My brothers and I could agree on precisely one thing when we were children: Wallace and Gromit. We must have watched the bumbling, cheese-loving inventor and his highly intelligent dog fly to the moon in their homemade rocket and thwart a jewel heist by a devious penguin literally hundreds of times, yet we never got sick of it.
These short stop-motion films, (A Grand Day Out, 1989, and The Wrong Trousers, 1993) created by Aardman Animations, were such formative part of my childhood that I approached an adult rewatch with some trepidation. I need not have worried: Wallace and Gromit are just as funny, just as lively, just as delightful at the age of 32 as they were at the age of eight. Furthermore, for an adult, they come with an extra layer of wonder – an eye for details or cultural references missed as a child, and an appreciation for the sheer artistry and inventiveness that went into creating them.
For those who grew up with these characters, then, an element of deep nostalgia accompanies the opening of the exhibition Wallace & Gromit and Friends: the Magic of Aardman in Australia. Yet there is also the potential for newfound appreciation, too: curated by Art Ludique-Le Musée, Paris, and showing at the Australian Centre for Moving Image, Melbourne, the exhibition is an extraordinary insight into the creative minds of the hugely successful British animation studio.
For co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, in Australia for the opening of the exhibition, the 40 years of Aardman Animations represents their life’s work: from schoolboy friends making models in the family kitchen, to creative directors of an Academy award-winning animation studio, with more than 150 full-time staff.
They’ve overseen the creation of all kinds of bizarre and hilarious characters – from man-eating rabbits to bumbling pirates to heroic chickens – and watched animation develop from crude puppetry to virtual reality, yet their enthusiasm for making stories out of clay has not waned.
“I always think there’s a genuine magic to clay which is very, very special,” says Lord. “When you’re watching a film you should be totally into the characters and absorbed in the story but in puppet animation there’s this little bit at the back of your mind that is marvelling, as well, at the fabulous illusion that you’re watching.”
When the duo first started making animated films, the style of the time was very, well, inanimate. “There wasn’t much performance in it,” says Lord. “Especially puppet animation, it just tended to be characters that waggle their heads and wave their arms at each other.”
“Trumpton style,” agrees Sproxton, referring to the British children’s TV series from the 1960s.
“So we concentrated on making [the clay puppets] so they could perform,” Lord continues.
The key to this was to focus on the eyes and brow line – think of the extraordinary facial expressions of the intelligent but entirely mute dog, Gromit.
“The miracle is that the working part is about an inch – you know, between the top of his nose and the top of his eyebrows – less than an inch of plasticine, and just with that eyebrow and movement of his eyes, he does it all,” says Lord.
Lord credits Aardman animator and creator of Wallace and Gromit, Nick Park, who joined the studio in the mid 80s, with developing this technique. Park admitted in a interview years ago that Wallace’s faithful hound was originally envisaged as a cat, but it’s less well known that Gromit was going to talk as well. Then Park – while struggling to animate the dog’s now-non-existent mouth in an early scene of the first Wallace and Gromit feature, A Grand Day Out – realised that the clay allowed him to manipulate his expression so subtly and effectively that Gromit need never say a word.
“One of the joys of clay is it’s infinitely malleable in a very subtle way,” says Sproxton.
“This is where Pete [Lord] slightly underestimates the legacy that he’s left – because he did all the animation on Morph early on,” he continues, referring to Aardman’s first character, a little clay man who first appeared on BBC TV in the 1970s. “It was I think, [his] learning, and the ability to make that little figure emote just through physical movements and body language.”
One of the highlights of the Acmi exhibition is the insight it gives into the animators’ process. The puppets – made from plasticine, and only slightly taller than an adult-sized hand – are accompanied by everything from early character sketches and ideas – idle scribbles on scraps of paper – to the original sets and character models, including the 5m tall pirate ship from the 2012 feature film, The Pirates! Band of Misfits (also called The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists in the UK).
There is even a room at the back of the exhibition entirely devoted to making your own stop-motion animation, with clay, sets and detailed instructions provided. My three-second film, titled First Cat on the Moon, is unlikely to win me an Oscar, but the experience highlights something else about stop-motion animation that Sproxton believes audiences respond to – and indeed, that reflects where he and Lord themselves began: “You sense that, well if I had the time and the patience, I could do this at home myself. Technically it’s feasible!”
Sproxton and Lord began their careers in children’s television, which still comprises most of what they do at Aardman. That said, there was a period – what Lord calls the “great boom time” of the 1980s – when Britain’s Channel 4 and the BBC were commissioning quite a lot of animation for adults.
“There’s a lot of great stuff you can do for an adult market – and actually there’s a huge adult audience out there,” says Sproxton. American TV has had quite a lot of success in this area, he says, with shows such as The Simpsons and Family Guy, and slots like Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.
“I keep expecting that Pixar will do it,” says Lord. “And then they’ll be really smug because they’ll think they’ve invented it, whereas in fact it’s been there forever.”
Not that Aardman is looking to make the next Simpsons. Sproxton and Lord are fully aware that they make a quintessentially British kind of comedy, which they sometimes struggle to translate for an American audience.
“Most American animation, it’s wildly exaggerated,” says Lord. “It’s a question of style. I’m generalising wildly, but they think that to keep the audience engaged, the secret is to jump round the screen wildly with big wide gestures and exaggerate the mouth. And what we do is quite understated, really.”
Sproxton name-checks the Goons, Spike Milligan, and Steptoe and Son as comedic influences. “British comedy tends to revolve around the underdog, or somebody at the bottom of the food chain,” he says. “American comedy tends to focus on aspirational characters.”
Lord chimes in: “They like the characters to learn a lesson. Now, I understand why that is satisfying – emotionally, that is satisfying, and if you can do it genuinely then that’s great. But I also think, wow, I haven’t come to the movies to be taught a moral lesson. I go to be told a story and to be entertained.”
Sproxton recounts a conversation between Aardman and Dreamworks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg and his team, in which they were discussing the story reel for Wallace and Gromit’s first full-length feature film, Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). The Dreamworks team wanted to know: what did Wallace learn at the end of the film? “The whole point is that he never does learn!” says Sproxton. “The point is Gromit’s got him out of the problem yet again.”
Given how much fine-tuning each story goes through before it even gets turned into clay, oodles of storylines and whole casts of characters are created and then eventually discarded. But this extreme fine-tuning is also what makes their stories and characters so enduring.
“The story is very highly crafted,” says Sproxton.
“We kind of believe optimistically, idealistically, that audience cares also because it’s handmade, that that gives it a certain sort of warmth,” says Lord. “That somehow the warmth and the love and the attention that went into the making will radiate back out from the screen. And that seems to be the case.”
• Guardian Australia was a guest of Australian Centre for Moving Image
