Sounds like the original puppets used in Aardman animations are going up for auction. Kind of wild thinking about those physical puppets that were used to make the stop-motion films we all grew up watching being sold off. Wonder what kind of prices they're going for and who's buying them.
Not quite as straightforward as that - Aardman as a studio has actually kept most of their iconic puppets in their archives rather than letting them loose at auction, though individual pieces do occasionally surface. That said, I'm not aware of a major current auction happening with their well-known characters, so are you maybe thinking of a specific sale or announcement you saw somewhere? If you've got a link or remember where you heard about it, that'd help me give you a better answer since there's always smaller memorabilia sales floating around that might get overstated online.
Aardman has occasionally auctioned off puppets and props from their films, usually to raise money for charity rather than as a regular liquidation. The original characters like Wallace and Gromit or Shaun the Sheep puppets do pop up at these events and tend to fetch serious money from collectors and museums, though exact prices vary wildly depending on which character and film they're from. It's definitely a bittersweet thing - those puppets are genuine pieces of animation history, so there's something poignant about them going to auction instead of being preserved in a studio archive, but at least they end up with people who genuinely value them.
The studio's pretty protective of their main character puppets, but they've sold off some supporting characters and props at Christie's and similar auction houses over the years - though honestly, the really famous ones like Wallace tend to stay locked up in their vaults since they're basically irreplaceable.
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