New Wallace and Gromit film for Christmas '24; Peter Sallis still dead

[madhair60]

wasn't so keen on seeing wallace's arse in the last film.

Yes you were. You loved it. You masturbate to it constantly.

[mothman]

Close Shave definitely benefits in retrospect from having been followed by Loaf & Death, but personally I didn't think it was that bad to begin with.

[Replies From View]

Nick Park was disappointed by A Close Shave himself.  The BBC gave them more money to get it done more quickly, and he felt that it suffered from that shorter production time.

The DVD commentaries on those first three films are obviously worth checking out.  They are quite candid.  I found it quite comforting that Park had his own misgivings about something I had been disappointed by.  The guy's a perfectionist, loves spending time on little details, and I'm sure he's had to let go of projects before he was happy with them, or gone along with 'bigger picture' company decisions that would have been against his nature.

[Replies From View]

I bet he'd have spent a fortnight crafting Wallace's buttocks if he could, but Peter Lord would have said, "No, come along now, Nick.  We haven't even started the storyboard yet." 

[H-O-W-L]

If anyone here hasn't seen Pirates! I really suggest you do. It's clearly Aardman going full cock-out back to form after Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas -- which I think they've gone on record as saying they fucking hated making?

[Old Nehamkin]

Arthur Christmas is pretty good.

[idunnosomename]

No big complaints about Pirates, it's fine and some funny jokes. But horrible studio meddling like insisting Hugh Grant play the pirate captain rather than Martin Clunes (who I believe did record all his dialogue in pre-production?)

[Old Nehamkin]

I remember Pirates screenwriter Gideon Defoe saying that they had to fight against a repeated suggestion by the Sony execs that the film should end with all the characters breaking into a big dance number.

[Replies From View]

A "smart gnome"? Like... like a smart phone, yeah?

Wallace and Gromit have always been filled with strained puns, but there's maybe something a bit more desperate about any spin on any newer and constantly present/discussed technology (especially when that "new" thing has actually been around for a good decade or more).

I guess whether it works for you will depend on whether you think of it as Nick Park shoehorning puns in, or Wallace's own humour.

I honestly didn't think of smart phones until you said it, though.  I just imagined the gnomes with lights in their eyes that have been in Wallace and Gromit for ages, and as they've been used to protect homes, "smart homes".  Which is a better rhyme and a less tenuous pun, I guess.

[mothman]

I sort of know what you mean. I did like the digs at social media and influencers in the Shaun Christmas special, but at the same time it felt a bit, I don't know, obvious?

[Jerzy Bondov]

Shaun the Sheep's world is a lot more elastic than Wallace & Gromit, much more sitcommy and inconsistent. Like in Farmaggeddon it's a big deal that there's an alien even though there have been multiple aliens in the series, and also the farm suddenly has vast corn fields which are then gone in the next series. I think that's the Richard Starzak influence as opposed to Nick Park.

[Glyn]

Arthur Christmas is pretty good.

It's great (and with a Peter Baynham script too) but I'd say you wouldn't particularly know it's Aardman without being told.

Atleast this news shows that the BBC are being optimistic enough to think they will still exist in some format by Xmas 2024. Guess this is the best we can hope for from the 'fully British TV shows' edict. 

[Midas]

Yes you were. You loved it. You masturbate to it constantly.

no

i merely use that image - medicinally - to stop myself from masturbating. if i inadvertently find myself flat on my back with my tongue lolled out, arm-deep in the grip of sin, i'll take a quick peek at wallace's arse to make it stop. that is all.

[madhair60]

Yeah. Makes it stop alright.

[Replies From View]

Yes I think describing the plasticine arse in Midas' ownership as an 'image' is a little disingenuous.

[Catalogue Trousers]

Day and Trousers remain superb. Shave is okay but it's where the creative rot set in (Shaun is very much the cute animal merchandising opportunity and the Wallace/Gwendolene love subplot goes nowhere). Loaf is just an enormous let-down, although I do quite like Wererabbit.

