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 Wallace & Gromit: Curse Of The Were-Rabbit is out on DVD and nominated for an Academy Award. |
Nick Park and Steve Box, the two sweet English eccentrics who created Wallace & Gromit: Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, are giddy today.
"We're over the moon," Box says with a high-pitched squeak on the phone from Los Angeles. With Park sitting beside him on a conference call with the Toronto Sun, Box is talking about the Academy Award nomination their film has garnered as best animated feature. It will be competing with Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and Japanese anime master Miyazaki's latest work, Howl's Moving Castle.
The Oscars are March 5 and both Park and Box will be there. "It's amazing," Box says. "It's still sinking in, really. You can never assume that you're going to get a nomination and we're just delighted.
"Nick's had to get up before now (to receive three Academy Awards for best animated shorts, two of them for Wallace & Gromit flicks). But it's all new to me. It's kind of (excitement) mixed with terror."
The timing of the Oscar nomination is superb for their purposes. The splendid DVD of Curse Of The Were-Rabbit came out Feb. 7, loaded with extras that allow fans to peek behind the scenes into the inner workings of Aardman Animations, the Bristol studio where Park and Box work their stop-action, plasticine puppet magic.
Incidentally, the DVD and the two filmmakers make it clear that the fire last fall -- on the same weekend that the Wallace & Gromit movie opened in U.S. and Canada -- destroyed the Aardman warehouse but did not affect the active studios, contrary to some initial reports. And the Oscar statues Aardman has already were not harmed.
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"Well," Park says, "I don't think it will affect us currently and the stuff we do in the future. Obviously, it was very sad (that old sets and models were destroyed). There was probably $4 million worth of stuff, and quite hard to value in a way because of the sentimental value. But it is past stuff and it was made for the movies and it has done its job, you know. And we move on."
Moving on to the DVD is a delight. Among many insights are the ones generated in a quirky featurette called How To Make A Bunny. Other making-of featurettes show the animators in action on set. The attention to detail is extraordinary and that is part of what makes the movie stand out.
"So many people seem to be attracted to the movies because of the kind of detail that we put into them," Box says. "It's too much to even take in, apparently. So now you can freeze frame and you can watch it at your leisure."
Park says that fans can now pick out sly references to past Wallace & Gromit movies. For example, there are several glimpses of the villainous penguin from The Wrong Trousers in Curse Of The Were-Rabbit.
As for the behind-the-scenes bits, Park says: "I'm sure people will really enjoy them. The films are quirky. The process is even more quirky. People come to visit us sometimes and I think they think that we live in some kind of dream world. And we do, really. It's hard to think of it as a job."
That job often means that animators supervised by Park and Box move plasticine models in tiny incremental steps for each frame of the film. One animator can work an entire day just to produce three seconds of footage. Box says that he and Park enjoy showing that process off in the DVD. Even though there might be a risk in revealing too much.
"I guess there could be, but there aren't many people really doing (stop-motion animation) and there seems to be a kind of inexhaustible kind of interest in it. People don't seem to get tired of finding out how it is done." Now Park and Box are waiting to see if what they have done is Oscar-worthy.