How Wallace & Gromit found a place in our living rooms, and in our hearts

35 years ago, a plasticine man donning a sweater vest and slippers, and his mute yet expressive plasticine dog walked onto our TV screens. Wallace & Gromit’s arrival struck a chord with audiences of the late 80s, with its handmade touch and careful blend of humour, charm and wit. It was novel yet nostalgic, posing new possibilities for the world of animation with a portrayal of Britishness that sat just on the right side of sentimental. The pair quickly fostered a fanbase as dedicated to them as they were to cheese, and the world of British cinema and stop-motion animation has never quite been the same since. Now comes its second feature-length film, Vengeance Most Fowl, which can be summarised in no plainer terms than a film of return; that return being of the iconic penguin villain, Feathers McGraw.

Being a child of the late 90s, it feels as though Wallace & Gromit has been a constant presence in my life. Watching the early shorts on the sofa with my family and developing an unhealthy obsession with Feathers McGraw in The Wrong Trousers, and a fully fledged fear of the sinister robo-dog Preston in A Close Shave. The pure excitement of going to the cinema with my aunty to see the first feature-length film, Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and marching into Stockport Borders (RIP) months later to nab it on DVD. A good few years later, nursing a blood-curdling New Years Eve hangover with a friend (who actually has the privilege of being from Tottington, where the Curse of the Were-Rabbit is loosely set – still his biggest claim to fame), looking to Wallace & Gromit for homey comfort. And now, among my friends, quotes from the films have become standard sayings: Something’s going to take an hour? In the words of Lady Tottington: “I can’t wait an hour!”

Why, like so many others, have the films resonated with me so much? It could be my northern roots, the films being one of the few comedic representations of northern characters that doesn’t resort to ill-meaning satire, or punching down. Or, more simply, it could just be the pure and uncomplicated ethos of creativity and humanity that sits at the animation’s core; from the joys (and perils) of wild invention, to always having the good of the community front and centre (even if this doesn’t always go quite to plan), and – it goes without saying – the importance of companionship.

I speak to Nick, Merlin and Will following Vengeance Most Fowl’s two-year production and a long film festival circuit. Still, straight off the bat, it’s evident that, for Nick, neither the affection nor dedication has worn off. After 35 years, there’s no sense of disillusionment – far from it. When I ask him why, 16 years since the last instalment of Wallace & Gromit, now felt the right time to bring the pair back, he replies quite frankly: “Every time is the right time.” What really matters (and takes a lot of time), he says, is nailing the right idea. The central premise of the new film – Wallace inventing a robot gnome (Norbot) which ends up going widely off-plan – had actually been knocking about since the Were-Rabbit. But, as Merlin says, “it kept coming back”, and that’s how they knew it was a keeper. What proved the biggest sticking point was how they would bring it all together. Who, or what, would be the antagonist? This is where Feathers waddled back into the picture. In reality, the now-iconic penguin was never meant to return to the small screen; Nick admits that he’s always been reluctant about bringing characters back. But his return ended up being the final link in the story that the pair had been cooking for so long.

This unwavering passion for Wallace & Gromit and the decade-and-a-half-long fixation with finding the right storyline appears rooted in two things – one being doing well by a dedicated fanbase. On whether he feels a sense of trepidation when working on a new installment, Nick says that “I’ve always got it in my mind.” A surprisingly earnest answer from a director who’s made some of the most well-known and loved animation films of the past three decades. “We’ve enjoyed such a lot of popularity with the films,” he says, “and the last thing you want to do is spoil it. We have to tread very carefully but confidently at the same time.” For Merlin, aside from auxiliary projects, this was the first Wallace & Gromit feature he worked as a director on, something he was very aware of. But, he clarifies, “you can’t let it play on your mind. You kind of have to have an awareness of it, I think, but also not let it stress you out somehow.”

