.

For a few years now, Wild in Art has been holding charity events in which plain white sculptures of animals are decorated by various artists and spread across a city. The events include elephants in Norwich, penguins in Liverpool, toads in Hull, sheep in Skipton... and now, with the collaboration of Aardman, Gromits in Bristol.

Gromit Unleashed started on the first of July and will run until the eighth of September. During that time, eighty sculptures of Gromit - all made using the same base, but each with an overall paint-job given by an individual artist or art team - will be spread across Aardman's home city of Bristol, with proceeds going to the local children's hospital.

Comedian Harry Hill was one of the celebrity artists involved, contributing a bald Gromit.

A range of celebrities got in on the act, with the likes of Jools Holland, Joanna Lumley and Harry Hill providing their own takes on Gromit.

Pixar's contribution to the trail.

Other than the involvement of Aardman, there are several connections to animation and cartoons. Pixar contributed a Buzz Lightyear Gromit; Richard Williams painted a rainbow Gromit; the crew behind The Beano plastered their Gromit with a comic collage; Raymond Briggs combined Gromit with his immortal Snowman; Where's Wally? creator Martin Handford placed Gromit into those iconic red and white stripes; Gruffalo illustrator Axel Scheffler came up with the Grommalo; Simon Tofield, creator of Simon's Cat, doodled his feline star over Gromit; Quentin Blake brought his distinctive style to his sculpture; political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe coated Gromit with one of his trademark ink splashes; and graffiti artist Tom Deams and Zayn Malik of boy band One Direction provided unofficial takes on two DC Comics superheroes, turning their Gromits into Superman and the Green Lantern respectively.

Simon Tofield's Gromit

Finally, there were a few designs coming from within Aardman itself. amongst the Gromits was a traditional, unadorned version of the character credited simply to the Aardman studio. Richard Starzak, aka Richard Goleszowski, aka Golly, collaborated with artist Jane Kite to create a Trojan Gromit operated by Shaun the Sheep. Nick Park, meanwhile, came up with a design which incorporated both of his characters...

Eighties stop-motion music videos: Reet Petite and Barefootin'

Here are stills from two stop-motion music videos from the eighties: Giblets Animation's 1984 video for Jackie Wilson's Reet Petite and Aardman's 1987 video for Robert Parker's Barefootin'. Both songs were decades old by the time these videos were made, dating from 1957 and 1966 respectively.

The Number Ones of the Eighties blog has some interesting history on the Reet Petite video, relating how it originated as a personal project but ended up propelling the song into the charts two years after Wilson's death. Barefootin', meanwhile, is notable both for being an early work by Rex the Runt creator Richard Goleszowski and for containing what I believe to be the earliest Aardman in-joke - a spaceship baring a striking resemblance to the one flown by Wallace and Gromit (whose first film was still in development at the time and not released until two years later) appears towards the end.

What I find interesting about these videos is that they're both examples of animation for the sake of animation, particularly Reet Petite. Clearly, stop-motion still had a good deal of novelty value at the time, and a piece of animation devoted to the simple pleasures of putting a plasticine character through a series of transformations could still receive mainstream attention.