‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’ Directors on Why Stop-Motion Animation Excites Them: “You Never Quite Know What You’re Going to Get”
“When you make stop-motion, you can’t go back.”
In a film industry increasingly fixated on the bigger, better and bolder — from CGI to motion capture or greenscreen technology — nothing gets Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham more excited than traditional stop-motion animation.
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“There’s an element of human touch,” Crossingham tells The Hollywood Reporter off the back of Aardman Animations’ seventh Oscar nomination for the most recent installment, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, of their beloved franchise. “From the time the animator starts the scene until they get to the end, that’s it. It’s a one-hit process, which is very, very pressurizing to get right the first time.” He continues, “I think there’s something in that which makes it quite alive. Because no matter how much preparation you do, even with your best animators, you never quite know what you’re going to get.”
Fortunately for the duo, their work has continuously paid off. The animators go way back to the mid-’90s, when they began working together at the Bristol-based animation giant. But Park is in no need of an introduction: A four-time Oscar winner for 1989’s Creature Comforts, 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, 1995’s A Close Shave and 2005’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, his achievements could make even the most cynical of Brits feel a little patriotic.
Wallace and Gromit are household names in Park and Crossingham’s native England. Wallace is a cheese-loving inventor living in Yorkshire, north England, with his incredibly bright sidekick Gromit (who happens to be a beagle). The pair are partial to a strong brew, jam on toast and, for the green-thumbed Gromit, a spot of gardening, but their wholesome routine of gadget-testing and hedge-trimming is often turned upside down by a charismatic villain.
“It started off as a 30-minute Wallace & Gromit for TV,” Park explains about their return. “It was about Wallace inventing a smart gnome to help Gromit in the garden. And that had loads of comedy potential, but it was always lacking that sinister element that Wallace & Gromit films have. Who’s behind it?”
To the horror (and glee) of the franchise’s fans, the villain Aardman needed soon emerged, and in reentered the cunning penguin Feathers McGraw, a legend of the Wallace & Gromit lore who is back with a, yes, vengeance after his plot to steal a diamond from the city museum was thwarted more than 30 years ago in The Wrong Trousers.
“He really unlocked everything,” Crossingham says of the decision to bring McGraw back into the fold. “It seems very obvious now, but he was clearly the right character to fit the story.” Adds Park: “He has a personal vendetta against Wallace and Gromit.”
It was 2020 when work on Vengeance Most Fowl began and Park offered Crossingham (creative director of Wallace & Gromit at Aardman) the position of co-director. But it would take another four years before the final product was unveiled to the world — 15 months of that time focused on the stop-motion alone with a crew of 260 people and 35 animators.
“We have a very rich vein of talent at the studio,” says Crossingham of Aardman’s workforce. “Not just the animators, but everybody in every stage of the creative process, from our story artists and art department to our fabricators and the model-makers, everyone is exquisitely talented. It’s an unbelievably concentrated fashion, and in a couple of years, the studio will be 50 years old.” Park believes it’s the limitations of Claymation that give the craft its strength. “There’s a humor that comes out of it that we tend to exploit,” he says. “With CGI, you’ve got the world at your fingertips, whereas working with clay, any given situation is a physical thing; it restricts your discipline of it.”
The BBC has long been the home of Wallace & Gromit, with Vengeance Most Fowl no exception. It debuted on Christmas Day and was the most watched film broadcast on U.K. TV in 25 years, with an enormous 16-plus million viewers — a testament to the characters’ icon status in Britain. Aardman found an international partner in Netflix this time around, however, as Wallace, Gromit and Feathers McGraw reached corners of the world they had never before. But to lean into the Britishness of Wallace & Gromit — Wensleydale cheese and all — proved to be a powerful weapon at Park and Crossingham’s disposal.
“Stylistically, with the humor, we’ve very purposefully been sticking to our guns and proudly maintaining a British voice,” Crossingham says. “The BBC certainly understood that, but Netflix, even more so, as an international exporter of films, they understood that it was actually the superpower of Wallace & Gromit and that it should be maintained.”
Adds Park: “It’s having some self-confidence, isn’t it? Because we’ve grown up on American films. Many of our references are American films, and we’ve had to learn what words mean and how culture works over there. So we’ve got to have self-confidence that our own culture is worth talking about, and people will get used to it and get to know it.”
There are a couple of jokes or bits that don’t travel for international fans, the directors highlight, like the news anchor named “Anton Deck” (a play on words with the U.K.’s biggest presenting double act, Ant and Dec). But these references are culturally important, acting as the makeup for that niche Wallace & Gromit DNA fans respond to, Crossingham and Park tell THR. “We’re [often] in America at screenings, and you can always tell when there’s a Briton in the audience because there’s a guffaw from the corner,” Crossingham says. “We don’t mind if they’re laughing with us or at us, as long as they’re laughing and having a good time.”
Now, these two Englishmen turn their attention to the dizzy industry heights of Los Angeles — where Park has claimed victory four times before, of course — with stops at the animation world’s Annie Awards and the BAFTAs on the way.
Notes Park of the moment he received his seventh Oscar nomination: “I was up in Preston with my wife, and we were just gripping ourselves. We were listening online, and then it was just … elation. You never get used to it — it doesn’t happen that often. It’s been a while since the last one, and it’s an enormous thrill. To be just nominated is an accolade in itself.” But it’ll be a tough fight to the Oscar podium on March 2, with Flow, Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot and Memoir of a Snail rounding out the category.
“You don’t make films for this, but it’s a fantastic thing for us and the crew, to get recognition, especially from your peers,” says Park. Crossingham echoes the sentiment: “It’s a massively fat cherry on top. It was lunchtime for us in the studio, and it was lovely because we had some of the crew who helped make the film there. A hush went down over the room … and a big, big cheer went up.”
It wouldn’t be a conversation with a pair of Oscar nominees without some coyness. Things in Vengeance Most Fowl were left a little open-ended, THR points out, with Feathers McGraw escaping on a runaway train. Aside from how anyone is expected to sleep at night with such a dangerous criminal afoot, will Park and Crossingham be teaming up again to steer Wallace & Gromit to further awards success?
“We can’t promise anything, but I’d say, watch this space,” Crossingham responds. “Watch this space,” his partner echoes.
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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