Wallace and Gromit is a British stop-motion animated comedy franchise created by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations. The main film series consists of four short films and one feature-length film, and has spawned numerous spin-offs and TV adaptations. The series centres on Wallace, a good-natured, eccentric, cheese-loving inventor, and Gromit, his loyal and intelligent anthropomorphic beagle. The first short film, A Grand Day Out, was finished and made public in 1989. Wallace was voiced by actor Peter Sallis until 2010 when he was succeeded by Ben Whitehead. Gromit is largely silent and has no dialogue, communicating through facial expressions and body language.
Aardman Animations Limited is a British animation studio based in Bristol, England. It is known for films and television series made using stop-motion and clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring its plasticine characters from Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Morph, and Angry Kid. After some experimental computer-animated short films during the late 1990s, beginning with Owzat (1997), Aardman entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away (2006). As of February 2020, it had earned $1.1 billion worldwide, with an average $135.6 million per film.
Nicholas Wulstan Park is an English filmmaker and animator who created Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, and Early Man. Park has been nominated for an Academy Award a total of six times and won four with Creature Comforts (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), A Close Shave (1995) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).
Wallace and Gromit: A Close Shave is a 1995 British stop-motion animated short film co-written and directed by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations with Wallace and Gromit Ltd., BBC Bristol and BBC Children's International. It is the third film featuring Wallace and Gromit, following A Grand Day Out (1989) and The Wrong Trousers (1993). A Close Shave won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. A Close Shave saw the first appearance of Shaun, who became the main character of the Shaun the Sheep spin-off series.
Chicken Run is a 2000 animated adventure comedy film produced by Pathé and Aardman Animations in partnership with DreamWorks Animation. Aardman's first feature-length film, it was directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park from a screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick and based on an original story by Lord and Park. The film stars the voices of Julia Sawalha, Mel Gibson, Tony Haygarth, Miranda Richardson, Phil Daniels, Lynn Ferguson, Timothy Spall, Imelda Staunton, and Benjamin Whitrow. Set in the countryside of Yorkshire, the plot centres on a group of British anthropomorphic chickens who see an American rooster named Rocky Rhodes as their only hope to escape the farm when their owners want to turn them into chicken pies.
Montacute House is a late Elizabethan mansion with a garden in Montacute, South Somerset, England. An example of English architecture during a period that was moving from the medieval Gothic to the more classic inspired Renaissance style. Montacute is one of few prodigy houses to survive almost unchanged from the Elizabethan era, the house has been designated as a Grade I listed building. It was visited by 125,442 people in 2013.
The Wrong Trousers is a 1993 British stop-motion animated short film co-written and directed by Nick Park, featuring his characters Wallace and Gromit, and was produced by Aardman Animations in association with Wallace and Gromit Ltd., BBC Bristol, Lionheart Television and BBC Children's International. It is the second film featuring the eccentric inventor Wallace and his dog Gromit, following A Grand Day Out (1989). In the film, a villainous penguin, Feathers McGraw, posing as a lodger, recruits Wallace by using his techno-trousers to steal a diamond from the city museum.
A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit, later marketed as A Grand Day Out, is a 1989 British stop-motion animated short film starring Wallace and Gromit. It was directed, animated and co-written by Nick Park at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield and Aardman Animations in Bristol.
Peter John Sallis was an English actor, known for his work on British television. He was the voice of Wallace in the Academy Award-winning Wallace and Gromit films and played Norman "Cleggy" Clegg in Last of the Summer Wine from its 1973 inception until the final episode in 2010, making him the only actor to appear in all 295 episodes. Additionally, he portrayed Norman Clegg's father in the prequel series First of the Summer Wine.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a 2005 stop-motion animated comedy film directed by Nick Park and Steve Box. It was produced, made and owned by DreamWorks Animation in collaboration with Aardman Animations. It was the second feature-length film by Aardman, after Chicken Run (2000). The last DreamWorks Animation film distributed by DreamWorks Pictures, as the studio spun off as an independent studio in 2004 until its acquisition by NBCUniversal in 2016. The film debuted in Sydney, Australia on 4 September 2005, before being released in theaters in the United States on 7 October 2005 and in the United Kingdom a week later on 14 October 2005.
