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

VICKY SHAW

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 charity unveiled another six Aardman characters last November for a previous campaign.

The new 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".

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