Stop-motion films are by their nature some of the most delicate, analog creations that exist in a sharp-edged entertainment universe grappling with the impending impact of AI. This year two of these movies — “Memoir of a Snail” and “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” — are among the frontrunners in a group of films vying for top honors in the animated film category during awards season.
Both films are the result of painstaking work by leading filmmakers, but their journeys have been different. One is the part of a long tradition by a beloved British filmmaking team (Aardman) and the other is an indie film by a lauded auteur (Adam Elliot) from Australia.
Each film and the filmmakers behind them have already made a mark. “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” has earned seven Annie Awards noms including best feature. “Memoir of a Snail” has also been lauded, winning the Annecy Crystal Award, the Animation Is Film Audience Award and earning an Annie Award nom for best independent feature.
Stop-motion films made strong showings during past awards seasons as well. “Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit” won best animated feature in 2006 and “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” did the same in 2023. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” helmer Nick Park also won three Academy Awards for his stop motion shorts: “Creature Comforts” (1990), “The Wrong Trousers” (1993) and “A Close Shave” (1995). Elliot won an Academy Award for his stop-motion short film “Harvie Krumpet” in 2004.
“Wallace & Gromit” co-directors Merlin Crossingham and Park created the film with updated technology, though the fundamental ways in which the film was made remained the same.
“We’ve been shooting with digital cameras since ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death,’ ’’ says Park. “This really helps if something goes wrong because it’s easier to fix something. If there’s a moment where an animation doesn’t work, you can edit it using the digital technology.”
Adds Crossingham: “We’re still using puppets on small stages in a kind of mini-studio and the core craft of stop motion is still the same. It’s the support around it that has evolved. We used to shoot on 35mm. That changes how you bring your vision to the screen. Shooting in digital makes things much faster so you can do more. The chase scene we have at the end of this movie might now have been possible, in the way that we did it, 20 years ago.”
Feathers McGraw in ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’
Richard Davies
The canal-set chase scene at the end of the film was done with the help of CG water, and they’ve also incorporated silicone in place of clay in certain areas, in order to get the look they want.
“With all the handling that the animators do, the puppets get so trashed,” says Crossingham. “If aspects of [the puppets] are silicone, it saves a lot of remodeling. But even with the silicone, we’ve become a lot better. And even if [the puppet] is silicone, the original was made of clay, and it’s a mold taken from the original clay, so the fingerprints transferred to the silicone, too. It’s still the hand that made the original and how the handmade aspect is so at the heart of everything we do.”
They’re still using clay in most of their characters, and that comes with the kind of complications that arise from this singular handmade art form.
“The modeling clay that we use is not designed for filmmaking,” says Park. “It’s designed for schools and for children and it’s not precision artists’ material. So you order crimson, and on one batch might be very crimson, and the next batch it might not be so crimson. So we have someone who is our clay monitor and when we get new batches, which we do at the beginning of a film, he will go through and mix the colors. So, all of our colors are unique. He mixes batches, not just for color and pigment, but for texture, because all the different pigments have different sort of malleable qualities. He tries to get them uniform so that all the animators get a modeling play that responds under the studio lights, which are often quite warm. He might add a little bit of glycerin to soften it up or, if it’s too soft, he’ll add a bit of chalk powder, gypsum, that kind of stuff. He’s got secret tricks.”
For Elliot, who produced his film with help from the Australian government’s arts funding, the key for “Memoir of a Snail” was finding techniques that would allow him to tell the story he developed over the course of many years, while also carefully watching his budget.
“The film has these four basic elements, which is paper, clay, wire and paint,” says Elliot. “Everything we do is it’s an attempt to make the puppets look a certain way — we’re celebrating the imperfect. Inside the head [of the puppet] is an armature, so we can move it around. There are also magnets everywhere — that’s how we attach the eyes. But the majority of the film is made from paper, clay, wire and paint. All the sets are all cardboard. We don’t use any fabric, so it’s all about celebrating the textures and the brush strokes, fingerprints and the wire is always hair. We never do molded hair. And that’s because I found a lot of stop motion was getting very slick. I didn’t want an over-reliance on things like 3D printers.”
Made with a tiny crew, “Memoir of a Snail,” used voiceover in favor of having the characters move their mouths so that the movements of the characters could be done more quickly. Sarah Snook, Eric Bana and Jacki Weaver joined the voice cast.
“I just said yes without even reading it because I knew Adam’s [Elliot] work,” says Weaver. “Playing ‘Pinky’ was a delight because she’s so well-written.”
There’s also a large amount of fire and water in Elliot’s film. But the constraints of his budget meant that he couldn’t consider even a small amount of CG. He had to look for other solutions.
“We used cellophane to create the look of fire,” says Elliot. “This film is about imperfection, accepting imperfection in yourself, in others and in life. The look of the cellophane fits with what we were doing but it did make things a lot harder. I’ve always had to find ways of doing more with less and small budgets, but in a way, you’re forced to be inventive and innovative. We had to come up with the magnetic eyeballs we use on the puppets to save time, and just being forced to use voice over.
“It’s all forced me to be very mindful of how to how to use everything we must make sure that the voiceover is paired right back and distilled to its bare essence, so that every word is only there because it needs to be. The rule is show it, don’t say it. I worked hard to make sure my narration isn’t too overbearing. So, yeah, I think it’s all these limitations that have forced me to come up with solutions that have then led to my style and esthetic and way of telling stories. It’s made what I do unique and, weirdly, that’s what everyone’s trying to be. When I was at film school, we were all trying so hard to be different.”
