Wallace, Gromit and a cereal killer
Salient facts about A Matter of Loaf and Death, in which Aardman Animations hops on the Jason Voorhees/Lou Ford/Hannibal Lecter bandwagon and has Wallace and Gromit face down a serial killer:1) The movie, actually a short film for television, "references" Aliens, Psycho, Batman, and Ghost, according to Wikipedia. Hitchcock lovers might also detect allusions to Blackmail, Foreign Correspondent and Vertigo.
2) Nick Park, Wallace and Gromit's creator, calls A Matter of Loaf and Death "kind of a bread-based murder mystery." Its first murder victim, Baker Bob, is based on co-writer Bob Baker.
3) The "making of" feature included on the DVD (on which Park calls A Matter of Loaf and Death a "who-doughnut") is one of the better examples of its kind, with fascinating detail about how the animators get plasticine faces with no eyebrows and some with no mouths to express such a range of emotions.
4) The term Anglo-Saxon gets bandied about pretty loosely, but Park is one of the few people I know of who has a real Anglo-Saxon name: Wulstan. (It's his middle name, according to various Internet sources.)
5) One of the characters looks like one of my colleagues. No, I won't tell you which character or which colleague.
(Read about Detectives Beyond Borders' visit to Wallace and Gromit's home town here, including a real-life tour guide who would be perfectly at home in a W&G movie.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2010
Labels: Aardman Animations, animation, movies, television, Wallace and Gromit
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 2:59 PM
63 Comments:
Peter
I think W&G peaked with The Wrong Trousers. That was the one with the train chase.
Nothing wrong with the others just not quite as sharp. You cant say that to anyone in England though where going after W&G is like exposing yourself to the Queen or something.
So one can't criticize Wallace and Gromit at Speaker's Corner, can one?
Have you seen A Matter of Loaf and Death? It was made for the BBC, but I think I read that it premiered on Australian television. It's not as sharp as some other W&G, or as Creature Comforts, but there are some gorgeous sets and fine animation. And the DVD bonus features (necessary when the main feature is only about half an hour long) are informative. I hadn't thought much about character development in animation before seeing some of the Aardman people discuss it, for instance.
And thanks for offering another chance to view the track-laying scene, though it may no longer be available to computers in the U.S.
Peter
Or it could be that I'm just out of step with the contemporary world. Yesterday I saw a trailer for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. I'm amazed that after his remakes of Planet of the Apes and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Tim Burton is allowed anywhere near a film studio but apparently the people love him and Helena Bonham Carter has had his babies so what do I know.
Aw, just look at the man, and you'll realize how hip he is. I think I've seen only one of the Batman movies among the Burton oeuvre. It was not bad, but it was all style. I suppose it was something like my vague idea of what all graphic novels were like before I started reading them again: all style and attitude.
Whether W&G "peaked" with Wrong Trousers -- and I don't think I'm ready to concede that -- it was a pretty high peak. Even sliding off, they're always worth watching.
I haven't seen the new one yet, but liked Close Shave and Were-Rabbit quite a bit.
My favorite Nick Park/Aardman work is probably Creature Comforts, actually. But I'd agree with your assessment: whichever W&G is the best, all are worth watching. Wrong Trousers is probably my favorite, principally for its marvelous villain, but I'm also a fan of A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit ...
And I have just read that the animal in Creature Comforts that I called a lion was a jaguar.
A Matter of Loaf and Death offers the episode, the episode with commentary, that fine "making of" that I mentioned above, and an episode of "Sean the Sheep." Good sound engineering in that one.
Watch Creature Comforts here.
Wallace & gromett are great! Creature comforts are funny too singing 12 days of xmas! I love Mad Monster Party (halloween style) and the new Fantastic Mr. Fox too! I have already made my puppy a modified tube sock bandit hat.
Solea, I have some catching up to do. I've only ever seen the original Creature Comforts five-minute short film. I did not know until tonight that there were a number of follow-ups. Presumably the creatures singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was one of these, and I will look for it. Thanks.
and conversely i've not seen the original u linked to! don't skip mad monster party either...it;s made by the same peeps that made rudolph. great voices too.
Watching Fantastic Mr Fox reminded me of the experience I used to have at parties in college when all the cool, beautiful people were in a corner laughing at some private joke and I was stuck by the mildewy Yucca plant sipping Newcastle Brown Ale listening to some guy explaining why the David Gilmour era of Pink Floyd was inferior in every respect to that of Syd Barrett.
Anon/Solea, I hope you're able to watch Creature Comforts using that link. It will be a worthwhile way to spend five minutes. You've given me a number of things to track down, actually, not just "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Thanks again.
