Fire destroys Wallace and Gromit models 

A pre-dawn fire today in southwest England destroyed hundreds of clay model characters, props and sets used in the quintessentially British animated films Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run.
  
Aardman Animations officials said the fire destroyed one of their warehouses in Bristol just as they were basking in the success of the Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which topped weekend sales at the US box office.
  
However, the officials said all the material for the latest film was spared because it was either on display at an exhibition in Bristol or at the company's headquarters elsewhere in the city.
  
Aardman officials said the fire destroyed sets, props and models from the Wallace and Gromit Oscar-winning short films The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), as well as A Grand Day Out (1989).
  
It also claimed material from the 2000 film Chicken Run, the said.
  
Police and rescue officials said nobody was inside the warehouse when the blaze broke out around 5.30am (1430 GMT) and the cause of the fire was being investigated.
  
"About 30 years of Aardman history represented by props and models has gone up in smoke," said Aardman executive Kieran Argo.
  
He said items feared lost included many of the original models for Morph, Creature Comforts and the Wallace and Gromit films. Most of the items were stored in metal flight cases.
  
"One of the big things that's gone is the pie machine from the Chicken Run movie, which was one of the largest pieces of set we have kept," he said.
  
"It took months to research, develop and build at huge cost and was the centrepiece of many of our exhibitions over the years," said Argo, who is events and exhibitions manager.
  
Argo said another item that had been destroyed was the MTV music award for Peter Gabriel's 1986 hit Sledgehammer, which was made by the Aardman team.
  
Lucy Wendover, Aardman's marketing and publicity director, said the company's film negative archive was safe but the other losses were devastating.
  
"Those artefacts are irreplaceable. We get very emotionally linked to our films - they're all hand-crafted. All that stuff has gone," she said.
  
Arthur Sheriff, an Aardman spokesman, said: "Today was supposed to be a day of celebration, with the news that Wallace and Gromit had gone in at number one at the US box office but instead our whole history has been wiped out".
  
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit took in some $US16.1 million ($NZ23.1 million) on its North American debut, according to industry estimates yesterday.
  
Nick Park, the Oscar-winning creator of Wallace, an eccentric inventor and his sidekick dog Gromit, played down the fire's impact given that Pakistan and India had lost thousands of people in an earthquake over the weekend.
  
"Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn't a big deal," Park said.
  
Aardman's films use painstaking frame-by-frame stop-motion photography of hand-sculpted plasticine models.