What makes two plasticine figurines from the 1980s relevant in 2025?

Watch this essay here, or read it below:

My kids are no strangers to classic Disney fare, from The Lion King to Lilo & Stitch (the #1 favourite in our home of late). Of course, their little developing brains love more recent short-form content like Paw Patrol and Spidey & His Amazing Friends - cloying, engagement-optimised shows with cardboard dialogue and zero character development across 275 episodes.

Part Daddy daycare, part social experiment, I took my two eldest kids (ages 5 and 3) to see Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers at the cinema next door to our house.

They loved it. Within days we’d tracked down the other W&G films and binged them all. I found myself going down a claymation rabbit hole, learning about the genius behind Wallace, a bumbling British inventor, and Gromit, his clever canine companion.

Nick Park created the first clay models of Wallace & Gromit as a student at England’s National Film & Television School in 1982. In 1985, Park joined Aardman, a growing animation studio, where he finished A Grand Day Out and two other short films featuring the pair. By 2006, Park had won 4 Oscars and 6 BAFTA Awards for shaping and photographing lumps of plasticine.

Park is something of an accidental hero, an Oscar-winning everyman. Speaking to the BBC, he explained: “I have to pinch myself sometimes, that they’re still on telly. Even my first student film is still on telly.”

Scratching below the surface, a focus and dedication to his craft appeared early in Park’s life. He shared that as a kid “I was always quietly ambitious…I realised that if I sat watching the telly I’d never get anything done.” Most days after school, Park would take himself up to the attic to sketch and build cartoon flipbooks or felt cut-outs. As a 13-year-old he hired his Mum (with her home video camera) to help him shoot a film project.

The ‘great train chase’ scene in The Wrong Trousers is one of my favourite in cinema.

It’s a rare mix of excitement, dramatic tension and humour, shot in a rough, shaky, off-kilter way. The lumps and bumps are a creative choice, as Park explained in a video on the Aardman Studios YouTube Channel:

“[We make] a conscious effort on set to ‘keep it thumby’…to leave traces of fingerprints on the models. It connects you with the story, it feels organic, [so] you know it’s real. 

It’s one thing being able to just animate a puppet, but it’s another thing making it seem like the puppet has its own life, and is living and breathing and has a soul. That’s the real skill.”

It took a team of 25 animators 9 months to make A Grand Day Out. A single animator, working with a single puppet, produces 2-3 seconds of film per day. This kind of content (read: art) doesn’t ‘scale’. And that’s one of its most charming features.

Notwithstanding how labour-intensive they are, Wallace & Gromit films are some of the highest ROI productions in the industry. They don’t scale, but they sell, and they stand the test of time. It’s a refreshing success story in the era of platforms like Netflix’s ‘more is more, and worse is better’ content philosophy. Nick Park’s plasticine creations are living proof that the opposite is true.

There’s a reason we can still watch Wallace & Gromit in a foreign language cinema in a village of 9,000 people almost 40 years on.

Who’s a creator you admire who leaves the fingerprints on their work?