Wallace & Gromits Cracking Contraptions
animated films by Nick Park of Aardman Animation. All the characters were made from moulded plasticine on wire frames, and filmed with stop motion animation. This process is sometimes known as "claymation" because clay is occasionally used.
Wallace is a hare-brained inventor, cheese enthusiast (especially for Wensleydale cheese) and owner of the dog Gromit who appears to be rather more intelligent than his master. All the speaking characters have Yorkshire accents, Wallace being voiced by veteran actor Peter Sallis.
A series of 10 short (2½ minute) Wallace and Gromit animations entitled Cracking Contraptions has appeared on the World Wide Web and subsequently on a limited-edition Region 2 DVD. Each episode features one of Wallace's new inventions and Gromit's sceptical reaction to it.
- The Soccamatic
- The Tellyscope
- The Auto Chef
- The Snoozatron
- The Turbo Diner
- The Bully Proof Vest
- The 525 Crackervac
- A Christmas Cardomatic
- The Snowmanotron
- Shopper 13
The success of Aardman's 2000 movie Chicken Run means that a Wallace and Gromit movie is on the cards; in fact, the Contraption shorts were made by the new team of animators, to familiarize themselves with the characters. Its original working title was The Great Vegetable Plot, but this has been changed to Curse of the Wererabbit. Whatever the final title may be, it is set for a 2005 release.
Park has consistently turned down requests for an ongoing television series because of the time and effort required for even a single episode.
In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, The Wrong Trousers was placed 18th.
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. Because a second of film constitutes 24 separate frames, even a short half-hour film like 'A Close Shave' takes a long time to animate well.
Though painstaking and time-consuming, and, with the newer advanced CGI technology, 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 like The Nightmare Before Christmas in the 1990s.
As with Nick 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 custard in Wallace's house.
