For my dough, there exists no animated feature more clever, more nuanced, more full of endearing silliness, more out-and-out hilarious than the Wallace and Gromit adventure The Wrong Trousers, produced by Nick Parks and the talented folks at Aardman studios. The action begins when Wallace, in dire financial straits, decides to let out a room and take in a lodger, who turns out, most wonderfully, to be an evil, cat-burgling penguin. An evil penguin, mind you (who turns out to be named Feathers McGraw), with beady little black eyes, who’s mute, oozing menace, and obviously up to no good, as Gromit discovers when he tails the little rotter on one of his mysterious nighttime forays. The felonious bird is casing a joint he intends to rob! OMG! Hijinks, as they say, ensue, until the movie climaxes with the attached set piece, as our heroes engage in a frenetic chase on a model train kit, trying to apprehend the scheming antarctic thief as he attempts his getaway by (HO scale) rail.
This action sequence is so creative, intricate, and full of twists and turns that it would be impressive if it was CGI; to have filmed it using the incredibly painstaking, downright agonizing process of stop-motion “claymation” is an achievement that practically beggars belief. It almost hurts to think about how long it must have taken to manipulate those little clay figures to create the frantic pursuit in Wallace’s living room, with the animators moving a part of a clay figure a millimetre, shooting a frame, moving it another millimetre, shooting a frame, ad nauseum, adjusting several characters at once, with truly exquisite attention to all the little kinetic details of fast-moving objects and the physics they obey. Think of the bit when Gromit is desperately laying new track in front of his speeding back end of the train – for that alone, we’re probably talking hundreds, if not thousands, of person-hours. Or think about all those spinning wheels on the train. Honestly, the mind boggles. This mini-documentary shows how it’s done:
Six weeks of prep, and three weeks of stop-motion animating, to produce one minute of film. At the end of it, though, the clay figures aren’t just moving, they’re performing.
Listen, if you’re not tickled pink by Wallace and Gromit, especially by this, which I’d argue is the greatest scene from their most entertaining feature, well, I’d advise people and other living things to give you a wide berth. Best to just let you march around grinding your teeth by yourself.
the needlefish 