I can't relate to that experience at all, Adrian. I never drank Newcastle Brown, and I never attended the same parties as the beautiful and the cool.
Ok strike parties and replace it with "a party".
I think I know your feelings about George Clooney though. He's very Clooney/Wes Anderson in Fantastic Mr Fox when just a little of Roald Dahl would have been nice.
I had to look up "Fantastic Mr. Fox" after a previous comment mentioned it; I had not heard of it before. I groaned when I saw George Clooney was in it. But I'll be strong and try to watch it anyhow.
Well, your experience of guys at parties was pretty much my experience of guys at parties, Adrian, whether cool and beautiful--or handsome--or not. "Holding forth" is I think the term.
Parties are one of those things that I've found have gotten a lot funner as I've gotten older. It kind of surprises me, but I think it's because the agenda is a little different. Also, I don't put up with so much bullshit as I did back then.
Peter, have you seen the Coen Brothers 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou?' It's a great movie and Clooney is pretty damn good in it. I would think that would allow him a pass, at least temporarily, for whatever great crimes he has committed that have him in you bad books. Or is the man beyond redemption?
In this age of Pixar computer animated to death over loaded with primary colours and everything moving at fifty gazillion miles an hour movies Fantastic Mr Fox was a breath of fresh air. I loved the stop motion animation they used on it and the whole look was sort of Quentin Blakish, and anyway, I think George Clooney is rather, er, nice.
A Matter of Loaf and Death was brilliant. The crew who produce those things are genius.
Seana, I have come to enjoy holding forth.
In re parties, you may have seen occasional mention here of a cafe near me where the young clientele wears black, pecks at laptops, and occasionally reads newspapers. Last week a bunch of the staff and customers were talking about a doughnut party they were going to attend at someone's house that night. Yep, they were going to get together and make doughnuts. Those crazy kids!
Solo, Clooney is not bad as a performer. It's his outsize self-importance and self-seriousness that bother me. As an actor, he's all right. As a personality, he is the apex of the self-important celebrity. Well, Bono is the apex of that, but Clooney is a close second. I know I should not let this hamper my enjoyment of his movies.
I found "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?" alternately too jokey and too self-serious -- highly overrated in my book, though I did love the music, as everyone else did. One feature of Clooney's performance bugged me: that tag line he kept repeating, something like, "That really hit the spot!" The line was not nearly as funny as he and the Coen brothers seemed to think it was. To be fair to Clooney, his spoofy delivery of the line was probably due to the director.
Vanda, your comment on animation is dead on. Years ago, when "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" was being praised to the skies for its alleged fidelity to the spirit of old Warner Brothers cartoons, I found that its hyperkinetic version got only half of it right. In retrospect, that movie is probably to blame for the fifty-gazillion-miles-an-hour animation you lament.
See the previous comment for my take on George Clooney. I've been down on the guy ever since he tried to organize a celebrity boycott of troublesome reporters and paparazzi. That sounds like a worthy aim, except that Clooney seemed to think he made massive millions of dollars per movie because of his talent and earnestness. He seemed to forget that the very reporters he wanted to boycott in his high-minded fashion are responsible for feeding the celebrity machine that makes him all his money.
Have you seen the DVD version of "A Matter of Loaf and Death"? The "making-of" feature has lots of views of models and sets and hands-on work that the animators had to do. You'd enjoy it, I think.
Peter, they say there's a thin line between genius and madness. But the Coen Brothers output over the last dozen years suggests there's an equally thin line between genius and idiocy. I thought 'Intolerable Cruelty' and 'The Ladykillers' were awful.
Most films that I watch remind me of other films but 'O Brother' and 'Lebowski' seemed to me to be more or less sui generis. That's a difficult trick to pull off, once, let alone twice.
It's strange, the thing you mentioned about the car chase in Bullitt, the impassiveness of the bad guys, which you disliked, was one of the things I liked best.
I guess the old saying is true: one man's meat is another man's poison.
Incidentally, I see you have enabled comment moderation. Is that the first time you've had to do that?
Holding forth is fine as long as you have the least scintilla of awareness of when your listener's eyes begin to glaze over.
Clooney's self-importance was put to good use with the Haiti telethon, I think.
He is a very attractive man, and obviously quite intelligent. I think his temptation to self-consciousness comes out as mugging for the camera a bit. He's best in movies where he plays a lesser character as he did in the Murrow movie. Although I did like him in Michael Clayton, come to think of it.
I am with you on O, Brother, though. Nice intro to some American music, but he really was almost unwatchable in that.
