You have to love those classic comedy duos, often at odds, playfully disagreeing, but always indivisible, always there for each other in a pinch.
Burns and Allen. Laurel and Hardy. Abbott and Costello. Hope and Crosby.
Wallace and Gromit.
British twit Wallace and his ever-put-upon dog Gromit have come a long way from their humble beginnings as a film-school project in the early 1980s for stop-motion animation enthusiast Nick Park.
Back then, Park toiled by himself to manipulate and photograph his little characters. Twenty-some years later, Park oversaw dozens of animation teams working with 400 clay puppets at a warehouse-sized set in this southwest English city to produce the duo’s big-screen debut, “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”
What’s the secret behind the worldwide appeal of this geeky, not-so-bright cheese addict who never stops talking and the unassumingly brilliant dog who not only cannot speak, but also doesn’t even have a mouth?
‘Like a family of two’
Park figures Wallace and Gromit’s odd domestic bond simply reminds viewers of their own family households.
“In many ways, I thought of them as an elderly couple,” Park said. “They’re inseparable, they live in each other’s pockets. There’s a kind of love-hate relationship, but they’ll always look out for each other at the end of the day.
“It’s a real kind of love without being all sloppy and sentimental, which I think people can kind of relate to as the more truer family thing. There’s a long-suffering-ness about it.”
“They’re like a family of two,” added Peter Sallis, the 84-year-old British actor who has been supplying Wallace’s voice since Park’s student days. “They could be not quite brothers but could be father and son in a sort of way. And there’s the charming fact that Gromit doesn’t speak, and Gromit, of course, is the brains of the family.”
Joining Sallis in the film’s voice cast is Helena Bonham Carter as a giddy society dame overseeing a giant vegetable competition and Ralph Fiennes as her villainous suitor.
“Curse of the Were-Rabbit” has Wallace and Gromit using their fabulous contraptions and inventions to help humanely rid the town’s gardens of pesky rabbits chowing down on the veggies — and a ravenous mutant bunny that threatens to ruin the annual contest.
An Oscar-winning teamWallace and Gromit grew into an unlikely cultural sensation after their 1989 debut in the animated short “A Grand Day Out” and two Academy Award-winning cartoon adventures that followed, 1993’s “The Wrong Trousers” and 1995’s “A Close Shave,” all directed by Park.
“The combination is so classic, the man-dog combination. There’s obviously a great love between them,” said Steve Box, Park’s co-director on “Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” “I think Gromit is the biggest key, in spite of the fact he’s mute. Through economy and simplicity of design, he lost his mouth, but this character obviously is very clever. He speaks with his eyes and can completely cross any language barrier in the world.”
Today’s cartoon heroes tend to be wry, glib hepcats oozing sarcasm and irreverence. Wallace, with his corny knitted vests and cheese compulsion, and Gromit, with his stout heart and servile ways, seem like old fogies by comparison.
The innocence and naivete of the characters could be what sets Wallace and Gromit apart from a parade of cartoon wisenheimers that stretches from Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck up to Shrek and Donkey.
“They’re not derived from anything you’ve seen before. What else is like Wallace and Gromit? It’s very hard to say,” said Peter Lord, co-founder of Aardman Animations, which produces the “Wallace & Gromit” films. “It doesn’t take shortcuts. It doesn’t do the obvious.
“For example, Wallace is a deeply flawed character,” said Lord, who co-directed Aardman’s animated hit “Chicken Run” with Park. “He’s so unaware of Gromit’s feelings and needs, and he’s obsessive. He’s pretty stupid. Your studio development executive would never come up with this character, but the audience can believe in him. They can trust Wallace and Gromit, and know they’re getting something genuine. They’re not going to be duped and tricked.”
Kindred spiritsLord and his Aardman co-founder David Sproxton, who both served as producers on “Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” met Park in the mid-1980s while doing a guest lecture to animation students at Park’s film school near London.
In Park, they found a kindred spirit with similar aims, trying to push the boundaries of stop-motion animation, a technique that involves meticulously moving inanimate objects and photographing them a frame at a time. When run at the cinematic standard of 24 frames a second, they zip about as though moving under their own power.
After film school, Park came to work for Aardman, creating the dazzling stop-motion animation for Peter Gabriel’s music video “Sledgehammer” and completing the first “Wallace & Gromit” short, “A Grand Day Out,” in which the duo runs out of cheese and flies to the moon to replenish their supply.
“The Wrong Trousers” pitted Wallace and Gromit against a bizarrely comic penguin on a robbery spree, while “A Close Shave” has Wallace falling for a wool-shop owner and Gromit framed for sheep rustling.
For all their wacky adventures, Wallace and Gromit’s peaceable little domestic kingdom presents a cozy, reassuring front to audiences, said Aardman spokesman Arthur Sheriff.
“A quite eminent British psychologist said one of the reasons children like ‘Wallace & Gromit’ so much is because no matter how big the adventure is, it starts from the front room and ends in the front room,” Sheriff said. “They take great security in that. Wallace and Gromit have been to the moon and everything, but that cup of tea in the front room is really comforting after all that.”
Rocket scientist and cat?The duo originated in quite different form. Park had begun with the idea of an eccentric living alone and building a rocket in his basement, then decided the character needed some sort of animal sidekick.
Gromit originally was supposed to be a cat, but in molding his clay figures, Park found the bigger shape and thicker, sturdier legs of a dog easier to make.
Once he hit on the notion of Gromit as smarter than your average dog — and smarter than Wallace — the whole dynamic of canine as benevolent overseer to dorky man fell into place.
“I guess if I’d have started Wallace and Gromit now from scratch, there’d have been all kinds of pressure to make Wallace cooler,” Park said. “But the great thing that’s been on my side is, he already exists, so people have to live with his idiosyncrasies the way Gromit has to.
“It’s not just a product of today, of some commercial marketing mind. He just came off the top of my head as a student and hasn’t changed since.”