BRITAIN: The talking polar bears, terrapins and jaguar from Creature Comforts have gone and Frank the Tortoise, who won fame as the face of a television advertising campaign, is missing. Wallace and Gromit's world has shrunk considerably after many of the wonderfully crafted sets they inhabited were reduced to ashes while manifold manifestations of the Plasticine character Morph have vanished forever.
A fire which yesterday swept through a Bristol warehouse containing figures, props, drawings and many other treasures created by the Oscar-winning animators Aardman wiped out much of the pioneering company's past, and with it, a chapter in modern British animation.
The cause of the warehouse blaze is being investigated.