Oscar winning British director Nick Park isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry that his latest feature film Wallace and Gromit has made it to the big screen. Park has spent the past five years working on Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a painstaking process given that one day of filming produced just three seconds of movie. “When I watched the film, I found it hard to relax,” Park said in Sydney last week. “It was great to hear the reaction of the audience on the one hand and that was such a relief but on the other hand I was still trying to make the film, trying to do different edits.” Park has made three short films based on the goofy Wallace and Gromit characters, a middle-aged Englishman and his loyal dog. And he admits to finding it hard to move on from the characters, which have developed a cult-like following around the world. “You have to kind of let it go,” Park, who has three Academy Awards under his belt, said. “There has to be some cut off point for sanity really.”
The director first thought up the characters while at film school, writing and directing the first three shorts—A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), and A Close Shave (1995). In the latest installment and first feature film based on the characters, Wallace and Gromit are charged with protecting their village ahead of the annual giant vegetable growing contest. That task isn’t made easy with the appearance of a strange giant rabbit. An experiment goes horribly wrong for Wallace, the mad inventor. While conducting an experiment to help voracious rabbits change their diet, thus saving them from the farmers’ wrath, Wallace is accidentally transformed into a were-rabbit that emerges every full moon. “We were aware that we were going more global this time but we didn’t want to change anything so it kept its individual British small budget feel,” said Park, who also directed the movie Chicken Run (2000) and the television series Creature Comforts (2003).
The film features the voice talents of Peter Sallis, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter and Peter Kay. “There is something about the Australian psyche that seems to like films that are slightly off beat,” Park said. The Wrong Trousers, and ,i>A Close Shave can be seen on ABC television Wednesday and Thursday respectively at 5:00pm. Wallace and Gromit videos and dvds are available for purchase from ABC shops nationwide.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit will open three weeks earlier in Australia than in the United States and four weeks ahead of Britain to coincide with school holidays. The film opened in Queensland on September 10 before being released in the rest of the country on September 15.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (PG) 94 Mins, general release, check guides for session times.
Some information for this report was provided by AAP.
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