Personally, I'd sooner have Rex the Runt return. A guy can dream.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

Obsessed with the janky mustiness of A Grand Day Out. Warm and lovely and slightly terrifying

[idunnosomename]

The coin-op moon robot is so bloody weird. As I said with the other ones you can see where Park gets his ideas, from Hammer horror to Hitchcock, but this is practically Dadaist.

Who put it there?
If it's a policeman, why is it coin-operated?
Will the second coin run out?

Very existential. Never repeated and miles away from simple stuff like Wererabbit

[Replies From View]

Day and Trousers remain superb. Shave is okay but it's where the creative rot set in (Shaun is very much the cute animal merchandising opportunity and the Wallace/Gwendolene love subplot goes nowhere). Loaf is just an enormous let-down, although I do quite like Wererabbit.

Personally, I'd sooner have Rex the Runt return. A guy can dream.

I forgot to mention in my earlier criticism of A Close Shave that - for me - the presence of additional voices is something else that negatively separates out everything that follows The Wrong Trousers.

I'd have rather continued they continued with the world of Wallace, Gromit and machines/creatures that can't communicate in spoken language.  Left to his own devices I wonder whether that's what Nick Park would have gone with, but A Close Shave had a lot more meddling on every level (for example the long-standing composer Julian Notts had several consultants all of a sudden, who were making him justify his musical choices).

The fact that the additional voice of A Close Shave is a love interest is so boring, such a cliche.  I'm banging the asexual drum again, but why not just let there be an inventor with a dog who doesn't give a shit about that kind of stuff?  Unless it was all Nick Park's idea, in which case it's obviously perfectly fine.

[Replies From View]

Obsessed with the janky mustiness of A Grand Day Out. Warm and lovely and slightly terrifying

I love it.  The scene where Wallace is tasting parts of the moon's surface is so characterful in its expression.  It's a perfect example of Nick Park's own acting emanating through Wallace's performance. 

The scenes you've highlighted in the above gifs were filmed before Wallace had said the word "cheese".

[Replies From View]

The coin-op moon robot is so bloody weird. As I said with the other ones you can see where Park gets his ideas, from Hammer horror to Hitchcock, but this is practically Dadaist.

Who put it there?
If it's a policeman, why is it coin-operated?
Will the second coin run out?

Very existential. Never repeated and miles away from simple stuff like Wererabbit

In the DVD commentary, Nick Park describes witnessing a child burst into tears that the coin-operated moon robot was left alone at the end.  He explained to the child that the robot was happy, but it's hard to reconcile, isn't it.  We know that coin is going to run out, and it'll just freeze to the spot again.



Seriously, everyone.  Get the DVDs and watch them with the commentaries turned on.  The commentary track for The Wrong Trousers even has the proper original music cues in the background.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

The coin-op moon robot is so bloody weird. As I said with the other ones you can see where Park gets his ideas, from Hammer horror to Hitchcock, but this is practically Dadaist.

Who put it there?
If it's a policeman, why is it coin-operated?
Will the second coin run out?

Very existential. Never repeated and miles away from simple stuff like Wererabbit

I always thought the robot wouldn't be able to enjoy skiing for very long. Then again, it doesn't really deserve to, after trying to wallop Wallace with a truncheon.

[Old Nehamkin]

If I recall correctly, in the Grand Day Out commentary Park says that the original script featured a Star Wars style moon cantina filled with all sorts of different aliens and robots, and Gromit having to rescue Wallace after he gets arrested and thrown in jail _{for saying he's English.} Park ultimately had to scale down the scope of the film after realising that it takes 3 hours just to get Wallace to say the word "toast" and I suppose the run-in with the traffic-warden-esque robot represents a sort of distilled version of that idea.

I very much agree that the eerie minimalistic barrenness of those first two films is sadly missed in the later entries. Maybe a future film could be produced in a kind of McCartney style where Nick Park just locks himself in a shed for 6 years or so and does the whole thing himself.

