Faced with modeling clay, AI had better behave

Wallace and Gromit return to the screens with a new feature film for the holidays, the first in twenty years. Or when modeling clay wants to be smarter than artificial intelligence. A Christmas gift to the British public, who will discover it exclusively on the BBC on the evening of December 25, “Wallace and Gromit: The Palm of Vengeance” will then be broadcast in the rest of the world on Netflix from January 3.

Nothing has really changed for the most endearing duo in animated cinema. In the very British living room of their brick house, Wallace, the eccentric inventor, and Gromit, his phlegmatic dog, lead their best life: armchair, cheese platter and tea break.

This well-regulated daily life will be turned upside down by an invention from Wallace: Norbot, an “intelligent” robot that does everything. A professional in cleaning and gardening, this assistant powered by artificial intelligence must spare them all the household chores and make their fortune. That's to say without the return, thirty years later, of Feather McGraw, the evil penguin who has been languishing in prison since the short film “A Bad Pants”, released in 1993. Norbot falls into very bad hands.

“Norbot is Wallace's best invention of all time!”, laughs the creator of Wallace and Gromit, Nick Park, in an interview with AFP. An Oscar-winning director, he has restored the nobility of one of the most ancestral techniques of cinema, stop motion, or frame-by-frame shooting.

Craftsmanship and hard work with handmade plasticine puppets that brought glory to a one-of-a-kind studio, Aardman (“Shaun the Sheep,” “Chicken Run”), including Wallace and Gromit remain the mascots.

In “The Palm of Vengeance”, Wallace, the geek before his time, and Gromit, the techno-skeptic, each have their own way of seeing technology. Accessible to all, the film is a mischievous nod to the rise of artificial intelligence, this technology which invades our professional and personal lives, even to the peaceful city of the two heroes.

“Wallace is completely in his delusion, obsessed” with the idea of ​​delegating tasks to his robot, “while Gromit represents the human touch”, who likes to do things by himself, continues Nick Park. At a time when artificial intelligence is proposing to replace humans for a multitude of things, the film “is about regaining control and finding a balance” in the face of the surge of technology, he confides. “It’s a very contemporary story, but told in a traditional way.”

“I love the fact that we have access to technology, but sometimes we have to wonder if it improves our lives and our connections with others or if it damages them,” says Nick Park. “Artificial intelligence is like a very sharp knife: you can use it for a surgical operation as well as for a murder,” illustrates its co-director Merlin Crossingham.

And to shoot Wallace and Gromit, “as far as we know, we didn’t use artificial intelligence!”, smiles Nick Park. “It’s all made by real human beings and we hope that comes across on screen.”

For this new “handmade” feature film, more than 200 people worked around the plasticine statuettes, with a top speed of two minutes of film produced… per week. Of course, technology can help in cinema, he admits. But in the end, on the screen, “it’s important that we see the fingerprints” on the modeling clay.