'Wallace and Gromit,' 90% Alone (animationobsessive.substack.com)

116 pointsby vinhnx8 hours ago15 comments

davnicwil 4 hours ago

This is just incredible, I had absolutely no idea of the context of 'a Grand Day Out' being a solo school project.

There's no way I'd imagined it wasn't done in a professional setup by a full team.

A real standout part is how he commuted by bus to the studio for years, to work on it mostly alone. Truly amazing dedication to a passion project.

I haven't watched it in probably 25 years but I'll find it now and appreciate it all the more for knowing this!

codeulike an hour ago

And then for his next work to be The Wrong Trousers, a near perfect film with the ending train sequence widely acclaimed as one of the best action sequences ever put to film

https://youtu.be/jrmZIgVoQw4?feature=shared

mk_stjames 24 minutes ago

Theres a scene there that's one of my favorite comedy bits in any film, the breakfast scene where you see a buzzer and light going off repeatedly, like they have some sort of computer system to indicate it is breakfast time... but then it cuts to Wallace in bed and he is just repeatedly pressing a button next the the bed, with the same specific cadence, to make the buzzer sound. I don't know why I find that so hilarious.

VCFundedGenYer 3 hours ago

I love the atmosphere of the original 3 features. A Grand Day Out especially, it makes great use of pauses and sweeping ethereal wide shots to give a great sense of scale and isolation.

As great as the post-A Close shave features are, something was definitely lost when they started adding more characters and expanded the universe.

jminnl 3 hours ago

The humor in those is so perfect. "Have you seen this chicken?"

foreigner an hour ago

I always thought Wallace was a self-portrait of Nick Park. If your find a video interview with him, the way his mouth moves when he speaks is totally Wallace. It's uncanny.

voncheese 2 hours ago

Amazing dedication and very inspiring. It's so awesome to read about what great things people can do when they are so focused on accomplishing something. And as other commenters have said, had no idea it took so many years of (mostly) one person.

Grand Day Out is a fantastic watch, the animation, characters and story telling are so fun for really anyone of any age.

p0w3n3d 2 hours ago

I always thought that Shaun the sheep is 3d animated. Learning that those shows are made the old way is so interesting!

andai 3 hours ago

Enjoyed this, especially seeing the sketches.

I saw a poster for a new Shaun the Sheep movie recently, so they're still making them! And it looks like they're still doing it "properly", old school stop motion? That's fantastic.

c10o 4 hours ago

Wow, this sparked some good memories watching Wallace and Gromit with my dad almost 30 years ago. Thanks for sharing!

andai 3 hours ago

> Asked about his preference for stop motion, Park once explained:

> I think it’s because I’d been brought up on a diet of children’s 3D animation.

What is 3d animation referring to here? This guy grew up in the 60's.

JoeDaDude 3 hours ago

It's just a guess, but he could be referring to the stop motion animation movies that were popular in the 60's. Ray Harryhausen famously made a career out of the technique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkLEZSWe5u4

NetMageSCW 2 hours ago

Gumby and Davey and Goliath come to mind.

posh_somme an hour ago

Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor The Engine, Trumpton, Camberwick Green. The UK was full of this stuff in the late 60s and early 70s

moomoo11 2 hours ago

i watched wallace and gromit as a very small kid, so i didn't really understand anything.

but it made me miss my dad a lot and i'd cry the whole time. we had it on vhs and there were like 4 or 5 of them, so i'd watch them over and over. i was like 3 or 4 or something.

its weird to say but even as an adult i cannot make it through more than 10-15 min of the movie.