"I've Been Bribed"--Nick Park Talks "Wallace and Gromit"
"I've been bribed"- Nick Park talks "Wallace and Gromit"
By Joe Strike
According to conventional wisdom, cartoons have gone the way of the rotary phone, replaced by Three-Dimensional, Computer-Generated Imagery; pixel pushers have rendered pencil-to-paper animation obsolete, and nobody does it the old way anymore. It's an argument that would have you ignore Japan's endless tsunami of animé, not to mention two-dimensional TV clowns like Spongebob. It also requires you to overlook the comeback-with a vengeance-of stop-motion animation, a technique dating back to the birth of the movies.
Close on the heels of Tim Burton's puppet-populated Corpse Bride comes the clay-animated Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. After a trio of wildly popular shorts, Nick Park's man and mutt duo have made their feature debut in a film that seems equally inspired by 1940's Universal horror films, Brideshead Revisited and Monty Python. For someone whose facility with molding clay and molding characters has already won him three Oscars, Nick seemed low-key and calm during a recent visit to New York to promote the film. Then again, it might have been sheer exhaustion from the labor of creating 85 minutes of animation in microscopic increments, one frame at a time?
Joe Strike: Where did Wallace and Gromit come from?
Nick Park: I began working on them in college. I didn't deliberately base Wallace on anyone-he started out as a rather stereotypical northern Englishman, wearing a sleeveless sweater, collar and tie all day long. Traditionally, you'd wear a flat cap and work down in the mine.
He used to have a moustache which is quite typical too. I got rid of it because it got in the way-you need to get your fingers inside the mouth to sculpt it. The cap also got in the way-I got rid of that immediately.
I was planning on Gromit being a cat at first. When it came to making him out of plasticine it turned out that a dog was a lot easier because of the smoothness of the coat and the length of his legs. I needed to get my fingers around the legs to move and resculpt them, otherwise your fingernails scuzz them up.
He was going to have a mouth and I even recorded a Scooby-Doo style voice for him at one point. Then I did the first shot in A Grand Day Out where Wallace is building the rocket and he's using Gromit as a trestle to rest this plank on. All I could really reach in that shot was Gromit's face. I don't think I even put a mouth on him, I couldn't be bothered. I found I could get so much out of doing very little just by moving his eyebrows. Suddenly he wasn't the bouncy dog I was planning on, but a kind of put upon human dog really, quite an introvert and suddenly very knowing.
That one shot defined Gromit's character. I kind of started playing with that, like in a scene where Wallace decides to go the moon: "That's it lad, the moon is made of cheese!" Gromit just kind of looks at the camera and does that eye roll, it's all very underplayed.
Joe Strike: You had 30 crews working at the same time, shooting different scenes from the movie simultaneously. If you had to do it with a single crew on a single set, how many decades do you think it would've taken to finish the film?
Nick Park: I'm not sure how you could work it out, but A Grand Day Out was just me, and that took seven years to do 24 minutes. Here we had 30 animators and each one was getting through about three seconds a day. Sometimes our aim was to do two minutes a day, but we only reached that a couple of times.
But that's fast for animation. It's no slower than computer animation and it's certainly cheaper. Just as much time goes into every shot. It's just a different kind of process, that's all.
The animators are like performers. They've got to go through the shot from beginning to end-it's not planned out with key positions along the way. You try to communicate as much as possible and rehearse. We even do the shots on video with ourselves. We act out the scenes to determine the timings and stuff like that.
JS: So you know Gromit's got to be at this point in 30 frames, or whatever.
Nick Park: Yeah, we have this whole prop box as well. We have Gromit ears to wear, were-rabbit ears, Lady Tottington's wig-it helps us get into character.
JS: I hope you're going to have this footage on the DVD.
Nick Park: Apparently, it is going to be. I'd have to pay quite a lot of money to have it taken off, but I've been bribed.