Secondly, something has to be said for just how personal Wallace & Gromit is to Nick. A Grand Day Out first started life as a film school project while Nick was studying Communication Arts at Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University) before it was adopted by Aardman studios, and it’s got strong connections to his family. Back in 2014, Nick wrote in The Guardian that when he started filming A Grand Day Out, he realised he’d subliminally based Wallace on his shed-tinkering father, and Gromit is a name he filched from his brother, an electrician – a ‘grommet’ is a rubber implement used to insulate wiring. The films are also always set in Nick’s neck of the woods, the north of England, especially his hometown of Preston and its surrounding towns.

Nick says his choice to set it on the terraced streets of the north was nothing “theoretical”. Instead, he says, with stop motion and model making, “you just love making the things you’re familiar with”. Many of the household objects littered around the pair’s cosy house were originally inspired by items in his granny’s 1960s house; the lamp behind Gromit’s chair, the cheese tray – all direct replicas. “Everything had character back then,” says Nick, “now everything’s square, black and shiny.” Such a close focus on locale has also led Merlin to brush up on his northern knowledge, delicacies like butter pies and parkin, for example, and the severity of the Lancashire Yorkshire border: “like an American state line!” Merlin laughs. “It’s a hard ‘do not cross’.”

It feels impossible to continue without properly addressing the elephant (or penguin) in the room. Since his first appearance in The Wrong Trousers, the conniving, diamond-looting Feathers McGraw has achieved something of a cult status; I’m sure I’m not alone in avowing that he truly is one of the best filmic villains ever created. But what is it that makes him so sinister? On paper he doesn’t seem to be in the same arena as the Jokers or Hanniball Lecters of the cinematic universe. He’s a three-foot penguin that uses a rubber glove to disguise himself as a chicken. Turns out it’s all in his movement, or – in fact – the lack thereof.

Will Becher, supervising animator of Vengeance Most Fowl, has worked full-time at Aardman since being brought on by Nick to work on the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and in his eyes the trick is that Feathers’ lack of movement and expression means that he doesn’t give anything away. Funnily enough, one of the key references that Will cites Nick as having attached to Feather’s creation is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famously rigid Terminator. But Will also highlights that in his first starring role, while Feathers has a large overarching presence, he’s not actually a huge physical presence. The same can’t be said for Vengeance Most Fowl – and so his performance really needed to live up to expectation. On the shoot, it got to the point in which there were only a handful of animators Will would put on the Feathers shoots because, quite simply, “animators love to move things”. He continues: “It really needed some quite restrained performance, even to the point where we’re saying how many times he was going to blink – every blink that the penguin does is relevant.” It’s not only on screen that his menacing nature comes to life however. “I mean, he really is terrifying,” Will says. “It got to the point where I always felt a little bit uneasy being in the unit that Feathers was kept in.”

Following the legacy of Wallace’s robotic trousers, Knit-o-Matic machine and Bun-Van 6000, Vengeance Most Fowl also centres on one of Wallace’s wacky inventions. Norbot is a gnome robot intended to help Gromit with the gardening, but (spoiler alert), he ends up turning Gromit’s tastefully wild garden into a clean-lined, Stepford Wives-esque nightmare. I ask Nick and Merlin whether this repeated focus on the perils of technology is a broader, self-referential critique – Wallace & Gromit’s dedication to the analogue methods versus a creative industry now heavily reliant on tech – but their answer is far from definitive. Invention and innovation (whether successful or not) is a key part of Wallace’s personality, and arguably what makes him so enjoyable to watch, and Norbot is, at first, entirely well meaning. Rather, Merlin suggests, the thematic interaction with technology concerns our “relationship” to it. “It’s a question of how much is tech helping?” says Nick. “Is it enhancing our humanity, or is it unknowingly taking away from it, and diminishing Wallace’s sensitivity to process?” Merlin adds: “It’s all about efficiency, and that’s not always the best thing.”

