CGI Meets Claymation in 'Wallace & Gromit'

Oct. 7, 2005 — -- After five years of playing with clay, director Nick Park has taken the duo Wallace & Gromit to places Gumby and Mr. Bill never thought possible. But even he realizes the primitive art of claymation can benefit from the modern conveniences of a little computer-generated animation.

'"There are limits to Plasticine," Park says as he prepares for the nationwide release Friday of "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit," his latest all-clay – or should we say mostly clay – kiddy comedy.

"You can't do fog or smoke or water. I mean, you could, but it would take forever, so we went to The Moving Picture Company to create our visual effects."

After the $172 million success of "Chicken Run" in 2000, Park has reason to feel confident that today's kids – who might as well be known as "The CGI Generation" – have the same affection for crude clay filmmaking as their parents. His Oscar-winning "Wallace & Gromit" shorts have achieved cult status and are a big hit on DVD.

In many ways, Park and his team at Aardman Animations are making "Wallace & Gromit" just as Park did when he began sculpting the Plasticine duo in 1983, as a student at Britain's Beaconsfield Film School. Of course, he's now working on a scale as elaborate as one of Wallace's inventions.

In the new film, Wallace and Gromit guard their little British hamlet from vermin as proprietors of "Anti-Pesto," an extermination service. Wallace humanely captures garden-ravaging rodents with his Bun-Vac 6000, and his faithful dog, Gromit, keeps the critters in their basement, proving he's a true canine humanitarian.

To depict the epic battle with the Were-Rabbit, Park's team constructed a set with 400 clay puppets at a warehouse-sized set in Bristol, each figure formed from a metal skeleton and covered with a synthetic blend of clay they call "Aard-mix."

The clay figures are molded for each shot, and with 24 individual frames required for each second of film, it's easy to see how the 85-minute feature was five years in the making. It might be nice to program a computer to do that work. But the Aardman team believes audiences appreciate human effort – and human imperfections.

"You can see the fingerprints," says Producer Peter Lord of the cheese-loving inventor and his long-suffering pooch. "It tells you that they are real. They are tangible."