Morph transforms into fashion icon on Esquire's front cover
Only a couple of weeks after the death of his creator Tony Hart, stop motion animation favourite Morph has made it onto the front cover of Esquire magazine in a tribute to his 30th anniversary.
As part of this celebration, the character is dressed in specially made designer clothes from Burberry, Gucci and Prada.
He appears in the magazine’s fashion pages as well as on a limited edition front cover.
Bristol based animation company Aardman Animations teamed up with the magazine’s fashion department to help create the images.
Peter Lord, Aardman's co-founder, sketched out the scenes for Morph and his mischievous sidekick Chaz, before animators, sculptors, model-and prop-makers embarked on a painstaking eight-week process to create the images.
Morph the plasticine stop-motion character appeared with Tony Hart on several of his television programmes and was produced for the BBC by Aardman Animations.
Peter Lord, co-founder of Aardman Animation, commented: “Tony Hart was a terrific artist – skilful, fluent and endlessly inventive. What an inspiring, inspirational career he had in TV - effortlessly encouraging young people to express themselves in every sort of visual medium. In person, he was amazingly modest about his talent and his achievements; and that TV manner – gentlemanly, kindly, and polite - was absolutely genuine and a reflection of the man."
Lord continued: “I must say the Esquire shoot was a hoot. The joke is that Morph’s wardrobe – which is approximately one-twelfth scale, was almost certainly worth twice as much as my wardrobe. Morph is really tiny - only about 12 or 13 centimetres tall. I couldn’t imagine how you could make clothes so tiny and then fit them around Morph’s body – which isn’t exactly slim – and still have them look good, but the whole team succeeded triumphantly.”