Wallace and Gromit

"Gromit" redirects here. For metal, plastic or rubber rings, see Grommet.

Wallace and Gromit

Wallace & Gromit are the main characters in a series of three 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 wire frames, 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, communicating only through facial expressions and body language.

Characters

Wallace

Wallace can usually be found wearing a white shirt, brown wool trousers, green knitted pullover and a red tie. He loves cheese 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. 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 a real-life invention. 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 a certain wakeup time.

He has a kindly nature, and is perhaps a little over-optimistic. Nick Park, his creator 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.

Gromit

File:Meatabix.jpg

Gromit — the master spy; as depicted in "The Wrong Trousers"

Gromit is a dog who lives with Wallace. His birthday is February 12, and he graduated from "Dogwarts University". He likes knitting, reading the newspaper, his alarm clock, bone, brush and framed photo of himself with Wallace. He is also very handy with electronic equipment (a grommet is a piece of electrical wiring insulation, a term Nick Park picked up from his brother, an electrician), and is sensitive, intelligent and resourceful. 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.

Gromit doesn't express himself with spoken words, but his facial expressions and body language speak volumes. 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 pun on Plato and a nod to the canine Disney character Pluto);
• Crime and Punishment, by Fido Dogstoyevsky (a pun on Fyodor Dostoevsky);
• Men Are from Mars, Dogs Are from Pluto (a pun on Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus);
• Electronics for Dogs
• Grated Expectations (a pun on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens)
• Sheep

He also listens to Bach (a word play, since Bach and Bark are pronounced similarly in England) and solves puzzles with ease.

Location

From The Wrong Trousers : proof that Wallace and Gromit live in Wigan

Wallace lives at 62 West Wallaby Street, Wigan, Lancs [1]. In the short film The Wrong Trousers, the pile of letters Gromit picks up while looking for birthday cards even sports a postcode (WG7 7FU), although a check of the Royal Mail's Postcodes Online service [2] fails to find the corresponding West Wallaby Street address and Wigan postcodes begin with WN and not WG, although this could be a reference to Wallace and Gromits' names. In fact, WN7 is the postcode area for nearby Leigh.

Also, at the beginning of the feature-length film Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, when Wallace and Gromit are getting into their Anti-Pesto van, there is a shot of Wallace pressing the 'Start' button, and in this shot an 'A-Z Wigan' can be seen on the dashboard, further proof that the duo live in the town.

However, Wallace speaks with an accent from the Holme Valley of Yorkshire, being played by Peter Sallis. Also, in one of the alternative endings for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace and Gromit are seen driving to the Yorkshire border to release all of the captive rabbits.

Studio fire incident

On October 10, 2005, a fire at a storage building in Bristol owned by Aardman Animations destroyed most of the props and sets used in the animated films. Creator Nick Park released a statement that the original Wallace and Gromit figures were in his suitcase on a world tour with him at the time. Some other models survived as they were part of a travelling exhibition at the time. The sets for Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit were also spared. Other figures, however, such as Wallace and Gromit travelling in their sidecar, were lost. The films themselves are unharmed having been stored at a separate location. (BBC News: "Fire hits Wallace and Gromit sets").

Recent reports have discovered the cause of the fire was an electrical fault in a ground floor office. The faults were either due to a faulty CCTV system or a faulty water heater.

Films

Wallace and Gromit have appeared in three half-hour films, an ident campaign, a series of short webcast animations, and also appear in a full-length feature film that won the 2005 (US) Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Original shorts

The original half-hour shorts were:

• A Grand Day Out (1989), won BAFTA Best Animated Film, nominated for Academy Award for Best Short Film, Animated
• The Wrong Trousers (1993), won BAFTA Best Animated Film, won Academy Award for Best Short Film, Animated
• A Close Shave (1995), won BAFTA Best Animation Film, won Academy Award for Best Short Film, Animated

In addition, following the success of A Close Shave, the duo were used as BBC2's official Christmas campaign in 1995, appearing with the famous "2" in the main ident and several shorter versions for in between trailers.

The three shorts were released on a compliation DVD, entitled "3 Cracking Adventures" by the BBC in 2005.

Each short had approximately 35,000 frames in total.

