For metal, plastic or rubber rings, see Grommet. Wallace & Gromit Wallace & Gromit are the main characters in a series of three British animated short films and a feature-length film by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. All the characters were made from moulded Plasticine modelling clay on wire frames, and filmed with stop motion clay animation. Wallace is an absent-minded inventor, cheese enthusiast (especially for Wensleydale cheese), and companion to the dog Gromit who appears to be rather more intelligent than his master. Wallace is voiced by veteran actor Peter Sallis; Gromit remains silent, communicating only through body language. Contents 1 Characters 1.1 Wallace 1.2 Gromit 1.2.1 Trivia 2 Studio Fire Incident 3 Films 3.1 Original 30-minute Shorts 3.2 Cracking Contraptions 3.3 Feature Film 3.4 Notes 4 Video games 5 Stop-motion Technique 6 External links Characters Wallace From The Wrong Trousers - proof that Wallace and Gromit live in Wigan Wallace lives at 62 West Wallaby Street, Wigan, Lancs [1]. Proof of this assertion may be found in the film The Wrong Trousers - the pile of letters Gromit picks up while looking for birthday cards even sports a postcode - WG7 7FU, although a check of the Royal Mail's Postcodes Online service [2] fails to find the corresponding West Wallaby Street address. Wallace can usually be found wearing a white shirt, brown wool trousers, green knitted pullover and red tie. He loves cheese - preferably Wensleydale cheese and crackers. The thought of Lancashire hotpot keeps him going in a crisis. He enjoys a nice cup of tea or a drop of Bordeaux red for those special occasions. He reads the Morning Post, the Afternoon Post, and the Evening Post, and occasionally "Ay-Up" which is a parody on "Hello" magazine. He is an inveterate inventor, creating elaborate contraptions that often do not work as intended. Most of Wallace's inventions look not unlike the designs of Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg , and Nick Park has said of Wallace that all his inventions are designed around the principle of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Some of Wallace's contraptions actually are based on a real-life invention. For example, Wallace's method of getting up in the morning incorporates a bed that tips over to wake up its owner, an invention that was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 by Theophilus Carter, and is similar to a device sold in Japan that is used to ensure a certain wakeup time. He has a kindly nature, and is perhaps a little over-optimistic. Nick Park, his creator says: "He's a very self-contained figure. A very homely sort who doesn't mind the odd adventure." He is loosely based on Nick Park's father. Gromit Gromit — the master spy; as depicted in "The Wrong Trousers" Gromit is a dog who lives with Wallace. His birthday is 12th February, and he graduated from "Dogwarts University" (a pun on Hogwarts of the Harry Potter books). He likes knitting, reading the newspaper, his alarm clock, bone, brush and framed photo of himself with Wallace. He is also very handy with electronic equipment (a grommet is a piece of electrical wiring insulation, a term Nick Park picked up from his brother, an electrician), and is sensitive, intelligent and resourceful. He holds a genuine affection for his master and remains loyal to him, even at his own expense or when Wallace's contraptions inevitably blow up in his face. Gromit doesn't express himself with spoken words, but his body language speaks volumes, though he does at times make dog like noises, such as a yelp. Nick Park says: "We are a nation of dog-lovers and so many people have said: "'My dog looks at me just like Gromit does!'" and... "'Gromit was originally the name for a cat in another story!'" Gromit enjoys eating 'KornFlakes' and reading many books including: The Republic, by Pluto (a pun on Plato and also a nod to the Disney character Pluto); Crime and Punishment, by Fido Dogstoevsky (a pun on Fyodor Dostoevsky); Men are from Mars, Dogs are from Pluto (a pun on Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus); Electronics For Dogs (a pun on Electronics For Dummies) Grated Expectations (a pun on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens) Sheep. He also listens to Bach and solves puzzles with ease. Trivia Many critics believe that Gromit's silence makes him the perfect straight man with a pantomime expressiveness that drew favourable comparisons to Buster Keaton. NASA has now named one of its new prototype Mars explorer robots after Gromit. The other new prototype is named "K-9". [3] Gromit happens to mean “destroy” in Russian, (Russian: громить, cf. pogrom). Nick Park originally imagined Wallace as owning a cat. The characteristic music was composed by Julian Nott. Studio Fire Incident On October 10, 2005, a fire at a storage building in Bristol owned by Aardman Animations destroyed most of the props and sets used in the animated films. Creator Nick Park released a statement that the original Wallace and Gromit figures were in his suitcase on a world tour with him at the time. Some other models survived as they were part of a travelling exhibition at the time. The sets for Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-rabbit were also spared. Other figures, however, such as Wallace and Gromit travelling in their sidecar, were lost. The films themselves are unharmed having been stored at a separate location. (BBC News: Fire hits Wallace and Gromit sets). Recent reports have discovered the cause of the fire was an electrical fault in a ground floor office. The faults were either due to a faulty CCTV system or a faulty water heater. Films Wallace and Gromit have appeared in three half-hour films, an ident campaign, a series of short webcast animations, and also appear in a full-length feature film that won the 2005 (US) Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit Original 30-minute Shorts The original half-hour shorts were: A Grand Day Out (1989, won BAFTA Best Animated Film, nominated for Oscar Best Short Film, Animated) The Wrong Trousers (1993, won BAFTA Best Animated Film, won Oscar Best Short Film, Animated) A Close Shave (1995, won BAFTA Best Animation, won Oscar Best Short Film, Animated) In addition, following the success of A Close Shave, the duo were used as BBC2's official Christmas campaign in 1995, appearing with the famous '2' in the main ident and several shorter versions for in between trailers. These have been released as extras on DVD