[EXCLUSIVE] Directors Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham on ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’

But how has this project come to life? European Animation Journal’s team spoke with Directors Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham back in Annecy, where Aardman presented footage of the film.

Wallace & Gromit adventures have always been a mix between comedy and grimness, with a pinch of frights. What can we expect from this new adventure?

Merlin Crossingham: It all comes down to drama. Drama is always essential in films with relationships. And so, making sure there is drama, jeopardy and stakes in your story is very important. I think it is just an important part of the fabric of storytelling in comedy. Comedy sometimes comes from a sad place.

Nick Park: In fact, it helps the comedy, as the tension that has built up offers us the ability to bring comic relief. In the film, the gnomes are both funny and have a dark side. We love to think we’ve invented a new subgenre, the gnome noir.

And what would the gnome noir be?

NP: Well, it is rooted in our love of cinema. It is influenced by Hitchcock, and all these movies that defined noir as a genre. But there’s also a lot of comedy. Overall, it’s about this mood that we set with the lighting, the music and the story. We are not afraid to go dark at times, but obviously in an entertaining way.

MC: And, to be fair, we also just thought gnome noir was funny.

It is indeed! How did it feel to bring Wallace & Gromit back to the big screen?

NP: They are family, you know? Both Merlin and I are very familiar with working with them, as we’ve done it for years now. So it was a great opportunity, and we had this idea that grabbed us by the collar and demanded to be made. Wallace has invented this garden gnome with the best of intentions, and it is immediately so perfect that it becomes an irritating thing. This premise seemed so charged with possibilities for a story.

MC: The core technique is exactly the same. In fact, it hasn’t changed since the times of Ray Harryhausen. Of course, we now shoot on digital cameras, and almost every aspect of our craft has evolved, but at the heart and soul of it, it still is about the craft. We used the most cutting edge visual effects technology for particle effects or things like that, but the starting point is a very real crafted stop-motion world. And so, our main focus is to bring all those parts together in visual harmony.

How does Aardman, as a studio, prepare the next generation of animators and directors with those projects such as ‘Chicken Run 2’ or this new Wallace & Gromit feature?

MC: On my side, I’m very happy because this is my first time directing a feature film, and I’ve been looking for it for over 25 years. At Aardman, we do acknowledge that we’re not getting any younger, and we do need new talent. And so, we embrace developing those. We have an academy for young aspiring stop-motion animators, they’re present at events such as MIFA, and it’s not only to scout animators for us, but also to encourage the industry on a broader scale. To promote stop-motion animation as an art.

NP: There is also a lot of attention towards diversity, finding and training female directors for instance. We are working hard behind the scenes, to implement this in the future course of the company.

What were the biggest production challenges, and how did you overcome them?

NP: This one actually goes back to the creation of the characters – did you know that Gromit was meant to be a talking character in the early version of A Grand Day Out, the very first instalment of Wallace & Gromit? I even recorded a voice test for him, but in the end I couldn’t manage to animate it. It just wouldn’t work properly. So I eventually started working on his brow, and it was like an epiphany. It made him very different, a perfect opposite to the complete extrovert that Wallace is, and people could relate to Gromit because he was a silent character. And that became the core of his personality: the misunderstood dog.

MC: Regarding this production, even though it has been a 15-months production, I still jump out of bed in the morning and love doing it. I think that if you’re not passionate about animation, every kind of animation, you just wouldn’t do it. People talk about the patience that it takes to make animation, but it is also about having a vision for a story, a thrill to bring characters and a story to the screen. It’s an amazing thing to do that.