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    Wallace and Gromit Creator Discusses the Characters, Technology and the Queen

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    Nick Park’s latest film in the stop-motion series is up for multiple awards at the BAFTAs and the Oscars.Wallace and Gromit is something of an institution in the entertainment world. Since its introduction more than 35 years ago, the stop-motion series has won three Oscars and five BAFTAs. The two protagonists — Wallace, the cheese-eating inventor, and Gromit, the long-suffering dog — have even appeared on Royal Mail stamps.The animation series’ latest iteration — “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” — is now back in the awards race with nominations at Sunday’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs, and the Oscars in March.“Vengeance Most Fowl” was directed by Wallace and Gromit’s creator, Nick Park, and by Merlin Crossingham, who said the film was shot over 15 months in a studio that was larger than a soccer field, with 260 people on set — including 35 animators and 50 puppet makers. The handcrafted clay cast has been expanded to include a robotic garden gnome called Norbot.“As a crew, if we got a minute and a half in the week, we’d have a megaweek,” Crossingham said. He described animation as a “magic trick,” because “you’re breathing life into something that doesn’t have any.”Park was born and raised in Preston, a city in northwestern England. His father was a photographer and his mother was a tailor and seamstress who made garments for all five of her children.Nick Park, left and Merlin Crossingham at the London Critics’ Circle Film Awards this month, where “Vengeance Most Fowl” won the best animated feature prize.Scott A. Garfitt/Invision, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gints Zilbalodis Discusses ‘Flow’ and the Movie’s Oscar Nominations

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      “We beat James Cameron!” the filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis said with a shy smile during a recent video interview. “Flow,” his second animated feature, is now one of the highest grossing films ever in his native Latvia, surpassing even Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise at the local box office.Latvia has a population of roughly 1.8 million people, and “Flow” has sold more than 255,000 admissions since it was first released in August 2024. The film is still playing in Latvian theaters.“We still have sold-out screenings in week 23 now,” Zilbalodis, 30, said.A critical and commercial success, Zilbalodis’s computer-animated, dialogue-free film follows a group of animals helping each other survive a flood. It received two Oscar nominations last month, for best animated feature and best international feature, and is the first Latvian production nominated for any Academy Award.A scene from “Flow,” which is nominated for two Academy Awards.Sideshow/Janus FilmsZilbalodis also recently won Latvia’s first Golden Globe, beating out two major American studio contenders, “The Wild Robot” and “Inside Out 2,” in the animated feature category. That “Flow” is an independent production largely financed with public funding and conceived on free, open-source software called Blender, makes the victory feel even more of a feat.And the director’s Baltic homeland is not being subtle about their joy over this triumph. The Golden Globe was exhibited for a week at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, the country’s capital, guarded by two cat statues, in an allusion to the movie’s protagonist, a dark gray feline.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Smurfs’ Trailer Shows Rihanna as Smurfette and Promises New Music

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      The first preview of the animated feature shows the singer in her “blue era” and assures fans that new songs from her will be featured on the soundtrack.Music superstar, beauty mogul, fashion designer and … Smurfette? Rihanna’s next big role may not be what you were expecting.On Thursday, Paramount released a trailer for “Smurfs,” giving us a first look at the singer as the elflike, blonde-haired, blue-skinned creature. In an animation style that blends smooth 3-D rendering with elements that evoke the classic hand-drawn cartoons, Smurfette leads her cohort into the real, live-action world on a quest to Paris to find Papa Smurf after he mysteriously disappears.The trailer begins with Rihanna, in human form, addressing the audience.“I can’t wait for you all to see it this summer,” she says, with sunglasses largely covering her Smurf-blue eye shadow. She had teased the trailer in an Instagram post on Wednesday, which was a short video captioned “in my blue era.”The animated movie also features an ensemble cast including Nick Offerman, Natasha Lyonne, Amy Sedaris, Nick Kroll and Dan Levy, and is directed by Chris Miller, who previously helmed “Shrek the Third” and “Puss in Boots.” It will be a musical-comedy reboot of ‘The Smurfs’ film franchise, which last had an installment with “Smurfs: The Lost Village” in 2017.In addition to playing Smurfette, Rihanna is a producer on the movie. But, in what will most likely be the biggest news for her fans, who have been clamoring for more music since her album “Anti” was released in 2016, the trailer ends with a message advising people to “presave” the movie’s soundtrack, which will feature new music from Rihanna.It also says the movie will include the song “Higher Love,” recorded by Desi Trill and featuring DJ Khaled, Cardi B, Natania and Subhi.“Smurfs” is set to release on July 18. More