It would be a stretch, however, to suggest that technology hasn’t been used as an aid at points. There’s a scene toward the end of Vengeance Most Fowl that features a lot of water, and so a sprinkling of CGI was used as plasticine simply wouldn’t suffice. And Norbot’s head – rather than being made from plasticine – is 3D printed, which, considering he’s a robot, is actually kind of fitting. It’s also fair to mention that while Wallace & Gromit has stayed true to form, the technology surrounding it has advanced significantly. Will points out that the earliest film was shot on 35mm film, while the more recent are all digital stills, making the quality of image much higher. Lighting too has advanced. Now, LED lighting means that the team can make use of much smaller, more detailed sources, making things like indoor lamps and candles much more realistic.

Outside of technology, perhaps the most significant change is the size of the team working on the production. From Nick alone, to a small handful of people, to now a hefty nearly 200-people-powered operation: 30 animators, eight assistant animators, 40 to 50 people in the art department, 30 to 40 people in puppets and 20 people in cameras. So while people may perceive stop motion to be slow paced (granted each animator does on average create only about five seconds a week) the studio is typically pretty bustling and busy. Your average day during production starts at 8:30, with Nick, Merlin, Will and the editor reviewing the previous day’s footage, Nick and Merlin then split to direct separate sequences. Nick can end up covering six miles a day, just walking from unit to unit for meetings with each department, all fueled, Will reassures us, by many cups of tea.

Throughout production, a key part of Will’s job as supervising animator is making sure he has to hand a “bible” – full of early paintings, sketches and concepts created by Nick, as well as in-depth character studies, who they are and where they’ve come from – that the crew rarely need to diverge from for reference. But this doesn’t mean the various members and teams can’t get their own personal touch into the production.

The film’s cinematographer, Dave Alex Riddet has a background in theatre, so many of his techniques are rooted in the hands-on, in-person nature of theatre staging. For example, a scene involving a shot through a window will actually be shot through a window, rather than using a blue screen to add one in post production, Will explains. The art team, led by art director Matt Perry, spend hours upon hours sourcing the right materials for each prop and set, and then building miniature mock-ups of each one, before then going on to create the real, immensely detailed thing. Vengeance Most Fowl has got more locations than any of the other films, and each one feels incredibly elevated and grand, something Will puts down to the “talent” of the art team. Finally, while the narrative and universe is conjured by Nick it’s the animators – many of whom get assigned to a specific character – who spend their days slowly moving the puppets, something Will sees as their own personal performance going into the film. It’s a nice way to think of the mammoth production; a performance of many parts, from many different hands.

Another aspect Nick says everyone’s keen to get involved in (understandably so) is the puns; the small visual gems nestled within each of the films. “Shameless, some of the puns!” Nick laughs. “Because the art department is always making stuff, they love to give us ideas.” He continues: “The list is quite shameful, but people don’t realise that they actually are vetted.” One of the most enjoyable things about growing up watching Wallace & Gromit is slowly uncovering the jokes that once went over your head. It was only recently I noticed that when Gromit’s doing a stint in prison during A Close Shave he’s reading Crime and Punishment, by Fido Dogstoyevsky. And when a naked Wallace returns to human form in Were-Rabbit, the box that hides his modesty bears the words ‘contains nuts’ – something that brought great joy when pre-teen me realised it wasn’t referring to the edible kind. Age aside, Merlin says that the puns in each film are so layered, it will likely take “several viewings” to catch them all. While many emerge in the scriptwriting phase, “every stage is a chance to evolve the idea and evolve the humour”, he says, from the storyboard, through to the animatics, and first reel.

In all honesty, it’s hard not to get a little starry eyed when speaking to the people who work so closely to Wallace & Gromit, an animation that’s come to mean so much to so many people. Feeling rallied, I was originally compelled to end this with something that bolsters the franchise as one of the last remaining examples of true handmade creativity in a world of moving image now so saturated by technology. But I fear I may sound too much like a curmudgeoning old man. Or, I could conclude with a cheesy thank you (as my mum made me do when she heard I was speaking to Nick Park). But, perhaps I’ll just end by saying that I know I speak for many when I say to Aardman: please, keep it coming. The adventures, the many laughs and, of course, the fingerprints.