Nick Park's doodles show the beginnings of Wallace and Gromit
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 851680.ece
They are papers that expose the origins of two seminal characters in English fiction.
Like the manuscripts of Charles Dickens that showed the genesis of David Copperfield, or the poems of Emily Brontë that hint at Heathcliff, sketchbook doodlings revealed by The Times today show how Nick Park created Wallace and Gromit.
The documents show Wallace as he was first conceived, a mustachioed flat-cap-wearing mail-worker called Jerry, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Postman Pat.
They show the evolution of Gromit, an innocent-looking penguin who becomes trapped in a milk bottle and a menagerie of dogs, sheep and rabbits who would populate the later films.
Intriguingly for the legions of Wallace and Gromit fans, they also show as-yet unseen characters and plotlines: evil beavers, a confused toucan and raging robotic dinosaurs.
Pages from Nick Park's sketchbooks from the 1980s are reproduced in The Art of Wallace and Gromit, which is published this week. Storyboards and related artworks go on display at the Illustration Cupboard in Central London on Wednesday, in an exhibition marking the 20th anniversary of the characters' appearance on screen.
The sketchbooks will do much to advance understanding of the Plasticine characters and the imagination of the man who created them. “I feel as though a lid on top of my mind has been opened,” he said. “I do feel a little bit exposed.”
The first pictures of “Jerry the postman and his flying red bike” are to be found in sketches that Park made at art school. He thought of them as doodlings. “I thought it wasn't proper art,” he said. “I didn't think they would ever be more than a hobby.”
His tutors encouraged him to develop them; his father encouraged him to go to film school. “Being from Preston, people just didn't do that,” he said. “I thought I had to get a proper job.”
The name Wallace came from a dog that Park met on a bus in Preston in the 1970s. “This little old lady got on to a bus with this enormously fat labrador. She said, ‘Come on Wallace, get down Wallace.’ They were these two opposites. The name stayed with me.”
Park's brother was an electrician who frequently mentioned “grommets”in conversation: Gromit became the title of Wallace's handy dog. “I've nothing against cats, but I somehow found the relationship people have with dogs more interesting for what I needed — we are playing with the loyalty thing,” he said. “I also found it quite difficult to give a cat a brow.”
A sketch of Gromit from 1982 shows him with a large mouth. Later the brow becomes his chief means of communication.
After the success of the first film, A Grand Day Out (1989), Park and the writer Bob Baker raided his sketchbooks for more characters. They found studies of a penguin, which they developed from an awkward guest into the psychotic Feathers McGraw, who carries out daring heists while disguised as a chicken. One rather sinister sketch shows the penguin carrying a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Another shows him trapped in a milk bottle, an image that would figure in the denouement of The Wrong Trousers.
The raid on his sketchbooks was accompanied by a broader plundering of Park's entire childhood. “We had chickens in the garden,”he said. “One of them was an American breed, a Rhode Island Red. He was known as the Lone Free Ranger. He was the model for Rocky in Chicken Run.”
“We had this idea that Wallace was going to discover dinosaur bones near Wigan,” he said. “Wallace opens a Jurassic park outside the town, but the mechanical dinosaurs go wrong and go on the rampage, like King Kong.”
He no longer needs to sketch Wallace and Gromit with such precision: animators at Aardman, not to mention most of Britain, are now thoroughly acquainted with them. “In meetings people say: ‘I don't think Wallace would do that’,” he said. “There is a lot of expectation and a pressure to live up to it. It's getting harder and harder to surprise people.”
Would the dinosaur film happen? He was not sure.
Then he let something slip. “At the moment I'm painting these characters for a feature film,” he said.
Wait a minute! What characters?
“Oh no, I can't say.” he said. “It's years away.”
What are they?
“They're human characters. But not Wallace and Gromit. Some other sort of people.”
With that cryptic utterance, Park went back to his drawing board.