Flushed Away is a 2006 animated adventure comedy film directed by Sam Fell and David Bowers, produced by Cecil Kramer, David Sproxton, and Peter Lord, and written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Chris Lloyd, Joe Keenan and Will Davies. It was the third and final DreamWorks Animation film co-produced with Aardman Features following Chicken Run (2000) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), and was the first Aardman project mostly made in CGI animation as opposed to starting with their usual stop-motion – this was because using water on plasticine models could damage them, and it was complex to render the effect in another way. The film stars the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen, Shane Richie, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis and Jean Reno. In the film, a pampered fancy rat named Roddy St. James (Jackman) is flushed down the toilet in his Kensington apartment by a sewer rat named Sid (Richie), and befriends a scavenger named Rita Malone (Winslet) in order to get back home while evading a sinister toad (McKellen) and his hench-rats.
Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions is a British series of ten Wallace and Gromit stop-motion animations varying in length from 1 to 3 minutes. Each episode features one of Wallace's new inventions and Gromit's skeptical reaction to it. The series was produced and released in 2002 by Aardman Animations. All ten shorts were aired on BBC One after the television premiere of Chicken Run (2000).
Steven Royston Box is an English animator and director who works for Aardman Animations.
A Matter of Loaf and Death is a 2008 British stop-motion animated short film produced by Aardman Animations, created by Nick Park, and is the fourth short to star his characters Wallace and Gromit, the first one since A Close Shave in 1995.
Locomotion was a Latin American cable channel dedicated to anime and animated shows targeting primarily an 18–34 audience, broadcasting movies, TV series and shorts. It was launched on November 1, 1996, and was closed down on July 31, 2005. It was also broadcast in Portugal through Cabovisão and TVCabo, and in Spain by satellite TV provider Vía Digital until 2003 due to administrative reasons with the TV operator.
"Angry Dad: The Movie" is the fourteenth episode of the twenty-second season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 20, 2011. In this episode, Bart wins many awards for his new short film based on his web cartoon series Angry Dad, which was first introduced in "I Am Furious (Yellow)", while Homer takes credit for the film during acceptance speeches.
Gromit Unleashed was a public charity art trail led by Wallace & Gromit's Grand Appeal and Aardman Animations, in which 80 giant artist-decorated fibreglass sculptures of Gromit were displayed on the streets of Bristol and the surrounding area between 1 July and 8 September 2013. At the end of the art trail, the sculptures were auctioned to raise funds for Wallace & Gromit's Grand Appeal, the Bristol Children's Hospital Charity. The Grand Appeal pledged to raise £3.5 million for state-of-the-art equipment for Bristol Children's Hospital, including an intraoperative MRI scanner, family facilities and child-friendly artwork to help save the lives of sick children at the hospital. All funds raised by Gromit Unleashed contributed towards this. The project follows the concept of the "Land in Sicht", the original Swiss project by artistic director Walter Knapp which inspired the subsequent worldwide exhibition "CowParade" and similar exhibitions in other cities, including Wow! Gorillas which took place in Bristol in 2011. To date Gromit Unleashed has raised over £5 million for Bristol Children's Hospital.
Early Man is a 2018 animated sports comedy film directed by Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, and Shaun the Sheep, written by Mark Burton and James Higginson, and starring the voices of Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, and Timothy Spall. The film follows a tribe of primitive Stone Age valley dwellers who have to defend their land from bronze-equipped invaders in a football match. The film premiered on 20 January 2018 at the BFI Southbank cinema.
Aardman Animations is an animation studio in Bristol, England that produces stop motion and computer-animated features, shorts, TV series and adverts.
