Creature comforts team help charity

12:03am Friday 4th July 2008

A charity is challenging negative assumptions about disability using a new set of animated characters created by the Wallace and Gromit team.

Creature Discomforts, which confronts public perceptions of disabled people, relationships and sex, is based on the plasticine characters created by Aardman Animations for their original Creature Comforts series.

The six new characters are being used for the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity's six week campaign. They are based on the unscripted voices of young disabled people talking about the issues that affect their lives such as sex and relationships, education and bullying.

The campaign opens with a mouse with a physical impairment saying: "Some people think because you have a disability you should be with someone with a disability... It doesn't always work like that."

An elephant steps into the frame and kisses the mouse on the head as she says: "You can't help who you fall in love with."

The animation cuts to a field full of baby rabbits, with a giggling female rabbit in a wheelchair saying: "Well, they think that if you're disabled you can't have a love life... That's not true though. I can have sex!"

Issy Bulmer, 22, a wheelchair user from Hitchin, Hertfordshire, voices Roxy the Rabbit. She became engaged in January to her boyfriend of eight months, who is known as "Beaney".

Ms Bulmer said: "When I'm out with Beaney I don't notice people looking at us because I use a wheelchair, but we have walked past people and I think I've heard them comment about that. We just ignore them."

The Aardman team has created another four characters for the charity's campaign including a blind chameleon, an owl and a shrimp using wheelchairs and a hearing-impaired Cheshire cat.

From next Wednesday and over the summer the characters will appear in adverts on ITV, online and at bus stops.

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