The cheese-loving stop-motion comedy duo Wallace and Gromit have been stumbling into invention-fueled hijinks since 1989’s Oscar-nominated short A Grand Day Out. This January, the characters return in A Vengeance Most Fowl, a feature-length adventure that’s basically a full-blown action movie. At this point, there’s seemingly nothing original creator Nick Park and Aardman Animation can’t do in claymation.
So when I asked Park in early December if he would ever ditch the stop-motion for a “live-action” Wallace movie, in the style of Disney’s recent spate of hand-drawn-to-photoreal conversions, the answer was… immediate and visceral.
“Well, it’s quite an easy answer,” he says. “NOOOOOOOO.”
The live-action redo pipeline is not slowing down, despite mixed reactions and receipts. Disney started the trend nearly a decade ago with back to back hits of The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. 2023’s The Little Mermaid struggled to reach those highs, grossing as much worldwide as The Lion King did in the states alone, and this month’s Mufasa (technically a live-action-ish reimagining prequel) is off to a slow start this holiday season. But that isn’t stopping Disney from plowing through the backlog, with Snow White, Lilo & Stitch, and Moana all arriving in the next two years. Universal will try its luck in 2025 with a live-action How to Train Your Dragon, too.
As for Wallace and Gromit, Park hopes to stick to animation.
“I think the movies themselves will always be clay,” he said. But Park has the ambition, along with his Vengeance Most Fowl co-director Merlin Crossingham, to bring the characters to any imaginable platform. Wallace and Gromit have done video games, they’ve done AR, and the director hopes they can do just about anything. “But I think [clay] is part of the character, it’s part of their soul to be that medium. It’s what they were born out of and it might take something away. It’s quite hard to define. ‘Thumby and funny’ is the phrase we’ve often used.”
Neither Park nor Crossingham want to see Wallace and Gromit stuck in the past. Each film is a reason to evolve the characters — technologically (as with the armatures of the modern sculptures) and emotionally. While Vengeance Most Fowl might be the most stunt-heavy Wallace and Gromit film to date, it also forces the characters to examine their friendship and, by the end, hug it out.
“We’ve sort of pushed them emotionally,” Crossingham said. “It’s in relative terms within the Wallace and Gromit world, but we’ve pushed them and I think it’s great to see them having a bit of a bigger arc to their emotional story.”
“But it’s very much Wallace and Gromit,” Park added. “It is not too overt, but… a British version.”
Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl premieres on Netflix on Jan. 3, 2025.
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