9: Stop Motion Animation

In class we watched Nick Park's Creature Comforts, and although this short is rather genius in it's use of real interviews to voice the animals in the cages, it is not Park's most famous work. The Wallace and Gromit series, consisting of A Close Shave, The Wrong Trousers, and A Grand Day Out have gained world wide recognition and even led to Park's creation of a feature film: Wallace and Gromit; The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.  These claymation works really emphasize the virtuosity of Park and his unique story telling ability involving Wallace's unique relation with his non-speaking, but nonetheless anthropomorphic dog, Gromit.

The whole series is very entertaining and I have loved them since I was a kid. Whether going to the moon to get cheese, confusing pants, or thwarting heists, Wallace and Gromit continually amuses and entertains. I have always been amazed that Gromit doesn't talk. In a Disney version of these stories Gromit most definitely would be a speaking dog, and the conversations between he and Wallace would have been inane at best.

A few years ago Park's studio burned down, losing many of the original sets that had been designed for the films, a tragic loss for stop motion animation.  These miniatures were incredibly intricate and must have taken hours to make.  Furthermore, the audiences of the shows could definitely tell that these sets were miniature, but due to the claymation animation, most could easily look past the less than perfect animation and use their imagination to look deeper within the cartoons for the essence underneath.