The Wrong Trousers, which helped establish the popularity of Claymation odd couple Wallace and Gromit, has proved to have legs. Directed by Nick Park, the 1993 stop-motion animated short film focuses on bumbling inventor Wallace and his beagle Gromit, a silent character known for saving the day when his owner’s creations go haywire.
Park created the pair for the 1989 short A Grand Day Out, which he began while studying at the National Film and Television School in England. David Sproxton, co-founder of Aardman Animations, which has produced all of the Wallace & Gromit projects, sees The Wrong Trousers as more polished than Grand Day Out. “Trousers was a whole league higher up the food chain in terms of production values and storytelling,” Sproxton has said. The Wrong Trousers centers on suspicious penguin Feathers McGraw, who moves in with the duo and hatches a nefarious plan for the robotic Techno Trousers that Wallace has invented to walk Gromit. For Sproxton, the film feels Hitchcockian, which he has attributed in part to the lighting: “I said, ‘Let’s light these as if they are live-action dramas. Let’s put the atmosphere in as if they are proper thrillers.’ ”
The Wrong Trousers premiered Dec. 26, 1993, on BBC Two, and it went on to win the Oscar for best animated short. Among its famous fans is Danny Boyle, who said during THR‘s 2016 Director Roundtable that Wrong Trousers‘ climax involving a speeding model train is “one of the greatest action sequences I’ve ever seen”; this led fellow roundtable participant David O. Russell to point out that he based chase sequences in Three Kings on it.
Wallace and Gromit, who star in 2005’s Oscar-winning feature The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, hadn’t been seen onscreen since the 2008 short A Matter of Loaf and Death before returning for last year’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. The new film, in which Feathers escapes from captivity, is a direct sequel to Wrong Trousers and is nominated for the animated feature Oscar. “We discovered how much the fans really love Feathers,” Park told THR last year. “It was, ‘Wow, Wallace and Gromit are back,’ and then it was ‘Feathers McGraw is back! That’s my childhood.’ ”
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
