Last month The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) announced an exciting 3 year research and industry collaboration which aims to discover whether or not animation can help improve the mental health literacy of young people.

The project partners are the University of Nottingham, Loughborough University and LSE, Aardman, the Mental Health Foundation, and also Dr Dominique Thompson of Buzz Consulting.

One of the major innovations in the project will be the authentic involvement of young people in every part of the project from the co-creation of the animated content to the marketing and distribution strategy, with all aspects of the research and critically as key contributors to both the Senior Leadership Team and the Advisory Board.

Work on recruiting young people to work with Aardman is about to start, with the animation and app being created next year. We hope to launch the content in Autumn 2020 at which point the major research part of the project will start to take place, with the final results and evaluation being published by April 2022.