Yet it’s also clearly an amateur work made by Nick Park with brilliance, a kettle of some string, and very little else. No teams of animators here: this first instalment is very much an independent film. It’s also interesting that Park, of Bristol, would choose so make Wallace so quintessential northern but this was, I think, a combination both of his earlier Creature Comforts and the late ‘80s zeitgeist.
Creature Comforts was a series of very short animations combining the voices of real people, not actors, many with accents not often heard on telly, with animations of animals with expressive yet naturalistic facial expressions. And all this, I think, feeds into a certain thing going on in the late ‘80s with Alan Bennett approaching the peak of his powers and popularity as a great yet very TV-friendly playwright (He had come a long way from Beyond the Fringe by this point, although I’d love to see his comedy series On the Margin, long junked by the BBC). In particular, this was the time of his series of short monologues called Talking Heads, short plays with one character- typically an elderly, northern woman- talking to camera. I thing there’s a lot of this aesthetic in Wallace.
Although, obviously, we also have a dog who does welding and a skiing fridge so, you know, there’s other stuff going on too. I thoroughly enjoyed and yes, indeed, I am just blogging what I happen to have seen over Christmas while the in-laws are here, just to keep the blog ticking over. I’m probably going to open a bottle of wine now and watch the penultimate episode of Union Jack while they all play their online computer game thingies. See you in a bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment