Sixteen years after their last appearance in the short film “A Sacred Trouble”, Wallace and Gromit are back in a new adventure broadcast from this Friday, January 3 on Netflix.
A gift to start the new year: Wallace and Gromit, whose last appearance dates back to the short film A hell of a mess sixteen years ago, are back in a new adventure broadcast from this Friday, January 3 on Netflix.
“They have had other adventures in video games and virtual reality,” Nick Park, their creator, told BFMTV. “But we never produce a film Wallace et Gromit without having had an excellent idea before. We never force this creative process.”
“We get asked all the time when we’re going to make a new Wallace et Gromit“, adds co-director Merlin Crossingham. “I think their fans miss them more than us! Because they never leave our minds. We think about them all the time.”
Artificial intelligence
Titled The Palm of Vengeancethis new feature film of approximately 1 hour 15 minutes evokes with the usual humor and phlegm of the British studio Aardman a hot topic: artificial intelligence.
As Wallace creates an intelligent garden gnome who seems to gain autonomy and develop his own will, Gromit worries about his master’s increasingly unhealthy dependence on his inventions.
The idea of confronting Wallace and Gromit with garden gnomes had been brewing for several years in Nick Park. But initially, the director didn’t see how to develop his story beyond a 13-minute short film.
“It was while thinking about several potential avenues to develop this story that we said to ourselves that the garden gnomes were missing a real motivation,” says Nick Park.
“Garden gnomes are very innocent characters,” points out co-director Merlin Crossingham. “We needed a really good villain to justify their actions and make them go crazy. And we already had one at our disposal.”
Iconic villain
If the universe of Wallace and Gromit is mainly aimed at children, it has featured several notable antagonists such as the were-rabbit and especially the penguin Feather McGraw, a figure of evil who appeared in Bad pants (1993).
“We get asked very often to bring Feathers McGraw back into a Wallace and Gromit adventure,” confirms Nick Park. “But that’s not what pushed us to make this film. It was the most logical way to unlock our story.”
However, this is the first time that Nick Park has reused an antagonist from the Wallace and Gromit universe. “Once we had this idea, everything came together perfectly,” says Merlin Crossingham.
Anthology action scene
All the challenge of The Palm of Vengeance was not only to make a film that lived up to expectations but also to imagine a chase as striking as the one that features Gromit and Feather McGraw in Bad pants.
Considered by Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro to be one of the most impressive action sequences of the genre, this scene shows Gromit chasing Feather McGraw on a speeding electric train.
“We are aware of the praise and there was obviously a lot of pressure to imagine a different scene,” smiles Nick Park. “Especially since The Bad Pants hasn’t aged! The scene still works perfectly.”
“When we did this scene, no one really knew what they were doing. No one thought about the issues,” continues the director. “We had to rediscover this innocence by realizing The Palm of Vengeance.”
Years of work
With the evolution of cinematographic techniques, the energy put into these kinds of scenes is even increased tenfold, insists Merlin Crossingham: “With digital cameras, we see everything and we can notice all the imperfections on the screen.”
To achieve the perfect result, Aardman spent three years refining the script. It took between 1 and 2 years to design the characters and settings and finally 15 months to shoot the film.
The result pleased the British public at least. Broadcast on the BBC on Christmas Eve, The Palm of Vengeance attracted more than 9.4 million viewers. A better audience on the British channel than the Christmas speech of King Charles III.
What’s next for Wallace and Gromit? “A well-deserved rest!” laughs Merlin Crossingham. “More seriously, we don’t know. But there will be something,” he promises. “I hope not another sixteen years absence.”
