They are two of our biggest and best-loved stars and their fans around the world are eagerly anticipating their return to our screens this Christmas.
It’s more than 15 years since Wallace and Gromit’s last film was released and in that time they have been honoured with a statue in Preston, where their creator Nick Park grew up, and with a ride at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
In the new film, Vengeance Most Fowl, the duo are once more pitched into confrontation with Feathers McGraw, the thief and master of disguise they last encountered in the Wrong Trousers.
The charming claymation creations were introduced to the world in the 1989 short A Grand Day Out, and have since appeared in three more shorts, a couple of television programmes and now a second feature-length film.
Speaking exclusively to Lancashire Life shortly after he returned from a promotional tour of North America, Nick said: ‘The films are all deeply rooted in British, and particularly Lancastrian, culture – there are lots of references from my own past.
‘I will often point out references or show the art department photos of Lancashire so they know what I’m thinking of. I have been surprised how universally it works. The films and these characters have been around quite a while and people, not just in Britain, really connect with them.
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'In the US, people were telling me the films are a part of their childhood, or that they are the reason they went into animation. It’s always quite a shock to hear the impact they have had.
‘This started off as a cottage industry with hand-made models, and yet it’s percolated into so many peoples lives. I get the feeling people don’t just like the characters, they love them and that really knocks me, it’s overwhelming.
‘There’s something gentle about the home-spun quality of the films and the references to northern England. We include references to the friendly rivalry with Yorkshire and I wasn’t sure how that would go down in the states but they seemed to enjoy it – they may not know about cricket or the Wars of the Roses, but that didn’t spoil their enjoyment of the film.
Vengeance Most Fowl is the first Wallace and Gromit film made under Aardman Animation’s 2019 production deal with Netflix but in spite of the American streaming giant’s involvement, the film remains charmingly British. ‘They have been very respectful to Wallace and Gromit,’ Nick added.
Nick was born in Preston in 1958, the third of five children born to Roger who worked as a photographer with the architectural firm BDP, and Mary, a tailor.
He grew up in Walmer Bridge and as a child, he would spend hours drawing and making cartoons with his parents’ cine camera. After attending Cuthbert Mayne High School (now Our Lady’s Catholic High School) he went on to Preston College where the art and design department library is now named after him.
‘I started doing animation when I was very young,’ he said. ‘My dad bought my mum an 8mm cine camera in about 1967 and they said to us children that if we wanted to use it, we could. I took that to heart, and I discovered it had an animation setting. At that time Preston felt a million miles away from the film industry but I loved drawing cartoons and I realised I could bring my cartoons to life.
‘I watched a documentary about Disney and at the age of about 12 or 13 I wanted to make characters that moved and that maybe one day people might like them. I was quite shy though and I never expressed any of that to anyone. I’d just go off to the Harris Library in Preston and read all the books I could find. I was influenced by everything I watched – Buster Keaton films, Morph, the Clangers, cartoons – it all just soaked in.
‘The first film I ever shot never came back from Kodak. I could have given up then, but I kept going.’
One of his earliest teenage works, Archie's Concrete Nightmare, was shown on the BBC in 1975, around the time he moved from Preston College to a course in Communication Arts at Sheffield City Polytechnic – now Sheffield Hallam University. From there he went to the National Film and Television School, where he started making the first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out.
'He loved building things – he’d go off into his shed, there’d be a lot of cartoon sawing and banging noises and then he’d emerge with what he’d made.
‘When I was a child he built a caravan which seven of us went on holiday in, to Wales. My mum put wallpaper up and made it a home from home and once I’d finished making the film A Grand Day Out, it struck me that it was a film about them.’
A Grand Day Out took six years to perfect but the story of Wallace and Gromit's encounter with a gas cooker when they go to the moon in search of cheese, won Nick a BAFTA and set him on the road to stardom.
In February 1985 he joined Aardman Animations in Bristol where he first worked as director and animator on numerous projects, including pop promos, title sequences and inserts for children's television.
In 1989 Aardman Animations produced the Lip Synch series for Channel 4. Nick’s contribution to the series was the film Creature Comforts which featured animals in a zoo complaining about their living conditions, with voices supplied by real people. It won him an Oscar for the best short animated film of 1990.
Nick, who was among the winners at this year’s World Animation Summit Hall of Fame Awards, married Mags Connolly at the Gibbon Bridge Hotel near Chipping in September 2016. The couple have a home in Goosnargh and enjoy bird-watching and walking the Lancaster Canal towpath.
Now, more than 30 years on from the original film, he has created a sequel which will be broadcast on BBC One on Christmas Day.
In the new 79-minute film, the evil penguin has returned to seek revenge on inventor Wallace and his trusty beagle Gromit, while Wallace becomes overly dependent on his inventions, including his new creation Norbot the smart gnome who seems to develop an evil mind of his own.
‘We initially thought this would be another half-hour TV special,’ added Nick, 65. ‘But it was a great opportunity to bring Feathers McGraw back and the story grew. What could be more perfect and more personal as a sinister motive than the guy who they locked up in the zoo 30 years ago seeking vengeance?
‘I love working with Wallace and Gromit, it’s like being with old friends. The idea for the smart gnome in this film came when we were making the Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005. I do have other ideas simmering away – probably too many ideas – and this won’t be the last Wallace and Gromit film, but they are very long projects and they’re absolutely tiring.
‘I do have to pinch myself sometimes that what started out as an idea about a man and his dog with a couple of daft names has become so big.
‘Even the airport security guards at in America asked me to open the case – not because they thought there was anything suspicious in there, but because they wanted to see Wallace and Gromit.’
All Wallace and Gromit films feature references to other movies and Nick added: ‘We like to have fun with that – Village of the Damned is in there as is The Midwich Cuckoos in the way the children walk through the streets and turn in unison. Cape Fear is a big one and The Italian Job in the final scene on the aqueduct. One of the barges is called the Accrington Queen – that’s a reference to The African Queen, which I remember being on television when I was young. I've always wanted to use canals, and without giving any spoilers, I’d never seen a chase scene with canal boats.’
* Vengeance Most Fowl will be broadcast on BBC One on Christmas Day and released on Netflix early in the new year.
