Wallace & Gromit

Overview

Created by animator Nick Park for his final graduation project at the National Film and Television School, Wallace and Gromit are two animated characters crafted from Plasticine. Having left his graduation project only partly complete when Nick Park joined the Aardman Animations, the studio picked up the characters and helped Park complete his work, which would finally become Wallace and Gromit's first TV film, A Grand Day Out. Wallace, voiced by the English actor Peter Sallis, is an absent minded, cheese loving eccentric inventor from Wigan who lives alone with his Dog, Gromit. Although Gromit is a Slient Protagonist, his strong and overtly animated facial expressions, paired with his anthropomorphic body language give the audience a vague idea of what he is thinking, often to the point that many people just assume that he is a talking Dog.

After A Grand Day Out was met with both critical and popular acclaim upon it's debut in 1989, Wallace and Gromit went on to star in a further 3 TV specials - The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and A Matter of Loaf and Death, - as well as appearing in several series of shorts (collectively called Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions) as well as a full length motion picture called Curse of the Were Rabbit. Wallace and Gromit are world renowned as not only some of the most recognisable claymation characters but also as major British Popular Culture Icons as well as iconic representations of the British People.

Wallace & Gromit in Games

Although initially Wallace and Gromit only appeared in mini game 'fun packs' over the course of their first 3 specials run between 1989 and 1995, after the release of the Motion Picture the duo began to find their way into more conventional games on home consoles. However, both Project Zoo and the Curse of the Were Rabbit Game Tie-in were met with fairly average critical reviews.

In 2009 Wallace and Gromit became popular gaming figures once more thanks to a series of Adventure games created by Telltale Games. Entitled Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures, so far 4 point and click episodic adventure games have been released on PC as digital downloads and on the Xbox Live Marketplace, with at least two more episodes currently in production.