How Aardman made Wallace and Gromit a silent villain

Stop-motion animation is challenging enough for any studio, even Aardman, which was Pioneering this model for decades at this point. But what happens when you decide to bring back a villain who is famous for not being able to say a word, barely moving any part of his face, and mostly getting by by standing and blinking?

“This was one of the most challenging aspects of the whole movie,” Nick Park said recently. inverse About the decision Bring back the McGraw feathersthe villain Wallace and GromitSecond TV outing, Wrong pantsafter decades Most birds’ revengestreaming now Worldwide on Netflix. “At least Gromit has a forehead he can raise up. He can understand ideas more clearly. It’s all about the simplicity of how the feathers move, the movements deliberate and small. Look here, and it twinkles. Minimalism, really.”

As Park explained, Wallace and Gromit He’s no stranger to silent characters, since the other half of the duo is a dog who can’t talk. But Gromit is still surprisingly articulate: his ears can move, his eyes look like any other human characters, he can move different parts of his face, and he has full hands and feet and even a neck to move and express his body. His feelings are made clear to the audience. Feathers, on the other hand, are a stylized little penguin (sometimes disguised as a rooster). Its eyes are small beads, and its whole body is bottle-shaped. If Feather wants to use body language, he has his flippers, which are restricted in their own way, and then he has to move his entire body at once. And so far, in both Wrong pants and Most birds’ revengeHe remains utterly charming, occasionally sinister, and still completely relatable to the audience.

Although more than three decades have passed between his on-screen appearances, Park’s techniques (and now his Most birds’ revenge Co-director Merlin Crossingham used to make Feathers “feel” closer to any other character in… Wallace and Gromit It remained the same. “We use camera movements and sound,” Crossingham explained. “He’s a very cinematic character because we, as filmmakers, rely on all these tricks to make him the hero/villain that you see and love to hate.”

The more things change, the more some things stay the same. But for Wallace and GromitAnd Aardman in general, it speaks to the timelessness of the craft involved in this kind of traditional hand animation. “Back when toy story It debuted in the ’90s, and it’s a studio like us, and we’re thinking, “Oh, boy, how much time do we have left?” Park concluded his speech. “But we kept going. As long as you’re telling good stories, compelling stories with compelling characters, it’s just a technique really. All these years later, Feathers remains as compelling as ever, still up to the same cinematic tricks.”

Wallace and Gromit: The Revenge of Most Birds It’s now streaming on Netflix.

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