A Disney-style live-action Wallace & Gromit? Creator says ‘NOOOOOOO’

Cheese-loving stop-motion comedy duo Wallace and Gromit have been stumbling into invention-based jokes since their 1989 Oscar-nominated short film. A great day out. The characters will return in January A revenge for most birdsa long-duration adventure that is actually a full-fledged action film. At this point, there’s seemingly nothing that original creators Nick Park and Aardman Animation can’t do when it comes to claymation.

So when I asked Park in early December if he’d ever abandon stop-motion for a “live-action” Wallace film, in the style of Disney’s recent wave of hand-drawn to photorealistic conversions, the answer was… immediate and visceral.

“Well, that’s a pretty simple answer,” he says. “NOOOOOOO.”

The live-action redo pipeline isn’t slowing down, despite mixed reactions and receptions. Disney started the trend almost a decade ago with back-to-back hits of The Jungle Book, Beauty and the BeastAnd The Lion King. 2023 The Little Mermaid struggled to reach those highs and earned as much worldwide as The Lion King did in the United States alone, and this month’s Mufasa (technically a live-action-style reimagining of the prequel) is off to a slow start this holiday season. But that hasn’t stopped Disney from trying to clear the backlog Snow White, Lilo & StitchAnd Moana all arriving in the next two years. Universal will try its luck with a live-action in 2025 How to train your dragonat.

As for Wallace and Gromit, Park hopes to stick to animation.

“I think the films themselves will always be clay,” he said. But Park has the ambition, along with his own Revenge most birds co-director Merlin Crossingham, to bring the characters to every platform imaginable. Wallace and Gromit have done video games, they’ve done AR, and the director hopes they can do just about anything. “But I think clay is part of the character, it’s part of their soul to be that medium. It’s what they were born into and it can take something away. It’s quite difficult to define. ‘Dirty and funny’ is the expression we’ve used a lot.”

Neither Park nor Crossingham want Wallace and Gromit to remain stuck in the past. Each film is a reason to evolve the characters – technologically (as in the armatures of modern sculpture) and emotionally. While Revenge most birds It may be the most stunt-heavy Wallace and Gromit film yet, but it also forces the characters to explore their friendship and embrace it by the end.

“We put emotional pressure on them,” Crossingham said. “It’s in relative terms within the Wallace and Gromit world, but we pushed them and I’m excited to see them have a little bit more of an arc in their emotional story.”

“But it’s mostly Wallace and Gromit,” Park added. “It’s not too overt, but… a British version.”

Wallace and Gromit: Revenge on the Most Birds premieres on Netflix on January 3, 2025.