Solo, I switched to comment moderation because of a recent plague of spam that bypassed my e-mail notification (I receive an e-mail message whenever a comment is posted to my blog, but the spam was appearing without the message, meaning it could sit in my blog for quite some time before I noticed it.)
I didn't dislike the impassive bad guys in "Bullitt" as much as it found it unbelievable that they would be jostled and thrown around like that without uttering a sound or showing any reaction. In any case, the annoyance was tiny; it barely affected my enjoyment of the movie.
I liked "Fargo" a lot, and I found "Miller's Crossing" too style-conscious for its own good. I don't remember feeling strongly one way or another about "Blood Simple." (By the way, if you like the Coens' crime movies, you might have a look at "Ice Harvest." It is darker, and it has some of the same appeal but without the overbearing cleverness of the Coens.)
Seana, does George Clooney cross the line between holding forth and holding court? I have a colleague who once called another colleague of ours a "low self-monitor." That's apparenly a psychologists' term for people who pay no attention to the reaction they induce in their audience.
Clooney probably put his influence to good use in the telethon. I can't judge whether he brought his self-importance to bear because I saw none of the telethon.
Nice to hear a fellow dissenting voice on "O, Brother" and Clooney's unberable mugging in it.
I havent seen A Serious Man but my wife did. She said the problem with the film was telegraphed ahead in the opening section set in the shtetl. Its entirely in Yiddish but the English subtitles only pick up about half of what the actors are saying above. Similarly the film takes the tropes of Yiddish literature and film but forgets the most important aspect of Yiddish culture - humour. I havent seen the film but apparently the hero suffers without cracking any jokes about fate or god or at himself and his problems. This is very un Yiddish. The Coens are clever but unfortunatley they're not as deeply read or as clever as they think they are.
Holding forth automatically turns into holding court if you can find a big enough audience to listen to you. Neither is necessarily a bad thing.
Clooney kept himself pretty low key at the telethon. They are a different thing from Jerry Lewis's day.
It's an odd thing about fundraising, though. I guess this one did well, but on our local public television stations, there has been a marked change from the days when Tom Fanella ran an eccentric station out of San Jose and pitched his heart out every pledge drive. Everyone did. He has since died, and the station has been merged to some degree with the bigger San Francisco one. Everyone now is very quiet and reasonable, and sit behind a desk and perform no funny antics. I used to give regularly but now feel no impulse to do so at all.
I thought the Coens hit the jackpot with 'O Brother' and 'Lebowski' but I can take or leave the rest of their output. All a matter of taste.
I haven't had a TV for about ten years and nowadays I only skim the newspapers, so I'm very much out of touch. Celebrities are just a concept to me. I only know George Clooney from the movies I've seen him in, and I'm sure I haven't seen half of them. Bono's just a guy I know from a band who were pretty good for a few years in the late 80s. I've never regarded celebrities as anything other than court jesters: some might be smart, some might be stupid but none of them are important enough to get excited about one way or the other.
What strikes me is how hard it is to be interestingly creative for long. The aforementioned U2 had three or four years when they were worth listening to and that's probably as much as most artists get. I've been going through the films of Billy Wilder recently and you can see him going through an upward curve until he reaches Sunset Boulevard in 1950. He stays at the top of his powers until The Apartment in 1960 and then it's gradually downhill after that. David Bowie is one of my favourite musicians but you can see a similiar curve with him from 1969's Space Oddity to 1980's Ashes to Ashes. Of course, there are exceptions but they're pretty rare.
My favourite crime writer in the last twenty years is probably James Lee Burke. My knowledge of crime writing is far from extensive but I don't know of anybody who was better than him in the 90s but after his tenth Robicheaux book you can see the powers diminish and the formula take over.
Seana, I always found pledge drives on public radio a big nuisance because the dj's always sounded so counscious that what they were doing was annoying. And they were right.
But I once volunteered and answered phones at a pledge drive. Met a local celebrity jazz dj and got to eat lots of free pizza.
Solo
You might like a little post I did on The Big Lebowski and Dashiell Hammett
Adrian, Wikipedia calls "A Serious Man" a "dramatic/darkly comedic" movie, an unexpected description for something Yiddish. Existentially comedic, maybe, but darkly?
Adrian, in re the Coens' not being as deeply read as they think they are, I didn't quite see the point of patterning "O, Brother" on "The Oddysey." Sure, those three women in white washing clothes are supposed to sirens. Yeah, I get it, and it would have been clever in a freshman English essay.
No, I'm being a bit hard on them, but all that sticks me from that scene is the beautiful singing. The Coens did not me bring new life to Homer's ancient story.
