Creating Wallace and Gromit

Nick Park started creating Wallace and Gromit in 1982. The first film was A Grand Day Out.

He came up with the name Gromit from his brother, an electrician. A grommet is a rubber device used to insulate wiring. He was originally going to be a cat, but once he found it was a lot easier to make dogs out of clay, Gromit became a dog.

Park had never written a script before, and his first version of A Grand Day Out would have been four hours long. Aardman took Park on and helped him cut down his ideas to make them better and makeable in a shorter amount of time. A Grand Day Out took seven years in total.

The next film, The Wrong Trousers, came out in 1993. The train chase in the film is something that they had never seen done before in stopframe animation, and none of them knew how to do it. They built a 20 ft long living room wall, 2 ft high. They fixed the camera to the train and filmed on a long shutter speed to make the background blurry.

In an interview with The Guardian, Park talks about once they made The Curse of the Were-Rabbit with Dreamworks: "We made The Curse of the Were-Rabbit with Dreamworks, and it was often a struggle to keep things as we wanted. They'd say: "Why do they have to have an Austin A35? Can't they have a pickup truck or something cool?" But I love it because it's not cool. We were going to call it The Great Vegetable Plot, but research showed that vegetables were a negative with American kids, and they didn't know a plot is a place where you plant vegetables."

Co-founder of Aardman, Peter Lord, says, "Nick manages to convey in animation what Wallace and Gromit are thinking – and that's something most animators can't do. The lack of sentiment is the most charming thing about them: their affection is never saccharine, never obvious, just kind of real. I love their Jeeves and Wooster thing: the master being such a dope and failing to properly value his lower-status companion – I won't say servant – who is so much more intelligent."

Nick Park ends his interview by saying, "Digital animation is getting better all the time – they can make it look so much like clay now – but for me, there will always be a difference."

Changes in Claymation

I assume that pretty much everyone grew up with the animations of Wallace and Gromit, but it could just be me. Whether or not this is true however, the style of Aardman animation and claymation has some how found a way into each of our lives, whether it be Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit, or Flushed Away. Some of the Aardman group have even worked on animations used for Pee Wee's Playhouse and most famously crossed over with DreamWorks.

Chicken Run

Wallace and Gromit

Flushed Away

I bring Aardman Animation Studios up because they have created a new stop-motion feature called The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

Now, Aardman studios is known for their use of stop-motion clay animation, but they still incorporate CG additions. Flushed Away was Aardman's first completely computer-animated movie, yet the designers maintained the look of the classic stop-motion clay animation. The video below shows the process of stop-motion that Aardman uses for such films like Wallace and Gromit and now The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

In a few different interviews with Peter Lord and Peter Baynham (Director of The Pirates! and the co-writer of Arthur Christmas, another mainly CGI feature), they discuss the plots and animation techniques used to create the two movies. In addition, this article from Online Animation Magazine previews both movies.

I find it very interesting how an animation studio incorporates traditional animation techniques, like stop motion, along with computer generated animation in order to reach their end goal. Using both techniques they can incorporate the best of both animation worlds. Plus, in an age where most all of the younger audience is used to computer animation I find it quite endearing that the directors are making a movie that will attract the older audience nostalgic for stop-motion.