Is Aardman overdoing claymation ?

No, but I am not talking about CGI.

I thought many shots without character (or character movement) could have been shot real-time, but on closer examination most of them featured claymation bits , thus had to be stop-motion.
Besides, clay models probably don't handle well any form of shaking around.

That said some shots do feature motion blur, but I just can't figure out if it is real or fake.

"You think it's really all that much easier to do CGI? "

This message comes around 6 years too late.. but better late than never, right?

First of all, what do you think the acronym "CGI" means? It comes from the words "Computer Graphics Integrated".

Shouldn't your question, then, more logically be something like: "Do you think it's much easier to do ICG?"

Unless you meant movies completely made with computers, but then, the letter "I" wouldn't even be used or needed, because the computer graphics are not really INTEGRATED (into a camera-shot-footage, which is what it means), but form all visuals completely.

Why doesn't anyone use the more logical word, "rendered"? Why is it always "CGI"? It's like people have lost and forgotten the meanings of acronyms, and just use them recklessly. How many times has anyone, who uses the acronym "LOL", for example, ACTUALLY laughed out loud before using it?

As to how easy it is to do rendered movies;

I'd say it's easier, and although it is also time-consuming work, and can be tedious in its own way, it's not as patience-requiring, as you can progress faster, and actually do more things per day. You can also change camera angles, lighting, do test-renders and test and tweak the animations more easily, but with real-world limitations, you can't easily get -exactly- the kind of shot you want, or test different variations without losing a lot of time, film, and work. Like, if you want to do a different swing of the left arm, or twist the body instead of straight walk, you can make such a change pretty easily and quickly in the world of computers. But in claymation stop-motion, you'd have to probably spend DAYS just to test how it would look, or at least a lot longer.

Besides, once all the modeling, lighting, texturing, animating and all that is done, all you have to do is click "render" and let the computer (more like hundreds or thousands of computers) do the final rendering (which might still take a really long time, but at least it won't require the humans to do much).

In stop-motion animation, you have to film every single frame by yourself, and if something is amiss or messed up, you have to re-shoot that frame.

Also, making things look like they are flowing or slowly dripping, like water, mustard, marmelade or something, is said to be really a nuisance in stop-motion (probably exactly because they refuse to do it in a continuous shot) and make it look good. With a computer, it's considerably easier, and quicker to do.

The point is, with computers, you don't have to film each frame separately, you can focus on the animation (and the other aspects) and test all kinds of stuff before the final render. With stop-motion, you can't do that - it's got to be more tedious to have to physically film every single friggin' frame of a movie that has almost 100 000 frames. That's a hundred thousand - that is, if they use a 12 fps framerate (which is half of the normal movie framerate for practical reasons - I think it'd be insane to do 24, that would make it almost 200 000 frames, if the movie is two hours long).

In any case, that's an _ENORMOUS_ amount of frames .. which is easier, film every single frame individually, or letting the computer render each frame?

In MANY ways, doing rendered movies _IS_ easier.

Not easy, but easier.

The difficulty comes from having to create everything from scratch, and not being able to use real-world faculties, like terrain, real-world-lights, and such effects - the 'artists' have to create every single model, every single light, every single texture, every single object, no matter how insignificant, by themselves.

They have to create forces, like 'gravity' and they have to devise methods to create 'realistic motion' (though here the stop-motion might also have a lot of difficulty, but at least they have physical models to move physically), like motion-capture and all.

Both are a huge amount of work and trouble, but I'd estimate that stop-motion is more tedious and in many ways more difficult, although in some small ways, perhaps easier (they never have to worry whether a glowing object is reflected properly or if there's enough radiosity-layers to make it look good - the real world already offers ready-made radiosity-effect, perfect mirrors for everything, and even glints, that are hard to render with certain packages - though I guess that's why they create their own ones).

FLushed away still had a very similar clay like feel to it, like wallace and grommit

They did it CGI because you cant get plastercine modls wet and still animate, plus water is far to fluid to work in stop motion

Flushed Away had many of the right ingredients but for me lacked something due to the CGI. It was a problem for me with most of the CGI animations.

No contest - stick to claymation.

he did it all stop motion to keep it uniform. the movies benefit from the hard work and would and it would effect the qaulity if corners were cut. besides cgi is way over used in modern films

You can't overdo Claymation, it's way too cool. CGI however...