Wallace and Gromit

Nick Park with figures of Wallace and Gromit

Wallace and Gromit are the main characters in a series of four British animated short films, a series of ten short-animated sequences, and a feature-length film by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. All the characters were made from moulded plasticine modelling clay on metal armatures, and filmed with stop motion clay animation. Wallace is an absent-minded inventor, cheese enthusiast (especially for Wensleydale cheese), and companion to the dog, Gromit, who appears to be rather more intelligent than his master. Wallace is voiced by veteran actor Peter Sallis; Gromit remains silent [he has no visible mouth], communicating only through facial expressions and body language.

Due to their popularity, the characters have been called positive international icons of modern British culture. BBC News has called them "some of the best-known and best-loved stars to come out of the UK."[1] Icons.org.uk has stated that they have done "more to improve the image of the English world-wide than any officially appointed ambassadors".[2]

Contents

Characters

Wallace

Voiced by Peter Sallis, Wallace can usually be found wearing a white shirt, brown wool trousers, green knitted pullover, and a red tie. He loves cheese, especially Wensleydale, and crackers. The thought of Lancashire hotpot keeps him going in a crisis. He enjoys a nice cup of tea or a drop of Bordeaux red for those special occasions. He reads the Morning Post, the Afternoon Post, and the Evening Post, and occasionally Ay-Up!, which is a parody on Hello! magazine.

Wallace is an inveterate inventor, creating elaborate contraptions that often do not work as intended. He is a self-proclaimed genius, evident from his exclamation when he discovers Hutch's borrowed skill, a talent for all things mechanical. Most of Wallace's inventions look not unlike the designs of Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg, and Nick Park has said of Wallace that all his inventions are designed around the principle of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Some of Wallace's contraptions actually are based on true inventions. For example, Wallace's method of getting up in the morning incorporates a bed that tips over to wake up its owner, an invention that was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 by Theophilus Carter, and is similar to a device sold in Japan that is used to ensure the sleeper awakens on time.

He has a kindly nature, and is perhaps a little over-optimistic. Nick Park, his creator (who created it in Bristol) says: "He's a very self-contained figure. A very homely sort who doesn't mind the odd adventure." He is loosely based on Nick Park's father, who Nick described in a radio interview as "an incurable tinkerer". He described one of his father's constructions, a combination beach hut and trailer, as having curtains in the windows, bookshelves on the walls, and full-sized furniture bolted to the floor.

In the first photo shown on "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit", it was revealed that once, when Gromit was little, Wallace had much more hair and a beard. On the photo that shows Gromit's Graduation at Dogwarts, he had lost his beard, but still had a little hair, in the form of little patches just above his ears. The reason behind Wallace's loss of hair is unknown. However, as shown in The Wrong Trousers, he still feels the need to use a hair-dryer.

Wallace has had two love interests. The first was Wendolene Ramsbottom which ended quickly when Wallace realized the sad fact that she was allergic to cheese. The second is Lady Tottington, whom Wallace fondly refers to as "Tottie"

Gromit

Gromit is a beagle who lives with Wallace. His birthday is 12 February.[3] Gromit graduated from "Dogwarts University" ('Dogwarts' being a pun on 'Hogwarts', the wizard school from the Harry Potter books) with a double first in Engineering for Dogs.[4] He likes knitting, reading the newspaper, and cooking. His prized possessions include his alarm clock, bone, brush, and a framed photo of himself with Wallace. He is also very handy with electronic equipment. Gromit's profiency with electronics may be an allusion to the origin of his name; a grommet is a ring (usually made of metal, rubber, or plastic) which is inserted through a hole made of another material to reinforce and/or shield the material. Nick Park picked this up from his brother, an electrician. Gromit even reads Electronics for Dogs.[5] He is very sensitive, intelligent, resourceful, and skilled at coping with Wallace's hare-brained gadgets. Gromit holds a genuine affection for his master and remains loyal to him, even at his own expense, or when Wallace's contraptions inevitably blow up in his face.

Since Gromit has no visible mouth (and possibly also because he's a dog) he cannot express himself with spoken words. However, his facial expressions and body language speak volumes. Many critics believe that Gromit's silence makes him the perfect straight man with a pantomime expressiveness that drew favourable comparisons to Buster Keaton.[6] He does at times make dog-like noises, such as a yelp. Nick Park says: "We are a nation of dog-lovers and so many people have said: 'My dog looks at me just like Gromit does!'" Gromit enjoys eating "KornFlakes" and reading many books, including The Republic, by Pluto (a nod to the Disney character of the same name and a pun on Plato); Crime and Punishment, by Fido Dogstoyevsky (a pun on Fyodor Dostoevsky); and a "how-to" guide entitled, Electronics for Dogs. He also listens to Bach, and solves puzzles with ease.

Sometimes, Gromit refuses to take (or simply ignores) Wallace's orders such as in A Close Shave and Shopper 13 wherein Wallace orders him to get rid of Shaun, but Gromit does not.

On 1 April 2007, HMV announced that Gromit would stand in for Nipper for a three month period, promoting children's DVDs in its UK stores.[7]

NASA has named one of its new prototype Mars explorer robots after Gromit. The other new prototype is named "K-9", after a robotic dog from Doctor Who.[8]

Location

While not overtly setting the series in any particular town, Nick Park had previously hinted that its milieu was inspired by thoughts of 1950s Wigan, reinforced by an A-Z Wigan being displayed on Wallace's Anti-Pesto van in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.[9] Closer examination of The Wrong Trousers by a fan revealed that, while looking for birthday cards, Gromit picks up a letter addressed to the fictional 62 West Wallaby Street, Wigan.[9] The address includes a postcode of WG7 7FU, though this does not match any street in Wigan, whose postcodes begin with the letters WN.[10]

Wallace's accent, however, voiced by Peter Sallis, comes from the Holme Valley of West Yorkshire.