alongside the three short films. Cracking Contraptions A series of ten shorts (2½ minutes) Wallace and Gromit animations entitled Cracking Contraptions has appeared on the Internet and subsequently on a limited-edition VHS and Region 2 DVD, as well as on the Region 1 collection of Wallace and Gromit shorts as a special feature. Recently, the duo have also appeared alongside other bonus material The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. They were also broadcast on BBC One across the Christmas period in 2002. They were created to help Park's new team get experience with the characters and the techniques used as a sort of warm-up before they moved on to the film. Each episode features one of Wallace's new inventions and Gromit's sceptical reaction to it. Shopper 13 The Autochef A Christmas Cardomatic The Tellyscope The Snowmanotron The Bully Proof Vest The 525 Crackervac The Turbo Diner The Snoozatron The Soccamatic The robot in The Autochef might be partly a spoof of the Daleks. During The Tellyscope episode, Wallace's black and white television is on the wrong channel. The programme showing is called "When Penguins Turn", suggesting it is a documentary about how Feathers McGraw turned evil. The music heard is Robert Farnon's Jumping Bean, a famous piece of light music. For a brief frame, a spoof of Test Card F featuring Wallace and Shaun the Sheep can be seen. In addition, Wallace's preferred programme, the "Cheese Files", seems to be a spoof of the intro to The X-Files. Another episode, Shopper 13, is of note for its references to Apollo 13, the Apollo Project, and space in general, in most of Wallace's lines: "Gromit, we have a problem!" "It's almost due for re-entry! I can see him!" "It's just one small step!" "I knew he'd make it!" "The Edam is stranded!" ("The Eagle Has Landed") "Quick Gromit, We'll have to launch the probe!" Shaun the Sheep puts in a re-appearance in Shopper 13. Feature Film Main article: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005, won BAFTA Outstanding British Film, won Oscar Best Animated Feature) Notes Park has consistently turned down requests for an ongoing television series because of the time and effort required for even a single episode. In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, The Wrong Trousers was placed 18th. Video games In September 2003, a video game entitled Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo was released for the PS2, Xbox and GameCube. This separate story sees the duo take on Feathers McGraw once more. Still obsessed with diamonds, he escapes from the penguin enclosure of West Wallaby Zoo, where he was 'imprisoned' at the end of The Wrong Trousers, and takes over the entire zoo, kidnapping young animals and forcing their parents to work for him, helping him towards his ultimate goal - turning the zoo into a diamond mine. Wallace and Gromit, meanwhile, have adopted one of the zoo's baby polar bears, named Archie. As they go to visit the zoo to celebrate his birthday, they find the zoo closed. A quick spot of inventing back at the house, and they prepare to embark on their latest adventure. Hiding inside a giant wooden penguin, a parody of the famous Trojan horse, they infiltrate the zoo, and set about rescuing the animals and undoing Feathers' work. In 2005, a video game of The Curse of The Were-Rabbit was released for Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox, following the plot of the movie as the titular duo work as vermin-catchers, protecting customers' vegetable gardens from rabbits. Gameplay for both titles is reminiscent of any third-person platformer released since the advent of Super Mario 64, with lots of jumping around in three-dimensional levels and collecting items. In Project Zoo, players exclusively control Gromit as Wallace functions as a helper NPC, but in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, gameplay shifts between the two, and even includes two-player cooperative play. Both games were developed by Frontier Developments with the assistance of Aardman, with Peter Sallis reprising his role as Wallace. Project Zoo was published by Bam! Entertainment, while The Curse of the Were-Rabbit went to Konami. Stop-motion Technique The Wallace and Gromit animations were shot using the old stop motion animation technique. After detailed storyboarding, and set and plasticine model construction, the film was shot one frame at a time, moving the models of the characters slightly between to give the impression of movement in the final film. In common with other animation techniques, the stop motion animation in Wallace and Gromit may duplicate frames if there is little motion, and in action scenes sometimes multiple exposures per frame are used to produce a faux motion blur. Because a second of film constitutes 24 separate frames, even a short half-hour film like A Close Shave takes a great deal of time to animate well. General quotes on the speed of animation of a Wallace and Gromit film put the filming rate at typically around 30 frames per day - i.e. just over one second of film photographed for each day of production. Though painstaking and time-consuming, and, with the newer computer-generated imagery, no longer popularly used for feature film special effects as it was in 1933's King Kong or Ray Harryhausen's work, stop motion remains a much-loved style of animation. This is probably very much thanks to the global success of Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit shorts and other films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas in the 1990s. As with Nick Park's previous films, the special effects achieved within the limitations of the stop motion technique were quite pioneering and ambitious. For example, consider the soap suds in the window cleaning scene, and the projectile globs of porridge in Wallace's house. There was even an explosion in The Auto Chef, part of the Cracking Contraptions shorts. Some effects (particularly fire and smoke) within The Curse of the Were-Rabbit proved impossible to do in stop motion and so were rendered on computer. External links Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Wallace and Gromit Official site Cracking Contraptions official site American official site Wallace and Gromit - The Early Years (A Retrospective on their Oscar-winning short subjects Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_and_Gromit" Categories: Fictional pairs | Stop motion characters | Wallace and Gromit | Fictional inventors | Animation protagonists