There have been 19 long years since the last “Wallace & Gromit” movie, but creator Nick Park has finally brought the iconic stop-motion animated duo back with “Vengeance Most Fowl.” As the title suggests, the pair’s nemesis, silent killer Feathers McGraw, intends to exact some revenge after the events of 2005’s “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” For this go-around, Park has brought on longtime Aardman Animations contributor Merlin Crossingham to co-direct. And their collaboration has led to uniformly rave reviews.
READ MORE: Aardman Literally Only Has Enough Clay For One More Film
Jumping on a Zoom last month, Park and Crossingham explained the complexity of this particular journey, how a fan’s stern request influenced a story arc for Gromit, and, with a brand new partnership with Netflix and the BBC, if we’ll have to wait another two decades for another adventure.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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I have read that there was some hesitation to make another feature film because of your experience with “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” at another studio. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but why has it been so long since we’ve had the joy of these characters on our big screen?
Nick Park: I mean, we’ve been busy with them really for the last few years. I mean, Merlin’s been looking after all kinds of different strands of Wallace and Gromit. I’ve been writing on stuff I was distracted by “Early Man,” which we both worked on. Another feature? They’re always bubbling away in the background, but you’re waiting for that kind of lightning strike idea that has got potential and lots of intrinsic kind of absurdity to the idea. And sorry, it wasn’t all one big lightning strike. It started the gnome aspect of it all. The smart gnome was actually way back in “Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” I’ve been tinkering away with that idea for quite a few years in between distractions. But each time I pitched it, it was very obvious that it needed something more sinister, a motivated villain behind it all. And it was quite late on, surprisingly, that Feathers came on board, and there was the answer to a big story issue and suddenly upped the ante and upped the gear many times. When Merlin and Mark Burton got on board, it suddenly became the feature film that it is, and we developed it together.
Merlin, can you talk about expanding the idea of the story and what direction you guys wanted to take it compared to the other films?
Merlin Crossingham: When Feathers sort of crashed the party, if you like, it solved a lot of story hiccups we were having. The story just grew, and we knew then that we needed to make a film that was ambitious, not just from a story point of view but visually as well. Stop-motion films tend to be quite small and focused in, and we wanted to push out. I mean, it’s still a fairly sparsely populated world in which they live, but we very much found that the story needed space, and we needed to get out of the house and go around. Not only was the story longer in terms of a feature, but it had the ambition to be visually like a feature. Some of the half hours, they’re big, but they’re still very contained. I think we realized we were going to take it to a whole new place within the context of the Wallace and Gromit universe.
In that context, even stop-motion companies use a little bit of CG here and there, maybe for backgrounds or to clean things up a bit. The set piece at the end with the gigantic rail bridge – is that all real? Is that all practical?
Nick Park: Yeah, all about practicality, really. And the studio space that we had or the amount of canal boats we had.
Merlin Crossingham: We used every single toy in the box, really. The foreground is all kinds of hero scale. And then the valley was so big that it had to be made — we work at miniature [scale], but we had to do a miniature miniature that was then composited in. The bridge was so tall that we couldn’t actually fit that stage in our studio. So, we made the top bit, and the legs were extended digitally. The water is digital, so there’s sort of very cutting-edge digital post-production to bring it all together. But at the heart of it, it’s still stop motion, handmade crafted filmmaking, very clever digital to do.
Nick Park: And even when we had stop-motion water, the task was to make that water animation fit the stop-motion world. So it didn’t look like live-action water, super smooth kind of grafted on.
Was there one set piece, one scene that was just the toughest or most time-consuming for your team to pull off?
Merlin Crossingham: It was all a bit like that? Well, in terms of time, I suppose the whole of Act Three took both of us along. We did bits of it each, and we were on that for a long time.
Nick Park: Yes, we were doing segments each, and it was like building a bridge from both ends. We had to make sure we met in the middle and on many different segments.
Merlin Crossingham: But the hardest stuff is not necessarily the most visually demanding, I’d say it’s the animation of Feathers McGraw because we needed the audience to understand what he was thinking, and yet he hardly moves. He doesn’t have any expression. And finding the way to direct that using camera, using music, using animation as minimally as possible, it’s those sequences actually that I think were the hardest. Just in terms of directing, in terms of logistics, and making it happen.
