Wallace & Gromit and Friends: The Magic of Aardman was announced on Thursday as the major 2017 Winter Masterpieces attraction at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It follows the David Bowie is… exhibition in 2015 and the DreamWorks Animation show in 2014, both major drawcards for the gallery at Federation Square in Melbourne.

The 300,000 visitors to the Bowie show helped make ACMI the most-visited moving image museum in the world, with more than 1.45 million visitors in 2014-15.

The Aardman exhibition was created by and first displayed at the Art Ludique Museum in Paris. It has also shown in Frankfurt. The Melbourne incarnation will be the first to feature exhibits from the studio's forthcoming feature Early Man, due for release in 2018.

The ACMI outing will feature 350 items, ranging from sketches and plasticine characters to full-scale sets, including the five-metre high ship from the 2012 feature film Pirates! Band of Misfits, the flying machine from Chicken Run, and Wallace & Gromit's vegetable garden, seen in its fullest glory in the Oscar-winning feature Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005.

It also features clips – including from the company's award-winning Creature Comforts series and Peter Gabriel's groundbreaking Sledgehammer music video from 1985 – and Nick Park's student sketchbook, containing the first drawings of Wallace and Gromit.

"The magic of the Aardman studios lies not only in their exceptional skill but in their ability to create so many characters that people of all ages love – funny, warm, playful, egotistical, generous and occasionally evil," said ACMI chief Katrina Sedgwick.

She added that the exhibition would showcase "the incredible technical processes" of the claymation outfit founded by Peter Lord and David Sproxton when they registered the name Aardman in 1972, while they were still students. The company became fully operational in 1976, when they relocated to Bristol, in the south-west of England, and created their first animated television character, Morph. Morph can still be seen today on children's channel ABC3, as can the later Aardman creation, Shaun the Sheep.

Sproxton, who will visit Australia with Lord to open the exhibition next June, said the showcase was a celebration of "the many artists and craftspeople that have contributed to the studio and its films over the decades".

"It has been a wonderful exhibition to put together, enabling us to dig deep into our archives and pull out work that only a few people have ever seen."

The Magic of Aardman opens at ACMI on June 29, 2017. Details: acmi.net.au

Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin