‘Wallace & Gromit’ offer a ‘real kind of love’

Kindred spirits
Lord and his Aardman co-founder David Sproxton, who both served as producers on “Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” met Park in the mid-1980s while doing a guest lecture to animation students at Park’s film school near London.

In Park, they found a kindred spirit with similar aims, trying to push the boundaries of stop-motion animation, a technique that involves meticulously moving inanimate objects and photographing them a frame at a time. When run at the cinematic standard of 24 frames a second, they zip about as though moving under their own power.

After film school, Park came to work for Aardman, creating the dazzling stop-motion animation for Peter Gabriel’s music video “Sledgehammer” and completing the first “Wallace & Gromit” short, “A Grand Day Out,” in which the duo runs out of cheese and flies to the moon to replenish their supply.

“The Wrong Trousers” pitted Wallace and Gromit against a bizarrely comic penguin on a robbery spree, while “A Close Shave” has Wallace falling for a wool-shop owner and Gromit framed for sheep rustling.

For all their wacky adventures, Wallace and Gromit’s peaceable little domestic kingdom presents a cozy, reassuring front to audiences, said Aardman spokesman Arthur Sheriff.

“A quite eminent British psychologist said one of the reasons children like ‘Wallace & Gromit’ so much is because no matter how big the adventure is, it starts from the front room and ends in the front room,” Sheriff said. “They take great security in that. Wallace and Gromit have been to the moon and everything, but that cup of tea in the front room is really comforting after all that.”

Rocket scientist and cat?
The duo originated in quite different form. Park had begun with the idea of an eccentric living alone and building a rocket in his basement, then decided the character needed some sort of animal sidekick.

Gromit originally was supposed to be a cat, but in molding his clay figures, Park found the bigger shape and thicker, sturdier legs of a dog easier to make.

Once he hit on the notion of Gromit as smarter than your average dog — and smarter than Wallace — the whole dynamic of canine as benevolent overseer to dorky man fell into place.

“I guess if I’d have started Wallace and Gromit now from scratch, there’d have been all kinds of pressure to make Wallace cooler,” Park said. “But the great thing that’s been on my side is, he already exists, so people have to live with his idiosyncrasies the way Gromit has to.

“It’s not just a product of today, of some commercial marketing mind. He just came off the top of my head as a student and hasn’t changed since.”

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