[Replies From View]

I very much agree that eerie minimalistic barrenness of those first two films is sadly missed in the later entries. Maybe a future film could be produced in a kind of McCartney style where Nick Park just locks himself in a shed for 6 years or so and does the whole thing himself.

Speaking of the passage of time, I'm always distinctly perplexed by any photos showing Nick Park at his current age.  It doesn't compute for me.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Gromit having to rescue Wallace after he gets arrested and thrown in jail _{for saying he's English.}

This has reminded me of a thing from several years ago, when someone kept editing the Wikipedia page to say that The Wrong Trousers was all about immigration. Apparently, Wallace saying he was "Partial to a nice black pudding. With bacon, of course" was loaded with meaning. They said this was all from some book they were writing.

[Replies From View]

Then again, it doesn't really deserve to, after trying to wallop Wallace with a truncheon.

I'm not sure why, but I always got the sense that it broke its programming somewhere in the course of the film, even though there's absolutely no suggestion of it.

The way it fights for its life and tries to get onboard the rocket screams HELP I HAVE BEEN MISUNDERSTOOD THIS ENTIRE TIME, I DON'T WANT TO BE AN OFFICIOUS TRAFFIC WARDEN ANYMORE HEEEEELLLLLP

[Old Nehamkin]

This has reminded me of a thing from several years ago, when someone kept editing the Wikipedia page to say that The Wrong Trousers was all about immigration. Apparently, Wallace saying he was "Partial to a nice black pudding. With bacon, of course" was loaded with meaning. They said this was all from some book they were writing.

Oh yes, I do remember that. Paragraphs and paragraphs of text including something about Gromit representing the native British worker and Feathers McGraw representing the onset of cheap immigrant labour.

[idunnosomename]

Park and Lord

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/mar/03/how-we-made-wallace-and-gromit

Among other things does seem to hint that there'd be a Brief Encounter bit with Wendolene.

I like the countryside we see in the big chase bit with the sheep in Shave. Some of the opening out of the world is nice and an obvious consequence of budget and resources going up post-Oscar

Also it does have a psychopathic robot with a plan of turning sheep and even his master into dog food, and ends up basically being lobotomised (which is the funnier pay off of the ending imo)

[Thomas]

I love (and I do mean love, with my full-blooded heart chambers) A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Similar to what Replies was saying earlier about the eeriness of W&G, I don't think it's unfair to compare A Grand Day Out to Blue Jam. Best experienced in the small hours; a perfect, mysterious blend of cosiness, uncanny strangeness, and poignancy. So intimate and homemade - it feels like you're the only person in the world privy to it, big light off, cup of tea in hand, peering sleepily into the dreamstuff of a northern plasticine coma.

The Wrong Trousers is magnificent, as everybody rightly recognises. The museum alarm sequence was duly praised above, the perfect comic-anxious mesh of sights, sounds, and angles, with the pathos of Sallis' helpless wails pitched to perfection.

A Close Shave is great, but it's the one of the classic trio I revisit least. Matter of Loaf and Death is the weakest of the shorts, and somehow feels too bright and out in the open (too consciously modern?), but I like that it retains an unsettling edge by including a serial killer. I prefer its working title, Trouble at Mill.

Ben Whitehead is a good Wallace, but I'm so familiar with Sallis' every syllable that even Whitehead's latest contributions - which many laud as spot-on - sound unhappily off to me. I can hear the strain in his vowels. Too low here, too high there - it's distracting, like waiting for a tightrope walker to trip up.

[Replies From View]

There is one part of A Matter of Loaf and Death that I like, and it's the part where Gromit is by himself exploring the serial killer's house.  At that moment, it feels like the film is able to breathe and find its rhythm/pace as a tense thriller, but it doesn't last long.

It doesn't know what it wants to be.  There are some supremely misjudged cartoony sound effects included, such as when Gromit rushes from the shed to stop Wallace from eating some soup.  Scooby Doo rabbarabba boink wooeee twong garbage.  Somebody involved with the world of these characters clearly isn't seeing that they need to be presented seriously for the absurdism to work.