Professor Stephen Hawking is giving this year's BBC Reith Lectures (an annual lecture series, usually by a prominent cultural figure), and to celebrate them, the BBC commissioned Aardman to make a film about the renowned physicist.

Inside His Head, which is available to view on the BBC website, imagines a journey inside Hawking's mind and combines clips of his distinctive robotic "voice" with some awesome animation, '80s disco-style synthesized music and scientfic diagrams.

Aardman director Will Studd said in a statement: "I wanted to create a stylized version of the graphics I grew up with in the '80s. I loved the kitsch futurism of the BBC's TV version of Hitchhikers Guide graphics, or the weird spacey covers of Omni magazine; I wanted to bring a bit of this back to explore Stephen's thoughts. For both films we built a soundtrack using '70s/'80s synthesizers to try and capture a sense of that retro futuristic feeling."

Fans of Hawking can also listen to his lectures, the first of which, on black holes, is on the BBC's site, accompanied by films of an artist drawing cartoon illustrations on a chalkboard.