Wallace & Gromit and The Curse of the Wererabbit

[matt35mm]

Trailer .

I love this so much.

[Pubrick]

helpful hint:

in english, 'arson' sounds like 'arsin', arse being the english word for ass (US). so 'arson around' is funny.

this highlights the difference between american and english, one is crass the other class.

[matt35mm]

helpful hint:

in english, 'arson' sounds like 'arsin', arse being the english word for ass (US). so 'arson around' is funny.

this highlights the difference between american and english, one is crass the other class.

Ahem, I got that.  And it's also why I love Wallace & Gromit.  It has class.  I, as an American, learn so much from it and hope that it will make me a better person.  Because all we can hope to be in this world is better than we currently are, and it's things like Wallace & Gromit that can help us become that.

[MacGuffin]

Wallace & Gromit go to any length
Nick Park's madcap Claymation stars break out of the short-film mold with their first feature film.
Source: Los Angels Times



CANNES, France — "I didn't really design it to travel," Nick Park says, still a bit baffled after all these years. "It was simply my own taste, the kind of film I wanted to see. It always astonishes me how universal it's become."

That short film, 1989's "A Grand Day Out," was seven years in the making, so long that when actor Peter Sallis, who'd voiced the lead for free, was called back for pickups he didn't remember doing the original job. Now, Park relates, "he says it's one of the best things that ever happened to him. He'd rather have this role than a permanent place at the National Theatre in London." Such is the power of Wallace & Gromit.

The madcap, multipart adventures of a hapless and rather dim inventor of Rube Goldberg-type mechanisms and his dog, a poker-faced know-it-all who barely tolerates his nominal master, turned out to have resonance all over the world. The second and third Wallace & Gromit shorts, "The Wrong Trousers" and "A Close Shave," have won more than 80 international awards between them, including two of Park's trio of animated short film Oscars. (The third was for "Creature Comforts.")

The Claymation shorts have also led directly to an enormous 30-foot, inflatable Gromit holding court in front of the Carlton Hotel and a trip to the film festival for their creator on a private jet provided by DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg. "I never realized," the genial and quick-witted Park admits, "that clay animation could get so glamorous."

The glamour and the trip to Cannes are in the service of the first W&G feature, "Wallace & Gromit — The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," to be released in the U.S. in October. "It's the first vegetarian horror movie ever," the 46-year-old Park says with sly sincerity. Taking his creatures to feature length — a project that took 4 1/2 years, including a mammoth 18-month shooting schedule — was fraught with all kinds of obstacles.

Though Park admits he "aspired to make feature films," when DreamWorks approached Aardman, the company in which he is a partner along with animators Peter Lord and David Sproxton, about going longer, "I didn't want to risk Wallace and Gromit, who had been so successful as shorts, in my first feature." So what came first, co-directed with Lord, was the phenomenally successful, Mel Gibson-voiced "Chicken Run."

Park also didn't want to proceed with a feature without a viable plot, which he didn't have until he and another writer came up with one in a pub in Bristol, England. "We thought, 'What if it was a werewolf movie and it was with rabbits, and it was not human flesh they were after but vegetables?' " he remembers. "This allowed us to use typical horror movie characters, like the skeptical policeman and a vicar who spouts all kinds of mumbo-jumbo about the beast within."

It also allowed for parts strong enough to attract the likes of Helena Bonham-Carter and Ralph Fiennes as voice talent. She plays Lady Tottington, an "eco-toff" who is attracted to Wallace's humane pest control firm, inevitably called Anti-Pesto. He is Victor Quartermaine, "a blood sport fanatic" who is her evil suitor. "It really is astonishing to me," the director says, "when you can go to people of that stature and ask them to play quite ridiculous roles."

That's especially astonishing to Park, who began with Claymation as "a 12-year-old kid who worked alone in his parents' attic" and who rarely told people what he was up to because "I didn't think anyone would be interested. When I went to Sheffield Art School, I didn't tell the tutors, I didn't think it was proper art. An art teacher, disgusted that I had drawn a cartoon, had told me that when I was 13 or 14. I thought it could only be a hobby, that it was too much fun to be taken seriously."

