Wallace & Gromit and the charm of claymation

During a recent interview with The Independent, the English filmmaker and animator Nick Park expressed his bemusement at Feathers McGraw, the anthropomorphic chicken antagonist from his latest animated film, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (released on Netflix earlier this month), becoming a hated onscreen villain.

- Aditya Mani Jha

"They think he is evil. But he is only a four-inch-tall piece of plasticine!" Park's being modest, of course, but the comment works as a tribute to the power of clay animation or 'claymation', a style of stop-motion animation wherein each figure being animated is handmade, usually out of plasticine clay. As with other forms of stop-motion, each still picture ('frame') is then recorded and played rapidly before the viewer, generally at 10-12 frames per second.

Within the world of stop-motion, claymation is considered a labour-intensive technique. There are several other stop-motion techniques where the logistics and the effort/output ratio are a bit kinder—paper-cutouts, Lego-based animation (called 'brickfilms'), 'lightbox' animation (the manipulation of light and shadow in high-contrast images). And yet, claymation maintains a significant following among animation enthusiasts because of the hand-crafted look one achieves with plasticine clay; plasticine's association with childhood and the resultant nostalgia don't hurt either.

Consider the painstaking craft behind the scene where Feathers McGraw reveals the full scope of his scheming—a submarine filled with evil robots doing his bidding. The sleek-looking submarine emerges from the water like a postmodern Kraken, before the camera turns to McGraw playing the piano, turning his swivel-chair around like the best bad guys. The level of detailing in each clay-piece here is truly impressive (how did they make the clay-piano obey actual piano-mechanics?).

It's no surprise that