Drawn

You may have noticed that there have been fewer updates to Drawn! over the past few days. This has, in part, been due to the fact that I’ve been running around the city partaking in the Toronto International Film Festival this week. And I have just returned from a moderated discussion with Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park entitled: A Model Animator: The Uncanny Artistry of Nick Park. (and as you can see, I got a pretty decent seat!)

While the discussion didn’t reveal too much new information to fans of Nick Park, the W&G series, Aardman, or animation in general, it was a treat to see Nick in person speak so lovingly about what an Australian journalist referred to as his “lumpy British style”.

The discussion was moderated by Time Magazine columnist Richard Corliss, who asked pretty standard questions that allowed Nick to outline the genesis and evolution of his career. Amongst other things, we learned that he has never owned a dog, his characters’ trademark wide, chiclet-filled grins are merely a toothy tribute to the people of Lancashire, and that his family kept a pet chicken when he was a child, and he and his sister gave it an imaginary boyfriend named ‘the Lone Free Ranger’. It was details like this that made it clear just how his sense of humour developed.

I particularly enjoyed hearing about how my favourite character from Creature Comforts was created: the Brazilian jaguar. Nick interviewed many people at the zoo about the animals, but found that the resulting answers didn’t offer him exactly what he was looking for. So he mixed up the questions, and in addition to animals, he asked questions about the people themselves, and later spliced the answers together to create the desired effect, which is why it’s never quite sure what the characters have been asked in the final film. The Jaguar’s voice was a travelling Brazilian student who complained about British food and the size of the rooms he stayed in, which fit perfectly with the themes of Creature Comforts. Nick mentions, however, that instead of a jaguar, the voice was originally going to be given to a sinister animal that showed up later in his work: a penguin.

We were shown clips of his work on Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, various Wallace & Gromit clips, some behind-the-scenes looks at Aardman Studios, and finally, a few sequences from the long-awaited feature-length Wallace & Gromit movie: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit which has its premiere gala tomorrow night here in Toronto at Roy Thomson Hall.

We learned that coming along the Aardman pipeline, amongst other things, is a Shaun the Sheep animated series, and several more features as part of a 5-picture deal with DreamWorks. The next of these features, after Were-Rabbit will be a CG (yes, CG) feature about rats in the London Underground (I wonder how it will fare alongside Pixar’s upcoming Ratatouille).

More than anything, I was enchanted by just how quintessentially British Nick Park was: quiet, mild-mannered, and proper. He has a kindness in both his voice, and his eyes, that translates directly to what we see on screen. More than any other artist or animator I’ve ever seen, Nick Park I think truly, truly loves what he does. He holds, and occasionally touches the models of his characters delicately as if they were his children. And when he tells the audience that none of the physical animation in this latest feature was performed by him (as opposed to The Wrong Trousers when all of the animation was done by himself and his Were-Rabbit co-director Steve Box), I think we all felt a little sad along with him. I can’t wait to see the entire film; the parts I saw today looked wonderful.