There is something quietly radical about an animation studio marking its 50th anniversary by giving its most precious objects away. Aardman didn't commission a coffee-table book or open a permanent museum — they rang Propstore, catalogued 200-plus screen-used puppets, and let the public have them. The message is either very generous or very confident: we can make more. The auction ran on a Thursday afternoon in London, and the lots covered five decades of work with unusual fidelity. Early Plasticine figures of Morph and his orange companion Chas — made by Aardman co-founder Peter Lord, accompanied by his own handwritten care instructions — opened the bidding and immediately established the room's temperature. They sold for £3,780. The handwritten note is probably worth as much as the clay. The centrepiece lots were the Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) figures: Wallace in his knitted green tank top, brown trousers, and resin teeth; Gromit on all fours over a fully jointed metal armature. The catalogue descriptions are where the auction house earns its money — 'He has a skeleton, just like every salt-of-the-earth lad, it's just that his happens to be made of metal' is the kind of copy that makes you want to bid on a character you've known since childhood. Feathers McGraw in a nun's habit — lot 219 — came with an in-universe reminder that yes, that is clearly just an innocent nun out for a pleasure cruise. Beyond the marquee names, the auction showed genuine curatorial range. Nick Park-signed Wrong Trousers storyboards fetched almost £4,000. A 9cm clay rabbit from The Curse of the Were-Rabbit — barely bigger than a thumb — went for nearly £10,000. Dry stone walls and a gate from the Shaun the Sheep television series, complete with adhesive remnants from set placement, were available for those whose budgets couldn't stretch to a principal puppet. The adhesive remnants are listed as a feature, not a flaw. That's the right call. The highest single price of the evening wasn't a puppet at all: lunch for six with Peter Lord in Bristol sold for more than £11,000. Which tells you something interesting about what fans are actually buying — not just the object, but proximity to the making of it. Aardman director of attractions Ngaio Harding-Hill described the auction as an 'unprecedented opportunity,' and for once that phrase is accurate rather than promotional. These are not licensed replicas or limited-edition collectibles — they are the actual armature-and-silicone bodies that animators moved frame by frame, hands on, for weeks of production time. The catalogue's warning about extreme temperatures and special packaging is a reminder that ownership carries responsibility: these things are fragile precisely because they were made to be touched thousands of times. Proceeds go to talent development, including bursaries at the Aardman Academy. That's the detail that makes the whole event coherent: the studio is converting its past into someone else's future. The puppets leave the archive; the money trains the people who will fill it back up. Fifty years in, Aardman appears to understand that the craft is the institution, not the objects.
