15 years after being rejected, Aussie animator lands gig at dream studio

It took this Australian animator 15 years to make it to their dream studio Ever since they were young, Australian animator Sammy Lewis knew they were destined for a career in claymation. "It goes way back to when I was about six. A family friend gave me a book on how to make plasticine creatures and I was just obsessed," Lewis tells ABC News. "For most of my childhood, I was making little plasticine animals and leaving them around the place." So, for Lewis, when they graduated with an animation degree at Griffith Film School in Brisbane and went on their first European holiday, it just made sense to drop into their dream workplace — legendary British claymation studio Aardman Animations. "I had my showreel on DVD; that was the style of the time. I detoured the trip to go all the way on a bus to Bristol," Lewis says. "I got to the reception, handed them my DVD and they were like, 'Please go away. You can't just turn up to an active studio. You need to properly apply through the website'." Disheartened but not deterred, young Lewis snapped a photo of themselves below the Aardman sign. Fifteen years later Lewis recreated the photo, this time returning to Aardman not as a wishful student but as an animator on the studio's latest feature film Shaun The Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom. "I'm a bit happier in one of them," Lewis laughs. For the kids Over the past 50 years, Aardman has been pumping out children's classics such as Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit — all lovingly rendered in painstaking claymation stop motion. Following on from 2019's Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, which scored an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature, Beast of Mossy Bottom returns to Shaun's farm for a horror-adjacent adventure involving overzealous hair-growing potions and a very unwitting farmer. For Lewis, the toughest thing about working on the feature was the commute to work. "I was in a bit of a dream state of getting to work at Aardman, and everything was kind of magical, even the difficult things. "It was so inspiring to be around so many talented people, animators who've forgotten more than I'll ever learn. There's animators who are still at the studio whose first job was the original Chicken Run," they say. "And they're all very lovely and happy to share their knowledge." Stop motion as a longform medium has become an increasing rarity due to the long production time and heavy human investment needed to bring the creations to life, especially in a post-generative AI world. In 2024, Aardman announced it was cutting 20 jobs from the 400-plus strong workforce after posting a $US720,000 loss for the year. Beast of Mossy Bottom is the first Aardman project to make it to cinemas since the downsizing, after 2024's Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl was released straight to streaming. A far cry from bouncing fruit or AI slop, Beast of Mossy Bottom is bursting with signs of human life — right down to the visible fingerprints on the colourful characters. Lewis hopes the movie can carry the stop-motion torch for future generations. "Going forward, for obvious reasons, I think, handmade things and tactile mediums are just going to be so important. There's just a special kind of magic about things that you just know that they have been made by people," Lewis says. "Sometimes that doesn't even come down to the artist; it's all the people with the money making those decisions. I don't know how we get them to care about stop motion or hand-drawn animation again." Don't dream it, be it Due to the enormous logistical challenge of putting together a stop-motion feature, Lewis only saw the Beast of Mossy Bottom in all its glory at a recent screening for friends and family. "I hadn't seen any of the final music, or the final editing. When you're working on it, you do get to see the whole film, but it's all in rough cut, storyboard sort of animatic form," they say. There was one part Lewis was particularly excited by — their name in the credits. "I had some pretty amazing impostor syndrome at the start of production. So, to see my name in the credits is kind of like, 'Yeah, you did it'." After their adventure in Mossy Bottom, Lewis is now preparing to move from the UK back to Australia to find their next project and reconnect with local animator communities. It's the same advice they would give any young Australian who is looking to follow in their footsteps. "Find your people was probably the first big step out of uni. It can be such an isolating time if you're just doing everything by yourself," Lewis says. "I graduated, worked my sports retail job for almost a whole year,and then was like, wait, this isn't what I wanted. That motivated me to move interstate and find other stop-motion animators. Once I did that, I think we all worked on music videos and silly things. It's just good having your people around you." Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is in cinemas now.