‘Wallace and Gromit’: How a bus trip in Preston led to animation’s most beloved characters
Taking a ride on the bus is like a lucky dip each time; it can be a relief to discover that you’ve landed a journey absent of rowdy teenagers or angry drunks, allowing you to get to your destination in peace, but not everyone gets the privilege.
I’ll never forget witnessing someone fly down the stairs of a bus and landing with a bit of bone practically poking out, leaving me scared of going on the top deck ever since.
For all of the strange people and bizarre experiences you encounter on buses, being in such a small, enclosed space with strangers is always going to yield some interesting, sometimes vomit-covered results, but thank God for public transportation. It’s a pretty revolutionary invention, and without it, we might not have been given the great gift of Wallace and Gromit, partly.
The beloved animated characters had already emerged in the mind of Nick Park, who began working on A Grand Day Out as his final project at the National Film and Television School; the project ended up taking many years, with Park working on it part-time following his recruitment by Aardman Animations, but once it was completed, it earned him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Animated Short Film’, although he lost out to himself for Creature Comforts.
Still, Wallace and Gromit soon became national treasures as they appeared in more films, like The Wrong Trousers and A Matter of Loaf and Death, with Park even getting four Oscar wins to his name, three of them thanks to the beloved old bachelor and his charming pet dog.
When you hear the names Wallace or Gromit, most of us Britons immediately think of the claymation characters, and it’s all down to a bus trip that Park took in his local Preston that inspired the name of the knitted-vest-wearing invention-lover. Talking to the Sunday Times, Park revealed that he initially had a different name and occupation in mind for Wallace, but he was soon struck with an unusual bout of inspiration after hopping on public transport.
“In an early version, Wallace was a postman called Jerry. Jerry and Gromit just doesn’t have the same ring,” he admitted, “But then I remembered this old lady on a bus in Preston. She got on with a fat Labrador called Wallace, and it struck me as a funny name, a very northern name to give a dog.”
So, he took the name, and while that makes it sound like he was going to call the dog Wallace, he instead decided to give the name to his owner. He already had Gromit, you see, which he knew he had to use as one half of the soon-to-be iconic duo, as Park explained, “My brother was training as an electrician and talking about grommets. For me, it’s always the way a word feels or makes a mouth move”.
So, just like that, Wallace and Gromit were born, and they remain some of the most influential, wacky, sometimes oddly relatable, and ultimately nostalgic and beloved characters in the history of animation.