Cracking Contraptions

A series of ten shorts (2½ minutes) Wallace and Gromit animations entitled Cracking Contraptions has appeared on the Internet and subsequently on a limited-edition VHS and region 2 DVD, as well as on the region 1 collection of Wallace and Gromit shorts as a special feature. Recently, the duo have also appeared alongside other bonus material in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. They were also broadcast on BBC One across the Christmas period in 2002. They were created to help Park's new team get experience with the characters and the techniques used as a sort of warm-up before they moved on to the film. Each episode features one of Wallace's new inventions and Gromit's sceptical reaction to it.

• "Shopper 13"
• "The Autochef"
• "A Christmas Cardomatic"
• "The Tellyscope"
• "The Snowmanotron"
• "The Bully Proof Vest"
• "The 525 Crackervac"
• "The Turbo Diner"
• "The Snoozatron"
• "The Soccamatic"

During "The Tellyscope" episode, Wallace's black-and-white television is on the wrong channel. The programme showing is called When Penguins Turn, suggesting it is a documentary about how Feathers McGraw turned evil. The music heard is Robert Farnon's "Jumping Bean", a famous piece of light music. For a brief frame, a spoof of Test Card F featuring Wallace and Shaun the Sheep can be seen. In addition, Wallace's preferred programme, the Cheese Files, seems to be a spoof of the intro to The X-Files.

Another episode, "Shopper 13", is of note for its references to Apollo 13, the Apollo Project, and space in general, in most of Wallace's lines:

• "Gromit, we have a problem!" ("Houston, we have a problem!")
• "It's almost due for re-entry! I can see him!"
• "It's just one small step!" (Neil Armstrong's famous quote, "One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.")
• "I knew he'd make it!"
• "The Edam is stranded!" ("The Eagle has landed.")
• "Gromit, we'll have to launch the probe!"

Shaun the Sheep puts in a re-appearance in "Shopper 13".

Feature film

Main article: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) won BAFTA Outstanding British Film and Oscar Best Animated Feature.

Shaun the Sheep

Main article: Shaun the Sheep

A spin-off based on Wallace and Gromit's friend, Shaun the Sheep, started in March 2007 on CBBC. Shaun The Sheep is a childrens show aimed at 5 - 7 year olds. Each episode is about 7 minutes long, and lots of merchandise is soon to be released.

Future

As of February 2007, Nick Park is writing a new film, either for television or cinema.

Video games

In September 2003, a video game entitled Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo was released for the PS2, Xbox and GameCube. This separate story sees the duo take on Feathers McGraw once more. 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 towards his ultimate goal - turning 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 Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox, following the plot of the movie as the titular duo work as vermin-catchers, protecting customers' vegetable gardens from rabbits.

Gameplay for both titles is reminiscent of any third-person platformer released since the advent of Super Mario 64, with lots of jumping around in three-dimensional levels and collecting items. In Project Zoo, players exclusively control Gromit as Wallace functions as a helper non-player character (NPC), 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 went to Konami.

Comic book

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 made reappearences in the comic.

Stop-motion technique

The Wallace and Gromit animations were shot using the old 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. 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.

Facts and Figures

• Many critics believe that Gromit's silence makes him the perfect straight man with a pantomime expressiveness that drew favourable comparisons to Buster Keaton.

• NASA has now named one of its new prototype Mars explorer robots after Gromit. The other new prototype is named "K-9". [3]

• Gromit happens to mean "destroy" in Russian, with the stress on the second syllable (Russian: громить, cf. pogrom).

• Nick Park originally imagined Wallace as owning a cat.

• The characteristic music was composed by Julian Nott.

• In "A Grand Day Out", Wallace was seen using Duck matches to light the spaceship, a pun on the actual brand of Swan matches.

• In "Curse of the Were-Rabbit", when Gromit is building a cage for the Were-Rabbit, the power screwdriver being used carries the brand "Botch", a pun on the tool manufacturer brand "Bosch".

• In "Curse of the Were-Rabbit", there is a grocery shop named "Harvey's", alluding to the Mary Chase play and subsequent black and white film "Harvey", which co-stars an invisible 6-foot tall white rabbit. There's also a barbers called A Close Shave after their third outing.

• 'Wallace and Gromit' has been incorporated into rhyming slang. [4]

See also

• Nick Park
• Aardman Animations
• Chicken Run
• List of animated feature films
• List of stop-motion films

External links

• Official website
• Cracking Contraptions official site
• American official website
• Wallace and Gromit - The Early Years (A Retrospective on their Oscar-winning short subjects
• 62 West Wallaby Street, a fansite based on the layout of Wallace and Gromit's home - includes a Wallace and Gromit Podcast.