Stop-motion technique

The Wallace and Gromit films were shot using the stop motion animation technique. After detailed storyboarding, and set and plasticine model construction, the film was shot one frame at a time, moving the models of the characters slightly between to give the impression of movement in the final film. In common with other animation techniques, the stop motion animation in Wallace and Gromit may duplicate frames if there is little motion, and in action scenes sometimes multiple exposures per frame are used to produce a faux motion blur. Because a second of film constitutes 24 separate frames, even a short half-hour film like A Close Shave takes a great deal of time to animate well. General quotes on the speed of animation of a Wallace and Gromit film put the filming rate at typically around 30 frames per day - i.e. just over one second of film photographed for each day of production. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a perfect example for how long this technique takes to make quality animation; it took five years to make.

Though painstaking and time-consuming, and, with the newer computer-generated imagery, no longer popularly used for feature film special effects as it was in 1933's King Kong or Ray Harryhausen's work, stop motion remains a much-loved style of animation. This is probably very much thanks to the global success of Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit shorts and other films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas in the 1990s.

As with Park's previous films, the special effects achieved within the limitations of the stop motion technique were quite pioneering and ambitious. In A Close Shave, for example, consider the soap suds in the window cleaning scene, and the projectile globs of porridge in Wallace's house. There was even an explosion in "The Auto Chef", part of the Cracking Contraptions shorts. Some effects (particularly fire, smoke, and floating bunnies) in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit proved impossible to do in stop motion and so were rendered on computer.

It is due to the time and effort required for even a single episode, that Park has consistently turned down requests for an ongoing television series.

Video games

A Wallace and Gromit interactive CD-ROM game from circa 1995, named W&G: Cracking Contraptions, has been released for the PC, containing mini games based on the three original animated shorts as well as brief video clips, wallpapers, screen savers, and sounds that could be assigned as system sounds.

In September 2003, Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo was released for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, Nintendo GameCube and Microsoft Windows. This separate story sees the duo take on Feathers McGraw (of The Wrong Trousers) again. Still obsessed with diamonds, he escapes from the penguin enclosure of West Wallaby Zoo, where he was "imprisoned" at the end of The Wrong Trousers, and takes over the entire zoo, kidnapping young animals and forcing their parents to work for him, helping him turn the zoo into a diamond mine.

Wallace and Gromit, meanwhile, have adopted one of the zoo's baby polar bears, named Archie. As they go to visit the zoo to celebrate his birthday, they find the zoo closed. A quick spot of inventing back at the house, and they prepare to embark on their latest adventure. Hiding inside a giant wooden penguin, a parody of the famous Trojan horse, they infiltrate the zoo, and set about rescuing the animals and undoing Feathers' work.

In 2005, a video game of The Curse of The Were-Rabbit was released for PlayStation 2, Xbox and Microsoft Windows, following the plot of the film as Wallace and Gromit work as vermin-catchers, protecting customers' vegetable gardens from rabbits, using a "BunGun".

Gameplay for both games involve players exclusively controlling Gromit, as Wallace functions as a helper non-player character, but in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, gameplay shifts between the two, and even includes two-player cooperative play.

Both games were developed by Frontier Developments with the assistance of Aardman, with Peter Sallis reprising his role as Wallace. Project Zoo was published by Bam! Entertainment, while The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was published by Konami.

In July 2008, developer Telltale Games announced a new series of episodic games based on the characters, called Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures.[11]

Comic

British publisher Titan Magazines started producing a monthly Wallace and Gromit comic after the debut of Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The characters still run Anti-Pesto, and both Shaun and Feathers McGraw have appeared in the comic.

A comic based on the spin-off series, Shaun the Sheep, is being published, also by Titan Magazines. The first issue was released on the 29th March 2007.

The Wallace and Gromit comic strip also appears in BeanoMAX. Nick Park guest edited the 70th birthday issue of The Beano weekly, and so this issue contained numerous Wallace & Gromit references.

Popular culture

Wallace and Gromit were used to promote a Harvey Nichols store that opened in Bristol (where Aardman is based) in 2008. The pictures show them, and Lady Tottington from The Curse of the Were-rabbit wearing designer clothes and items.[12]

See also

References

  1. ↑ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4295048.stm
  2. ↑ http://www.icons.org.uk/nom/nominations/wallacegromit
  3. ↑ In an early scene in The Wrong Trousers, Gromit notes the date on a monthly calendar that is unlabeled but contains 29 days.
  4. ↑ The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Wallace & Gromit: Annual 2007
  5. ↑ http://www.wallaceandgromit.com/characters/gromit.html
  6. ↑ Review of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in Variety.
  7. ↑ "Gromit steps into HMV logo role". BBC News (2007-04-01). Retrieved on 2007-10-31.
  8. ↑ David Perlman (2005-10-04). "NASA's new robots show their stuff: Gromit, K-9 have the smarts to travel on the moon, Mars", San Francisco Chronicle. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 "A cracking town, Gromit". Wigan Today (2005-11-16). Retrieved on 2007-10-31.
  10. ↑ "Royal Mail’s online Address finder:". Retrieved on 2008-03-05.
  11. ↑ 'Wallace & Gromit' to become episodic video game
  12. ↑ "Wallace given designer trousers", BBC News Online (2008-08-26). Retrieved on 2008-08-26. 

External links

Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit series
Short films
A Grand Day Out · The Wrong Trousers · A Close Shave · A Matter of Loaf and Death
Feature film
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Video games
Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo · Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit  · Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures
Other adventures
Cracking Contraptions · Shaun the Sheep · BBC One 'Circle' idents