Thanks for the post, Adrian. A very interesting thesis and I would agree with you that Lebowski is more Hammet than Chandler although I'm not sure the similarities are so cast-iron.
Leone was succesfully sued by Kurosawa for stealing the plot of A Fistful of Dollars, somewhat ironic given that Yojimbo was so obviously based on Red Harvest.
Whatever the origins, the Coens somehow created something original when they did Lebowski. I can't see either Hammet or Chandler coming up with the Dude.
Adrian, I think Hammet regarded The Thin Man as a bit of fluff but I liked the book a lot, particularly because of its humour. I'm not sure I'd compare it to Wodehouse but it is witty. I particularly like the lines from the disappointed wife who says about her husband:
'She stared at him dully and said: ‘I don’t like crooks and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.’
Solo, I'm with you in the television department, but here is all you need to know about celebrities: Bono's name is bruited about as a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore, whatever you think of him or whatever your stance on the politics and science of global warming, wins the Peace Prize essentially for public relations. Bono, Clooney or both make a list of the hundred most influential people in the world. Priness Diana makes some network's or magazine's list of the 100 most importand English people of the pas thousand years. Generate buzz, get coverage, and it doesn't matter if you actually do anything.
One exception to the phenomenon of waning creativity: Michelangelo. He did astonishing, though flawed work as a teenager, and he was working on masterpieces almost literally to the day he died, just weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday.
Adrian, I'll probably use that post of yours as a viewing guide when I finally get around to watching "The Big Lebowski." If nothing else, it ought to sharpen my thinking about Chandler and Hammett, two authors about whom contemporary readers' thinking is apt to be lazy precisely because they are so often talked about.
Solo, I didn't know Kurosawa had sued Sergio Leone, but I'd agree this would be ironic consider Kurosawa's borrowings from Westerns and other American popular art forms. If I do watch and like "The Big Lebowski," I will have to overcome my predisposition to be annoyed at any character called "the Dude."
Solo, it's been a while since I read "The Thin Man," but I recall that it may have had a bit more of an edge than the movie. But even the movie had dark undertones to the fluff, mostly with respect to family matters and lowlife gigolos.
Peter, all you need to know about the Nobel Peace Prize is that it was created by a man who liked blowing up things and it was awarded to another man in 1973 who liked blowing up Cambodia and I don't care how f*cked up Bono is but no matter how hard he tries he'll never blow up Cambodia or anywhere else.
I think Stalin referred to some people as being useful idiots; celebrities, on the other hand, are more like useless idiots. They may raise your hackles but for the most part I get a laugh out of them.
You're right about that. Bono is no Henry Kissinger. Still, the prizes to Gore and Obama (before the latter had done much to deserve it) and the mention of Bono may indicate a kind of despair about the ability of traditional political leaders to get things done, and a fear of offending powerful nations by awarding the prize to activists in their countries.
Someone once divided Peace Prize recipients into those honored for formulating grandiose agreements (that almost always proved ephemeral), and brave activists, such as Aung San Suu Kyi. Recent years may have seen emergence of a third category: the consciousness-raisers.
'Generate buzz, get coverage, and it doesn't matter if you actually do anything.'
Peter, I think that's the main problem with celebrities. It's not that they have opinions; it's the coverage their opinions are given by the media. Who gives a sh*t what Bono thinks? I don't, but obviously the media do. And why do they care? Because they think it'll sell papers. And maybe they're right. Maybe it will sell papers. You want to get rid of self-important celebrities? Get rid of the papers and tv stations that promote them.
Yes, but it's not just the media that promote celebrity, it's people like the Nobel committee, who honor consciousness-raisers. But yes, it seems that celebrity worship and a general accrual of power and money to the big at the expense of the small has accelerated in recent years.
One more thing about O, Brother, Where Art Thou?: The Coens took the title from Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, whose protagonist is a director of movie comedies who wants to make a socially important movie called O, Brother, Where Art Thou? Of course, the story makes a fool of him and his pretensions, and he discovers the virtue and power of making people laugh, which he could do all along.
What did the Coens intend, other than a simple tribute to a favorite movie, by borrowing the title? Do they want to have it both ways, to be taken seriously and not seriously at the same time?
Fair point. I'd like to see that Preston Sturges movie though.
I saw it years ago, and I remember liking it. Sturges was one of the best. Rudy Vallee was terrific in "The Palm Beach Story."
I don't what to say about the Coen Bros because I was so disgusted with Fargo that I've never bothered to watch any of their movies since. It employed some local actors here in Minn. that were incredibly embarrassed when it came out.
