WallaceAndGromit.net

Because of all the business around the holidays I’m a bit late with this bit of news, but in case you haven’t heard, Wallace and Gromit’s Curse managed to pick up the Children’s BAFTA award back in November, Gromit and Potter awarded Baftas:

This makes their second BAFTA award, as they also won best British film at the main Bafta awards early in 2006.

Wallace and Gromit’s big adventure – Wallace and Gromit visit Sick Kids Hospital

Wensleydale is big cheese in world awards – Wensleydale picks up SEVEN metals at the World Cheese Awards!

Aardman’s model bosses made CBEs – The men who moulded Aardman Animations into one of the world’s top animation studios have been made CBEs in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list

Producer’s Guild Award of America Animated Feature Nominations – Including Aardman’s Flushed Away. If you recall, Curse carried off the prize for best toon award last year.

The Patent Office rolls out innovation project for kids:

The Patent Office has appointed Bell Design to roll out an interactive campaign to encourage innovation among primary school children.

The campaign will form part of a wider public agenda to move the UK towards an innovation-based economy.

WALLACE and Gromit fans flocked to Worcester city centre to see the plasticine pair celebrate the start of the festive season by turning on the Christmas lights.

Worcester News: It’s Wallace and Gromit in the big festive switch on

Also, for those of you who follow Nick Park’s work, his work had a cameo on The South Bank Show – as well as a shot of Gromit holding the sound boom!

A couple articles about it:

Manchester Evening News Blogs: A Grand Day Out

Manchester Evening News: A sculptor in Plasticine

First off, thanks to everyone who emailed with such kind words about my wedding! Several of you expressed interest in seeing pictures, so I’ll get this out of the way first 🙂 You can see all the photos online here: The Wedding of Elizabeth and Michael.

Rather than boring you with a lot of old news, I’m going to highlight just a few of the things that have gone on with Wallace and Gromit these past few months.

Perhaps the thing that I’m most excited about is the creation of a Wallace and Gromit Podcast by the fellow over at 62WestWallabyStreet.co.uk. It’s quite good, you can subscribe via iTunes, or use this direct XML link (which you can drop into your RSS reader).

Jafar emailed me over these few links over the past couple months that I thought I’d share:

Wallace and Gromit’s Cheese Plea – August 11 – The makers of Wallace and Gromit are backing a campaign urging the European Union to grant special status to the characters\u2019 favourite cheese. Manufacturers in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, where the cheese has been made since the 12th century, say that they need protection from unfair competition…. (I also found a new Wensleydale Blog, more info about the blog creation here)

Wallace and Gromit Masterminds Awarded Freedom of City – As Jafar said “Feels great to know about another feather in Nick Park’s and Aardman’s cap!”

Gromit Film up for Bafta Awards – Animated duo Wallace and Gromit could score a Bafta double after The Curse of the Were-Rabbit earned a best film nomination in the children’s awards.

Thanks again Jafar!

In other news…

Tony White on “Animation from Pencils to Pixels” – Not strictly Wallace and Gromit (although he does mention them, “arguably the best animated film over the past couple of years was Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,“), I’m an animation fan in general and this was an interesting article.

Aardman launches mobile TV channel

A Grand Day Out for Youngsers – Wallace and Gromit visit some young fans

An Animated History – As Aardman celebrate 30 years of animation and receive the freedom of the city of Bristol, we take a look back at the history of the company which brought us that cheese-loving duo Wallace and Gromit. – Great timeline with links to other Wallace and Gromit exclusive BBC content!

Dreamworks and Aardman Split – Can’t say we didn’t see this one coming, it’s ashame but I think Aardman really needs a releasing studio that will do more to promote their fantastic films.

New Unit for Children’s Hospital – The new building is being paid for by the Department of Health, with £90,000 coming from the Wallace and Gromit Grand Appeal for art enhancement.

And finally, Aardman’s latest feature film was released last weekend! I haven’t seen it yet, but Flushed Away made $18Mil in US theaters it’s opening weekend (better than Curse did), topping the charts at #3.

As many have remarked upon, I haven’t updated this website in a couple months. This is because I have My Wedding coming up and a lot of other things have come up in my life to keep me occupied.

But rest assured! I will be back. I hope to implement an RSS feed for the news of this website and perhaps add other features in the upcoming months, starting when I get back home from my honeymoon 🙂

Thanks for your continued patronage and support!

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, following the Academy Award for Curse there was talk about the creation of a statue in their hometown of Bristol to commemorate the duo. Well it’s going to happen!

BBC.CO.UK: Wallace and Gromit to get statue

Bristol City Council has backed plans for the monument, which will be funded by public subscriptions.

The statue is the idea of local councillor Terry Cook, who wants to see Wallace and Gromit, and their makers Aardman Animations, recognised.

Thanks to Jafar from India and my regular contributor Daniel Brett for letting me know about this!

Other items in the news:

Wallace and Gromit visit city hospital

Wensleydale is big cheese at cheese awards

Wallace & Gromit & Simpsons Win Reuben Award

Wrong Trousers day was celebrated on June 23rd, here are a couple articles about it:

‘Cracking Day’ For Wrong Trousers

Wrong Trousers . . . but a right load of cash

And finally, I was very amused when I stumbled upon this article: Making a pot of tea, by text messaging

The ReadyWhenUR kettle, devised by British tea maker PG Tips and U.K. cell phone network Orange and loosely inspired by invention-happy characters Wallace & Gromit, boils hot water upon receiving a text message that reads “switch on.” It’s that simple.

