Filmmaker Nick Park already had won two Oscars, the second for Wallace & Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers, when American viewers finally got to see that hilariously clever claymation short via a Wednesday evening PBS screening on March 20, 1995.
That’s how long it took to cross the pond. Unbelievable.
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| Wallace,left, thinks that his recently invented Norbot "helper gnome" will revolutionize back-yard gardening ... but the more practical Gromit has his doubts. |
Park and his Aardman production team subsequently made the world a better place, in their own modest way: not merely by bringing renewed respect to the painstaking art of sculpted clay animation, but because they also carved a niche for adorable, family-friendly British whimsy.
Along the way, Park and his hilariously eccentric claymation duo collected two more Academy Awards, for 1996’s A Close Shave and 2006’s feature-length The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
They’re all laden with folksy, tea-and-cheese, veddy-British charm, laced with countless spot gags and a wacky, off-kilter sense of humor.
Along with plenty of eyeball-rolling puns.
That’s also true of the many other delightful Aardman productions that kept us entertained along the way, among them Chicken Run, Arthur Christmas and Shaun the Sheep TV episodes and big-screen features.
All of which brings us to this new film: not merely the first Wallace & Gromit entry we’ve seen since 2010’s A Matter of Loaf and Death, but also an inspired sequel to The Wrong Trousers.
That earlier short’s villain — Feathers McGraw, the nefarious, inscrutable penguin who disguises himself as a chicken, with the help of a red rubber glove — is seeking payback. (Park and co-director Melin Crossingham must be the only people alive who could made a mute, animated penguin look sinister.)
A brief prologue recaps how the beloved duo captured Feathers, and turned him over to the constabulary; the penguin subsequently was sentenced to a “high-security institution” ... the local zoo.
The story proper kicks off on a typical day with the ceaselessly inventive Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead, sounding just like the late and very lamented Peter Sallis, who played this role for years). Wallace never met a simple task that couldn’t be “improved” via some crazily complicated contraption.
By way of example, each morning begins when Gromit activates the “Get Up Deluxe,” which opens the curtains in Wallace’s bedroom, tilts his bed, and — with the push of a red “launch” button — sends him down a chute, removes his pajamas, dumps him into a bathtub — with pre-wash, soak, scrub and eco cycles — then dries and plunges him into the Dress-O-Matic, after which he plops into the downstairs kitchen, fully clothed, in time for the automatically prepared tea-and-toast breakfast.
It’s a breathtaking 70 seconds — choreographed to Lorne Balfe and Julian Nott’s exhilarating score, with echoes of the iconic main theme — which sets the tone for future, equally frantic action sequences.
