Aardman marks its 50th anniversary by auctioning 220 original Wallace, Gromit and Feathers McGraw puppets

Aardman is opening its archive for the first time in its history, putting more than 220 original puppets and props up for auction to mark 50 years since the Bristol studio's founding. It is the first sale of its kind the studio has staged, and it reaches from its most recent feature back to the clay figures that launched it in the 1970s.

The sale is run with memorabilia specialist Propstore, and bidding is already open online, by absentee bid and by telephone. The live event that concludes the sale runs on September 24, and every one of the roughly 220 lots opens at just £100, about $135, putting the full catalog within reach of collectors well beyond major institutions.

The marquee lots come from Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the 2024 feature that returned the pair to screens. Three screen-matched, production-used puppets are up for sale: Wallace, Gromit, and the studio's recurring silent villain Feathers McGraw, offered complete with the red rubber glove he wears as his signature disguise.

These are not replicas or later casts. They are the physical figures that passed through animators' hands frame by painstaking frame during production, which is what separates a screen-used puppet from the licensed merchandise built afterward for retail.

The catalog then reaches back to Aardman's origins. Original clay Morph and Chas puppets, hand-built by co-founder Sir Peter Lord, represent the character who effectively started the studio's on-screen story when Morph first appeared in 1977 and who remains bound to the Aardman identity nearly 50 years later.

A Shaun the Sheep puppet from the forthcoming Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, due in 2026, bridges the two eras. Shaun himself debuted in the Academy Award winning short A Close Shave in 1995 before graduating to his own television series and feature films.

Propstore CEO Stephen Lane said the puppets hold a special place in the hearts of generations of fans, and that starting every lot at £100 lets collectors around the world own a piece of Aardman history. Money raised will be reinvested in talent development across the studio.

That reinvestment includes bursaries at the Aardman Academy and programs for emerging filmmakers, according to Ngaio Harding-Hill, Aardman's Director of Attractions and Live Experiences and Archive. Harding-Hill called the sale an unprecedented opportunity to own a part of the studio's 50-year history, and noted the collection includes an original Nick Park sketch made for the occasion.

Registration and the full catalog are handled through Propstore, and those who sign up are also entered into a giveaway for a Blue Teapot prop from the Shaun the Sheep television series, a smaller nod to the same archive being sold off lot by lot.

Aardman is the Bristol animation house behind the Wallace & Gromit shorts and features, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep and Morph, built over five decades on stop-motion clay and puppet animation rather than the computer-generated techniques most studios moved to. That handmade process is precisely what makes each puppet in this sale a singular object rather than one of many identical copies.

This auction is part of a run of charity and archive sales we have covered in our coverage of scene, where studios, marques and collectors turn objects with production or ownership history into fundraising. Rolex, for instance, sent four one-of-a-kind gem-set Cosmograph Daytonas to auction for charity, and marked 100 years of the Oyster case that changed watchmaking.

We have also tracked screen and celebrity provenance driving results well beyond a standard auction estimate, from the factory matte black Ferrari Enzo once ordered for Brunei's royal family to Michael Jordan's Ferrari 550 that inspired the Air Jordan XIV, listed for as much as $1.3 million. The Aardman sale applies the same logic at a far lower entry price.

Where those sales open on estimates in the hundreds of thousands or millions, Aardman's £100 opening bids are deliberately low, a structural choice rather than an accident of low demand given the studio's five decades of cultural reach. The gap between entry price and likely final hammer price is itself part of the story for bidders weighing where to spend.

Nearly 50 years separate Morph's 1977 debut from the 2024 release of Vengeance Most Fowl, and that stretch is what the auction is built to represent in a single catalog rather than a single lot. Pairing the earliest clay figure with the newest screen-used puppet gives bidders a rough map of the studio's whole history in one sale.

Aardman has not said what it expects the sale to raise in total, only that proceeds go toward bursaries and skills programs at its academy. With bidding open now and the live event closing the sale on September 24, the final figure, and the size of the fund it creates for emerging filmmakers, will not be known until the auction ends.