The world’s only vegetarian vampire and an eyepatch-wearing, mystery-solving mouse are celebrated in a new exhibition that pays tribute to one of Britain’s most successful animation studios.

Count Duckula, who shunned meat after being resurrected with ketchup instead of blood, and Danger Mouse, the world’s greatest secret agent, are two of the stars of a new show exploring the work of Cosgrove Hall, an independent animation company based in Manchester.

In its heyday Cosgrove Hall was the biggest animation studio in Europe. Its programmes were shown all over the world, both original productions such as Danger Mouse, which ran for 161 episodes, plus remakes of Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men; Noddy and Postman Pat.

The exhibition, at the Waterside arts centre in Sale, Greater Manchester, marks the opening of the Cosgrove Hall archive. It has been saved from destruction with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant after languishing in an old pie factory in what is now Media City, the BBC’s Salford home.

Visitors are greeted by a human-sized model of Igor, Count Duckula’s butler, who could not hide his disgust at his boss’s plant-based diet. The show also includes models and props made for Wind in the Willows, another Cosgrove Hall hit from the 1980s. Gilt-framed miniature portraits of Toad of Toad Hall, which were hung in the childish toad’s grand residence, are on display along with one of his costumes - an Eskimo outfit, complete with tennis racquet snow shoes.

They were donated by Brian Cosgrove, who opened the studio in 1976 in Chorlton, south Manchester, with his illustrator friend, Mark Hall. The suburb provided the name for another of the pair’s best-loved stop-motion animations, Chorlton and the Wheelies.

The show reveals some of the tricks of the trade, such as putting the puppets on wheels because it made animation far easier. For the same reason, the show’s baddie, Fenella the Witch, did not walk but simply sank into the ground and regenerated elsewhere on set when she needed to move.

Cosgrove has also donated some of the many thousands of hand-drawn animation celluloids or “cels”, which he has been hoarding in his barn in Cheshire. For shows such as Danger Mouse, each second of animation required 12 subtly different frames, each drawn by hand on a transparent sheet of acetate.

It was a laborious but ultimately rewarding process, insists Cosgrove, who is 83 and still draws regularly as he tries to find a publisher for a series of illustrated children’s books.

“People thought animators must be mad. They came in at 9.30am and were often still there until 10pm, drawing the same characters over and over again, all day. Then they would come in the next day and do exactly the same all over again. The view was there must be a certain madness there.

“But if you’re an animator and you see those drawings filmed and coloured with a voice on, it pays you back for all that madness. Suddenly you’ve created something special, but it’s a strange profession,” he said ahead of the Waterside opening on Friday.

One of the exhibits is a cel of Penfold, Danger Mouse’s hamster sidekick, running away from danger. Perennially frightened Penfold, a useless crime fighter but loyal friend, was inadvertently based on Cosgrove’s brother, Dennis, then editor of the northern Sunday Express.

“Dennis was also bald and had thick, black rimmed glasses,” said Cosgrove, who made his brother a Penfold model to put on his desk, complete with a plaque saying “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”

Animation City presents: The Cosgrove Hall Films exhibition opens on 20 October and runs until 17 February 2018 at Waterside, Sale, M33 7ZF