Given his solo beginnings, one of Park's key challenges was "slowly learning on each film to collaborate more and more." There was a crew of 40 on "A Close Shave" and close to 200 on "Were-Rabbit," including 30 animators. That meant the first co-director in Wallace & Gromit history — Steve Box, who'd animated the villainous penguin in "The Wrong Trousers" and Wendolene Ramsbottom in "A Close Shave."

All these people are necessary because clay animation is an astonishingly labor-intensive business. The clay is molded onto a metal skeleton called an armature, a frame of film is exposed, the clay is moved slightly, another picture is exposed, the clay is resculpted and shifted again, another picture taken. Twenty-four pictures equals one second of film, which means that three seconds a day per animator and two minutes total per week for the entire group of thirty is considered good production. "Clay animation doesn't lend itself to being industrialized," Parks says. "It's a cottage industry and it always will be."

Parks' biggest worry in involving all these people with characters he considers "my family, really," is that their work "continues to feel handmade, that it keeps the soul of the original films." To this end all the animators "go through a long process, they have to take Wallace & Gromit classes, lots of talks and workshops on how to do it the right way. I encourage them not to make things too slick and polished, they have to unlearn that. I don't mind fingerprints on the clay."

One of the great pleasures of a Wallace & Gromit short is distinctive and deliberate pacing; "it takes its own time," is how Park puts it. The director said the feature process included "pressure to move things faster, make things quicker, zappier" — pressure, Wallace & Gromit fans will be happy but not surprised to learn, he resisted.

"We're in a culture of very short attention spans, and we're feeding it, conditioning an audience," he says. "I think you don't have to hit people, you can appeal to their deeper nature. It's about respecting people, their ability to appreciate things if given a chance to."

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer

[Redlum]

That new trailer was so shit I had to turn it off.

[Pubrick]

it's the american trailer.

[Stefen]

I wanna see the african trailer.

[matt35mm]

Pubrick's right, it's the American trailer, which means it says nothing about the film itself.  It's all just as flashy and fast-paced as can be to try and sell it to stupid people.  Nick Park said he didn't give into the pressure to make it faster-paced or flashy, so that doesn't accurately reflect the movie at all.

Don't worry: the movie will still be great.  I have all the faith in the world that this will be awesome.

[SiliasRuby]

I hate false avertising. Going to see this though, because Nick Park, is brilliant.

[MacGuffin]

Look for Wallace & Gromit in Three Amazing Adventures on 9/20 (SRP $19.99). The title will include A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, along with the never-before-seen Cracking Contraptions shorts and a sneak peek at the upcoming theatrical movie Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (due in theaters 9/30).

[Redlum]

Really great news story today about the new cheese featured in the The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Wenslydale is no more; now its all about 'Stinky Bishop'. The maker of the cheese was on the radio today apparently worried about meeting demands when the film is released having only a workforce of 2 and each unit of cheese being hand made.

Apparently the filmmakers contacted him about featuring the cheese after finishing animation yet he signed only an agreement for them to feature the cheese that involved no fee or W&G advertising rights. This might seem slightly crazy but during the radio show a business advisor was present and offered ways to cash-in, expand and capatalise on the product placement in the same way Wenslydale cheese did during the the first series of shorts.

What was great was that the guy seemed perfectly happy with his small business and didnt want the hassle of going into mass production.  No doubt there will be many offers from other companies to buy the recipe for the cheese - which, is apparently a very tasty cheese despite livign up to its name.

[Ghostboy]

This movie is wonderful! It's exactly like the original films - no big shakeups, everything you know and love - and its so perfectly plotted that it doesn't actually feeel any longer than any of the shorts. That was the biggest thing I was worried about, but all my hopes were fulfilled.
Three cheers!

[matt35mm]

This movie is wonderful! It's exactly like the original films - no big shakeups, everything you know and love - and its so perfectly plotted that it doesn't actually feeel any longer than any of the shorts. That was the biggest thing I was worried about, but all my hopes were fulfilled.
Three cheers!

I knew it.  I had no doubts.

I shall see it as soon as it comes out!

EDIT:  And if you check Rotten Tomatoes, it's getting positive reviews across the board.

[matt35mm]

It was awesome.  Not really a crowd movie, though.  I can't wait to buy it and just watch it in a smaller setting.  I could feel the audience waiting for bigger laughs and it's not really that kind of movie.  I want to watch it by myself and notice all the brilliant details that the movie is filled with.