I figure that paying attention to people like Bono and other celebrities about their opinions is kinda like asking your doctor for investing advice.
Forgot to mention...one of my friends gave his girlfriend a Wallace and Gromit alarm clock. It's pretty big and looks hilarious.
Now, there's a lesson ... sharply divided opinions on "O, Brother," and now also on the one Coen Brothers movie to which I gave an unhesitating thumbs-up. What can we learn from this?
What were the local actors so embarrassed about?
I think it was Spy magazine that once ran a box of what purported to be genuine quotations from movie stars on major public issues. The box ought to have embarrassed any celebrity from ever opening his or her mouth again. It did not.
A Wallace and Gromit alarm clock is an intimidating proposition considering the lengths to which Gromit goes to get Wallace out of bed each day.
Peter, there's a minute and a half long clip on YouTube that is made up entirely of scenes where somebody says 'yeah' in Fargo. It demonstrates pretty well why Minnesotans might feel they were being made fun of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF3z-j8o39I
I wonder if that was put together by the same obsessives who assembled a clip entirely of characters saying "fuck" from, I think, The Big Lebowski.
Bingo! Good one solo, but more to the point here's another clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRu6_mJiVAo&NR=1 is even more ridiculous. I've lived in Minnesota for about 35 years now and I've never met anyone that spoke like that. Those phony accents were so distracting I couldn't pay attention to the movie. I can say for certain that they never met anybody like that in St Louis Park.
v word= dingle I'll leave it at that
Thanks, John. I’ll take a look and listen later, when leisure time is a bit more plentiful. I can’t think of anyone I’ve met from Minnesota, and changing planes at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport once was my only experience in the state. Still, I’m pretty sure many people from there don’t speak like Swedes in a late-night comedy skit, the way so many do in the clip Solo posted.
“…Chandler and Hammett, two authors about whom contemporary readers' thinking is apt to be lazy precisely because they are so often talked about.” So much so that people who haven’t read anything by either author often end up confusing the two. These generally include people who have seen the 1941 “Maltese Falcon” and 1946’s “The Big Sleep” and because Humphrey Bogart starred in both they think either Hammett or Chandler wrote both novels on which the films were based.
This confusion reached a kind of nadir when L.A.’s book selection for the city’s participation in the NEA’s “The Big Read” program (gee, I wonder where they got the idea for that title?) was “The Maltese Falcon.” The city press releases revealed how clueless L.A.’s Cultural Affairs Dept. boneheads were as they referenced Hammett’s particular relevance for L.A. audiences because so many of his stories were set there!
“…’The Thin Man,’ but I recall that it may have had a bit more of an edge than the movie.” Absolutely. And its genesis in a 1930 fragment of the rough draft for its first version is even darker in subject and character. This fragment is reprinted in: “Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories and Other Writings (Library of America), Vol. 1”
“I’m pretty sure many people from there don’t speak like Swedes in a late-night comedy skit.” No, but we Scandinavians (“squareheads”) are among the few ethnic groups it is still safe to mock without repercussion in the media. There is no go-to advocacy group for CNN , etc. to seek opinions from when we are ridiculed. Sons of Norway? Heilage london!
Elisabeth, you may have sold me on the Library of America's Hammett volume. My most frequent comment about Chandler and Hammett has been that, for whatever reasons, contemporary readers have lost touch with both authors' dark side. A fragment like the one you mention might serve as a useful restorative.
A creative cultural dictator ship might ban The Big (fill in the blank) as a title until that restoration and until the confusion between the L.A. guy and the San Francisco guy has abated.
No, but we Scandinavians (“squareheads”) are among the few ethnic groups it is still safe to mock without repercussion in the media.
Yuh, but you bear up stolidly.
"...bear up stolidly"? As in OED's "dull and impassive; having little or no sensibility; incapable of being excited or moved"?
Hmm, and I thought this Viking was an "excitable girl." I won't even go to the rest of the definition...
v-word = estsifie Yep, I'm estsified a good deal of the time.
You know, "excitable girl" would be a fine title for a song.
If stolid raises your hackles, how about taciturn?
That's better, and a bit more optimistic than the "Lutherian resignation" I was thinking of.
You can always temper the Lutheran resignation with a bit of berserker exuberance.
"...berserker exuberance." They've tried to get me to take medication for those episodes but I say: Nothing doing! My nickname ain't "Blood-Axe" for nothing.
Hmm, Hallgerd the Hot-Blooded!
... the scourge of Santa Monica!
yaaaaah, you betcha dearie. Blood Axe is it? Care for some hot dish?
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