Wallace and Gromit is a British stop-motion animated comedy franchise created by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations. It 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 released in 1989. Wallace was voiced by actor Peter Sallis until 2010 when he was succeeded by Ben Whitehead. While Wallace speaks very often, Gromit is largely silent and has no dialogue, communicating through facial expressions and body language.
Creator Nick Park with his characters in 2005 promoting Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Wallace and Gromit bronze sculpture at the Market Hall in Preston, Lancashire, Park's home town.
Wallace, with his dog Gromit, the main characters of the franchise
Gromit sorts the mail at his house where he hopes to find a birthday card (scene from The Wrong Trousers).
Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints or plasticine figures are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation. Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation. Stop motion of flat materials such as paper, fabrics or photographs is usually called cutout animation.
A clay model of a chicken, designed to be used in a clay stop motion animation
Stills from Battle of the Suds and other Helena Smith-Dayton films (1917)
Pat & Mat, two inventive but clumsy neighbors, was introduced in 1976, while the first made-for-TV episode Tapety (translated Wallpaper) was produced in 1979 for ČST Bratislava.