Aardman pays tribute to Loyd Price, the animator and supervisor who trained its feature crews

On 16 October 2026 Aardman announced the death of Loyd Price, an animator, animation supervisor and teacher whose work at the Bristol studio spanned more than three decades. Co-founder Sir Peter Lord wrote the tribute. Animation World Network (20 October) and Stop Motion Magazine (19 October) followed with career summaries. According to Stop Motion Magazine, Price learned his craft at Cosgrove Hall. At Aardman he animated on commercials and on Nick Park's Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave (1995). He was an animator and animation supervisor on Chicken Run (2000), the studio's first feature. He was supervising animator on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), and his Gromit won the Visual Effects Society award for Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Motion Picture in February 2006. With Chris Sadler he co-directed the ten Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions shorts, which began appearing online in 2002.

The tribute dwells less on his shots than on the people he trained, and that is what makes his career worth recording here. In a 1997 AWN interview, Lord described a training scheme run with the University of the West of England. Ten students animated a simple puppet every day for four months under Price and also did life drawing and life modelling. Its purpose was to build the crew for the feature that became Chicken Run. In the tribute Lord calls Price the studio's "tutor in chief".

Price kept that role as the studio grew. AWN reported in 2005 that on The Curse of the Were-Rabbit he trained animators in the Wallace & Gromit style as they joined the production. In 2013 he co-led the 12-week Aardman and National Film and Television School Certificate in Character Animation in Bristol as Aardman's head of animation, and AWN reported in 2014 that Aardman hired five of the first course's graduates. In 2020 he helped develop the curriculum for the Aardman Academy's online Industry Training: Stop Motion 1. The Wiki's new page on training stop-motion animators uses this three-decade record as its main worked example.