As far as British teeth go, Nick Park has a pretty decent set. There's a bit of an overbite and a couple of wayward incisors or premolars, but the bottom row seems nicely regular. And both uppers and lowers look very white and well-maintained indeed.
In other words, they're nothing like the stumps that fill the gummy mouth of one-half of Park's most famous creation. Which, of course, would be Wallace, the cheese-loving dweeb in the woollen sleeveless sweater whose penchant for madcap, labour-saving inventions is forever getting him and his equally famous (and toothless) canine companion, Gromit, into dire situations.
The dotty dysfunctional duo has been getting into sticky wickets since the late 1980s, shortly after Park, an animation graduate of the National Film and Television School near London, travelled 200 kilometres west to Bristol to take a job with Aardman Animations. It was there that Wallace and Gromit took shape (literally), with Park moulding tons of Plasticine and modelling clay into the now-iconic figures that eventually starred in the first W & G short film, the 30-minute A Grand Day Out, about extraterrestrial cheese-hunting.
As devotees of the first three W & G short features can attest, Park has a, well . . . thing for the teeth and lips of his characters, a thing so English in its caricatural extravagance as to deserve the adjective "Dickensian." Indeed, Park's penchant achieves positively halitosal heights in the duo's first full-length feature, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, particularly with Park's renderings of co-stars Lady Campanula Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter) and her shifty suitor, Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes).
Not surprisingly, when one gets the chance to meet Park face to face -- as this reporter did during the Toronto International Film Festival -- and hear him say something like, "Wallace and Gromit are an extension of me, in a sense," you're compelled to inspect, however furtively, the mouth mouthing these words.
At 46, Park remains boyish and twinkly-eyed. Unmarried, childless, he lives in a modest two-bedroom house. When he takes a summer holiday, it's usually a drive up to Scotland in a beat-up Peugeot instead of an airplane trip to the Côte d'Azur. ("It's quite important to stay in contact with reality," he observes.)
Even though he's scored three Academy Awards and two Oscar nominations in less than 15 years, he's still prone to the nervous laughter, trailing sentences and fidgety hand gestures of a shy 13-year-old at his first mixed social. While in Toronto, where Curse had its North American premiere, these gestures often entailed reaching out to touch, lift and pat large-scale models of Wallace and Gromit that Park likes to carry.
"I prefer to be behind the camera, not in front," Park, a self-described "frustrated actor," readily acknowledged. "I enjoy a sort of fame because I've created them. But it's their faces that people know, not mine, and I'm quite happy to have it that way."
The idea for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit ("Something wicked this way hops!") happened about six years ago while Park was sitting in a Bristol pub with co-writer Bob Baker. They were in the midst of making Chicken Run, Park's first feature-length stop-motion animation, released in 2000 as the kickoff to a $330-million, five-picture deal with DreamWorks SKG.
That film was something of a surprise, albeit a pleasant one, for Park fans precisely because it didn't star Wallace and Gromit but a Mel Gibson-voiced rooster in a barnyard spoof of Stalag 17.
"You see, I was nervous of spoiling what we had with the three short films, the sweetness of it," Park explained. "If we were going to do a Wallace and Gromit movie, it couldn't just be a string of jokes. We felt we wanted it to have some integrity as a movie . . . I wasn't looking for any idea to fill 80 minutes or so; I wanted something that demanded to be made," especially since, in the nerve-racking world of stop-motion animation, weeks of work are required just to produce two or three minutes of usable footage. (At its peak of principal photography activity, Curse had 30 film units operating at any one time.)
In this instance, it was Baker sipping on a pint and exclaiming, "Oh, how can we do a horror picture with Wallace and Gromit?" that got Park in gear. But not entirely: In fact, both DreamWorks and Park thought their second collaboration was going to be a Claymation adaptation of the tortoise and the hare fable. "But that kinda fell through, really," Park said. "We eventually both felt it lacked some kind of 'X' factor."
Turning then to the voluble Wallace and the mute Gromit felt at once like a relief and an inevitability. "Here we were back with homegrown characters, back on home turf. On the one hand, we didn't have to start from scratch, like Chicken Run, or try to freshen up an old story."
For the time being, Park seems content to nurse the on-screen delivery of Curse and not put his mind too firmly toward any new project. Yes, "we've talked about doing a second Chicken Run, but there's nothing concrete." Yes, John Cleese is working, in Plasticine, on "an animation about cavemen" for Aardman called Crude Awakening , "but I won't be involved particularly."
Will there be another Wallace and Gromit feature, then? Will Gromit ever, like Garbo, talk?
"There are no plans to have Gromit talk," Park answered with a laugh, while admitting an early incarnation of the canine did involve a mouth and the ability to speak. "One country -- Denmark or Finland, I forget -- actually put a voice on Gromit for TV broadcast, but we stopped it, of course."
Is he worried about Wallace's future given that Peter Sallis, the veteran British character actor who has been the inventor's inimitable voice from the beginning, turns 85 next year and it takes four or five years to make an 85-minute stop-motion epic?
"Oh, I don't like to think about that," Park frowned. "I can't imagine anyone else doing Wallace. Really, it's a bridge I prefer to cross when I come to it. Fortunately, Peter's health is pretty good. He was pretty sprightly in this film."