Animal is Back! For Peperami’s latest commercial, Margate’s A+C Studios, alongside agency partners Fearless Union, have refreshed one of advertising’s most notorious characters following a lengthy hiatus from TV.
The production was undertaken at A+C’s studios with the in-house team collaborating with the agency to seamlessly blend stop-motion, CGI and live-action to achieve an updated but authentic return of the madcap character.
Partnering with globally renowned puppet artisans Mackinnon and Saunders meant the Animal’s reimagined character design retains its aesthetic while being modernised for 2024’s audiences.
The Peperami “Animal” sausage stick in Doc Martin’s hit tv screens in 1993 with the strapline “Peperami, it’s a bit of an animal” and originally voiced by comedian Ade Edmondson. It was animated in stop-motion until 2014 and then in CGI in 2015.
A+C founder Dan Richards said: “When the agency first called the studio about bringing back Peperami’s Animal, we jumped to bring such an iconic character back.
“We wanted to be as true to the likeness of Animal’s appearance as possible. We used traditional techniques along with 3D printing to create the puppet. We watched all of the original ads to create a set of rules for the character to be as authentic as we could to the original.”
Mark Campion at Fearless Union added: “It’s been a privilege to bring one of ad-lands most iconic characters back to our TV screens. ‘The Animal’ is such a nostalgic force that staying faithful to what makes him great, whilst also moving him along, has been a real journey.
“We had some oversized Doc Martins to fill – but the work displays our dedication to staying true to an unforgettable brand, while finding a way to speak to a contemporary British audience.”
The commercial will run across TV, VOD and across socials, highlighting Peperami’s snacks including Chicken Bites and Pizza Buns.
A&C animation was founded in 2007 by director Dan Richards in modest premises in his dad’s shed.
From there, Dan quickly grew the business and today, A+C is a leader in providing highly crafted, unique animated solutions to worldwide brands.
The studio has been based in the historic laundry building in St John’s Road, Margate, since the latter half of 2014 and is the birth place of an array of talking, moving characters from glasses of juice with faces and emotions, paper-crafted hens and a giant egg box and Lego characters.
Dan made his first stop motion animation – where puppets/characters/sets are handcrafted as opposed to using computer generated animation – when he was just 12 years old.
Some 10 years later he graduated from the prestigious Bristol School of Animation, going straight to work at Aardman Animations on the hit film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Soon after the project ended Dan decided to strike out on his own and A+C was born.
