The cheese-loving English inventor Wallace and his loyal dog Gromit have been stars since the beginning.
In the 35 years since Nick Park introduced the world to his stop-motion creations and their eccentric, unapologetically British existence, they’ve won Oscars and appeared in commercials, video games, animated series and even the occasional bit of (unofficial) protest art.
Feature films, however, have been few and far between. Part of the reason is the difficulty: Even a 30-minute short can take upward of two years. Besides, why mess with a formula that’s produced only classics?
After working on the pair’s first feature, “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” which was released in 2005 and won an Oscar, and “Early Man,” Park even doubted that he’d dabble in the form again. But sometimes inspiration requires a little more breathing room: That's how the second “Wallace & Gromit” feature film, “Vengeance Most Fowl,” came to be. It debuts Friday on Netflix.
After “Were-Rabbit,” Park started kicking around an idea about a smart gnome, Norbot, built to help Gromit in the garden.
“There was something a bit missing,” Park said. “We tinkered around with the story on and off for years and it seemed to be lacking the more sinister element that’s often in ‘Wallace & Gromit.’ Why do the gnomes go wrong? Who was the motivated villain?”
Five years ago, the solution came to them: Feathers McGraw, the conniving penguin with a penchant for heists and simple disguises, who turned their lives to chaos in “The Wrong Trousers.”
“He was the answer to everything,” Park said. “The story got bigger and more exciting. Suddenly it became a feature-length film.”
The starting point for all scenes was always the traditional: in-camera, stop-motion animation like Aardman has using since 1989. It is, Crossingham said, fundamentally vital to the films to see the thumbprints on the characters and know that they're handmade.
There have always been limitations, and the option to use more digital assistance, but it’s only been in recent years that computer graphics have caught up enough to blend in. Effects like fog and steam are possible in stop-motion, but, they explained, they never look quite right.
“The main thing we required was that if we were going to use a digital technique, could we force it to look right for our film rather than it just being bolted on and feeling like an accessory that was a bit of an unwelcome guest,” Crossingham said. “The visual effects department at Aardman worked very hard to get that stylizing so that it felt right in ‘Wallace and Gromit,’ in which and the sets and the props are characters in themselves.”
The tension between embracing technological innovation like artificial intelligence and preserving the old ways that still work was not just something they were thinking about off-camera. It’s at the heart of the film too, as Wallace’s well-intentioned invention turns against him (and wreaks havoc on the town).
“It’s a bit meta,” Crossingham said. “I think there’s something that resonates with audiences with stop-motion that they can tell it’s handcrafted, they can tell that’s the human touch.”
