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In recent years, it has become a tradition for animated adaptations of beloved children’s books to grace our screens during the festive season. While this trend arguably began in the 1980s with Dianne Jackson’s adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman, more recent years have brought us several Julia Donaldson classics, as well as older favourites like Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea, both directed by Robin Shaw. This year, Shaw returned to the director’s chair for another Kerr festive adaptation, with the Lupus Films produced Mog’s Christmas, which has earned a nomination for this year’s Best British Short Animation award at the BAFTAs. Curious about the process of bringing cherished books to life, we sat down with Shaw to discuss the art of creating family-friendly films, the challenge of staying true to the original story,...

To celebrate the release of Ivor the Engine: The Complete Collection on DVD and Blu-ray from 20th November, we’re giving away a Blu-Ray Complete Collection!

The end of the 1950s found Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin feeling their way into a new and challenging world of stop-frame animation. Their first collaboration as Smallfilms brought us the utterly charming six-part story of how Ivor the Engine got the chance to fulfil his dream of singing in the choir of the Grumbly and District Choral Society.

Now, for the first time, all the series have been lovingly remastered and brought together in one definitive collection. Voiced, along with Postgate, by David Edwards, Olwen Griffiths and Anthony Jackson and accompanied by the beautifully evocative bassoon music of Vernon Elliott, we bring you Ivor the Engine. Peep-peep!

Ivor the Engine is the story of a (sometimes disobedient) small green locomotive who works...

To celebrate the release of The Clangers, available to own on Blu-Ray and DVD from 30th October, we are giving away Blu-Rays to 2 lucky winners!

Originally broadcast between 1969 and 1972 Clangers was made by Smallfilms the company set up by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin producing many other childhood classics including Bagpuss, Noggin the Nog and Ivor the Engine.

Enjoy all 26 episodes from Season 1 and 2, now fully restored and presented from high-definition masters.

Discover a small blue planet populated by pink beings known as Clangers, a green dragon who cultivates soup and orange monopods who emerge from a magician’s top hat. Wonderful and exotic creatures often visit, and are always very welcome, especially a chicken made of iron who lives on a nearby nest made of space junk.

Please note: This competition is open to UK residents only.

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The Small Print

This competition is open to UK residents only.

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We salute Terry Brain and Charlie Mills, creators of 1980s children’s stop-motion animated TV series, The Trap Door…

Somewhere in the dark and nasty regions where nobody goes stands an ancient castle. Deep within this dank and uninviting place lives Berk, overworked servant of The Thing Upstairs. But that’s nothing compared to the horrors that lurk beneath the trap door. For there is always something down there, in the dark, waiting to come out…

What was under the trap door? In 1986, a three inch stack of film reel cans forming a makeshift plinth for whatever Plasticine monster was due to spill out of it in that episode. Over the course of forty mini-episodes in the mid-eighties, a legion of skittering demons and tentacled beasts slithered off those reel cans and into the psychedelic polka-dotted castle dungeons where they caused havoc for servant Berk and his disembodied skull companion Boni.

Louisa Mellor Apr 26, 2017

Puns, movie references and nods to Aardman’s past abound in Wallace & Gromit: A Matter Of Loaf And Death…

Animator Nick Park’s fifth Wallace and Gromit film, A Matter Of Loaf And Death (named for the Powell & Pressburger 1946 fantasy romance A Matter Of Life And Death, the first of many such baking-related puns) became the most-watched television programme in the UK in 2008, attracting a Christmas day average audience of 14.4 million viewers. It saw 62 West Wallaby Street, Wigan, transformed into a granary, making Wallace the target of a “cereal killer” intent on ridding the world of bakers. Gromit, as ever, came to the rescue.

See related Why Alien: Isolation proves the Alien deserves another movie

We’ve scoured the half-hour short to unpack some of Aardman’s characteristic in-jokes and film references…

1. The name and look of Baker Bob, who meets an unfortunate end at the hands...

Awards also included the youngest-ever winner of a Bafta.

The Lego Movie won Best Feature Film at the Bafta Children’s Awards in London last night (Nov 23).

The Warner Bros. film, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, beat competition from Disney’s Frozen and Maleficent as well as Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon 2.

However, Frozen took the top film prize in the Bafta Kids’ vote, based on more than 200,000 votes from children aged 7-14.

The ceremony, held at London’s Roundhouse, also saw nine-year-old Cherry Campbell become the youngest Bafta winner ever, winning Best Performer for her title role in kids drama series Katie Morag.

The show, about a feisty young girl who lives on a Scottish island with her family, also won the award for Best Drama.

Campbell was seven when she started making Katie Morag, based on the books of Mairi Hedderwick.

For the first time, Cartoon Network...

Bagpuss and Mr Benn are among the classic children's TV characters that appear on a new stamp set.

Characters from 12 shows feature in the new series, including Postman Pat, Paddington Bear and Bob the Builder.

The stamps are part of the Royal Mail's celebration of 60 years of children's television, and have been released today (January 7).

Old favourites such as Dougal from the The Magic Roundabout and Andy Pandy also appear, along with current stars Peppa Pig and Shaun the Sheep.

The lineup is completed by Ivor the Engine, Great Uncle Bulgaria from The Wombles, and Windy Miller from Camberwick Green.

"For over 60 years, Britain's children's TV characters have brought cheer to generations of viewers," said Royal Mail Stamps' Andrew Hammond.

"It feels appropriate to celebrate all of these unforgettable characters on a set of very special stamps."

The Magic Roundabout celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2014, while Bagpuss turns 40.

Postman Pat...

Feature Louisa Mellor 15 Oct 2013 - 08:11

The Clangers are coming back to children's television with a brand new stop-motion series in 2015...

In the wake of those nine unseen-for-forty-five-years Doctor Who episodes reappearing, another sixties BBC classic is making its return to modern television. Clangers, which debuted on the Beeb in 1969, is being revived for a new series in 2015.

CBeebies and a group of international partners are co-producing the new series, announced to have a budget of £5 million. That'll buy you a lot of pink knitting wool.

CGI-phobics can rest assured, because the newly revived space mice-oids are to be rendered in old-fashioned stop-motion animation, with original co-creator Peter Firmin and Daniel Postgate (son of Firmin's late collaborator, Oliver Postgate) executive producing, working on design and writing storylines and scripts.

The puppet makers are to be Mackinnon and Saunders, the same company that worked on Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox,...

Bagpuss creator Oliver Postgate has passed away, aged 83. Postgate's other TV work included Noggin The Nog, Ivor The Engine and The Clangers. He died at a nursing home in Broadstairs, Kent on Monday. His shows were created by his own company Smallfilms, which he developed with puppeteer Peter Firmin. The duo began the company in a disused cowshed in Kent. Postgate famously narrated all his Smallfilms programmes (more)...