Fantastic!

Several news items for this update, here they are, in no particular order. Thanks to Daniel Brett for letting me know about some of these!

Bad news first, there have been several articles talking about the continued losses that Dreamworks has taken following last year’s movies. Curse is often named in these articles as one of the causes of the flop, but as an internationally recongnised “Great Movie” by film festivals and even mainstream award shows in the United States (think Academy Awards), I’m still convinced this was a problem on Dreamworks’ end with lack of publicity for the film. As I’ve mentioned in the past, everyone I know knew about Madagascar, but very few knew about the Wallace & Gromit film. It’s really ashame.

Real-life were-rabbit is ‘killed’ – I posted about this were-rabbit a few weeks back. A teenage motorist has succeeded where sharp-shooters failed, by apparently killing a real-life “were-rabbit” which was plaguing Northumberland allotments. Poor critter!

Now lets get on with the good news, shall we?

Japanese robot legs could replace wheelchairs – Real techno trousers? This isn’t strictly Wallace and Gromit related of course, but that’s the first thing I thought of!

Police end up with wrong trousers – Measurement problems lead to many officers not getting trousers that fit properly.

Wallce and Gromit top UK inspirational figures poll – Wallace and Gromit have topped a poll to find the most inspirational figures in the creative arts world. The cartoon creations were the surprise choice in a survey of 16-25-year-olds.

BT announces film deal – Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Madagascar, Just Like Heaven, Red Eye and the award winning Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit will soon be available on-demand from BT.

Wallace and Gromit open European film fest – The festival will begin tomorrow (5/10/06) showcasing 12 of the most prominent films of Europe which are expected to delight cinema fans in Hanoi and HCM City.

Buy Feng Shaun at Amazon.com – I had to laugh when I saw this so I had to share, Feng Shaun: Discover Inner Peace with Shaun the Sheep

AMC Theatres Shows Free Movies – In select AMC theaters in the US, AMC is showing free movies on Wednesday mornings in the summer. One of their features? Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit of course!

Today, April 23rd, Wallace and Gromit are hopping in a Ford Transit and attending the London Marathon in an effort to help raise money for needy children.

Helping their marathon effort is the fact that the new Transit is only an inflatable replica of the one that will be unveiled for the first time at the NEC, Birmingham next week

It’s all the idea of the Wallace & Gromit’s Children’s Foundation — a national charity that raises funds to improve the quality of life for children in hospitals and hospices throughout the UK.

media.ford.com – A Grand Day Out For Ford Transit

For more information about the foundation, check out wallaceandgromitschildrensfoundation.org and wrongtrousersday.org.

Articles have been floating around about a giant rabbit in the UK ravaging gardens.

Four gardeners described the rabbit as having one ear larger than the other.

The main clues are oversized paw prints and sightings of what growers claim to be a cross between a hare and a rabbit.

BBC.co.uk – Hunt for real life ‘were-rabbit’

That’s too funny! Thanks to George from Zurich for emailing the link, as well as others who have brought this story to my attention.

Also check out this article that has a picture of a breed of rabbit that can grow to be quite large.

And Happy Easter all!

After the win at the Academy Awards this year for Best Animated Feature, the residents of Bristol, England began to clamor about having some sort of monument put in place to honor the plasticine duo.

Call for Wallace and Gromit statue

“A campaign to erect a statue of Wallace and Gromit – the animated stars of Oscar-winning Aardman Animations – has been launched.

Campaigners are calling for a monument celebrating balding cheese-lover Wallace and his canine companion Gromit to be erected in the company’s home city of Bristol.”

That would be fantastic!

And Daniel Brett emailed me to let me know about the Sony Ericsson Empire Awards, where Wallace and Gromit picked up 4 nominations for awards. When all was said and done they managed to scoop up the Best Director award. Wow! Quite an acomplishment!

And as a final note, I wanted to let all visitors to this site know about another WnG fan site that is really exceptional: WallaceAndGromit.us. The owner of the site emailed me a couple weeks ago to swap links and I was happy to, she’s done some great work, so check it out!

On the tail of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit’s win in the “Outstanding British Film of the Year” category at the BAFTA awards, Wallace and Gromit make another victory, this time in the US with the winning of an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature! The 3rd award for Wallace and Gromit, and the 4th for their creator Nick Park!

I was excited while watching this, hoping that they’d get the recognitionthey deserved, the competition was pretty fierce.

Nick: Oh. Actually, we’ve got a little thing, just to match the old bow ties for coordination. We just happened to bring them along, just in case. Just want to give a great big thank you to Helena Bonham Carter, and particularly to Peter Sallis who has been the voice of Wallace. He’s here tonight, ladies and gentlemen at the Oscars. He’s been the voice of Wallace for the last 23 years and you’ve been an absolute gem, Peter and you’ve sparkled all the way. Also, thank you to Jeffrey Katzenberg and to Dreamworks, who also sparkle, and have been a great support to this very personal film of ours. And the whole crew back in Bristol, England at Aardman Animations thank you so much you’re great. And a little message from Steve.

Steve & Nick: Cracking cheese, Gromit.