Wallace and Gromit became Aardman’s most famous characters after animator Nick Park joined the studio in 1985.<\/p>\n
But Gromit was not always a dog.<\/p>\n
“I had this idea of an English guy who builds a rocket, in the basement of his house,” recalled Park.<\/p>\n
“I was thinking he may have a pet, probably a cat.”<\/p>\n
The switch was surprisingly simple.<\/p>\n
“I started modelling the cat, and it was just very difficult, so I thought I’d do a dog instead!”<\/p>\n
Park was developing A Grand Day Out at the National Film and Television School in London when Lord and Sproxton came to speak to students.<\/p>\n
“We met him and thought, ‘Oh, he’s good’. In fact, he’s very good. Now I know him, he’s actually a genius,” said Lord.<\/p>\n
The combination was electric. A Grand Day Out was nominated for an Oscar in 1990, losing only to another Aardman production, Creature Comforts, also directed by Park.<\/p>\n
Pointing to a poster of Wallace and Gromit floating over Bristol in a hot-air balloon, Lord reflected on their appeal.<\/p>\n
“When they appear on the screen, you laugh before they do anything.”<\/p>\n
Park later won three more Oscars. Perhaps it was just as well he never mastered Gromit the Cat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wallace and Gromit became Aardman’s most famous characters after animator Nick Park joined the studio in 1985. But…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":879121,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-879120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}