Creature Discomforts

There are other ways to raise awareness about ASD. An excellent example is through animation. Aardman Animation paired up with Leonard Cheshire Disability to create a series of short animation to raise awareness about people with disabilities. Leonard Cheshire Disability is an organisation who helps people who have physical impairments and learning disabilities. They aspire to help everyone understand disability and combat discrimination against it. The organization supports thousands of people in the UK and works with disabled people in over fifty countries. (Leonard Cheshire Disability 2011) Aardman Animations are well known for their stop-motion animation. They have created a number of different animated productions over the years, such as “Chicken Run” (2000), “Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit” (2005). (Aardman, 2012) They also released a book called “Cracking Animation” in the year 2010, to help give young animators starting off a glimpse of what it is like to make a stop motion animation from scratch. “Creature Discomforts” is a series of short and sweet animations to help raise awareness about disability. It is a fun and unique approach to spread the word about disability and help people understand that these are people too.

“Abled bodied people need to learn…to think differently about what they say to [disabled people]” (Creature Discomforts 2012) 

These are real stories being told by real people. Aardman simply took these stories and created characters based on the sound of the voices they heard. The animations are humorous and relatable. What made this animation so effective was that these were real people telling their story.