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      When ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Gets the Anime Treatment

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      “The War of the Rohirrim” is the latest and most high-profile anime adaptation of a Western franchise to hit screens big and small.When Warner Bros. approached the filmmaker Peter Jackson and his longtime screenwriting partner Philippa Boyens about making a new animated “Lord of the Rings,” Boyens at first had a hard time wrapping her head around the notion. But when studio executives suggested that the film could be told via Japanese anime — suddenly it clicked.They could tell a stand-alone story from J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices about the people of the kingdom of Rohan, which has now become “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” directed by Kenji Kamiyama. Jackson is one of the film’s executive producers and Boyens one of its producers.“It was that moment of form meeting the story,” Boyens said in a video call. She said she thought anime would be an appealing approach because “it’s a story that ultimately deals with the wreckage of war, and that’s something that Japanese storytelling on film has been really good at telling.”“The War of the Rohirrim” (in theaters) is the latest and most high profile anime adaptation of a Western franchise to hit screens big and small. In recent years there’s been “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” on Netflix, an anime version of the 2010 movie “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”; a “Rick and Morty: The Anime” for Adult Swim; and “Terminator Zero,” a show set in James Cameron’s “Terminator” universe, also on Netflix. Kamiyama also made an installment of “Star Wars: Visions,” a 2021 anime anthology featuring a galaxy far, far away on Disney+, as well as “Blade Runner: Black Lotus,” a co-production of Adult Swim and the anime streaming service Crunchyroll.BenDavid Grabinski, one of the creators of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” said in an interview that he sought to tap into some of the artistry of anime that “can feel fresh and different than a lot of the traditional animation coming out of the west.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Know About ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’

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      You don’t have to know an orc from a Mumakil to enjoy the new animated adventure, though it’ll certainly help.If you would like to know who the Helm of Helm’s Deep is, you are in the right place.Also, if you are an anime fan who has never watched a single “Lord of the Rings” film, welcome.A new Warner Bros. animated adventure, “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” is in theaters, the latest installment in a franchise of seven — soon to be eight — movies based on the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. Set roughly 200 years before the events of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, it tells the tale of a storied king’s quest to defend his land from an invading army.Here’s what to know about where the story came from, how it fits in with the rest of the “Lord of the Rings” universe and which familiar characters you might find.Did Tolkien write this story?The characters in the film, directed by Kenji Kamiyama, are based on details in the appendices at the end of the “Lord of the Rings” novels. They cover the history of the rulers of Rohan, the fictional kingdom in Middle-earth known for its horse-tamers and riders.Obviously, turning footnotes into an animated film required some rewriting and fleshing out — the filmmakers’ task was essentially to bring a family tree to the screen, which includes Helm Hammerhand, a legendary king of Rohan; his sons, Haleth and Háma; and an unnamed daughter. The producers chose to focus on Helm’s daughter, whom they called Héra for the film. (Tolkien left her fate unclear.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lovable Movie Robots Are Coming to Charm Your Children

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      The adult world is ever more full of robots. Children’s entertainment feels as if it’s working hard to make them seem adorable.One near certainty about raising a young child these days is that you and your offspring will be exposed to a lot of stories about robots. Another is that the robots working their charms most effectively on you will belong to a new kind of archetype: the sympathetic robot. Sitting in darkened theaters with my 5-year-old son, I have watched any number of these characters. They are openhearted and often dazzled by the wonders of everyday life — innocently astounded by, say, the freedom of playing in the surf, the bliss of dancing with a loved one or the thrill of just holding hands. They might be more winningly human than some of the humans you know.The robots in our fictions used to be more sinister. Our notion of artificial life has included the bioengineered humanoids in “Blade Runner,” the homicidal computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the one that wages war on its makers in the “Terminator” movies. Long before that, we had Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel and the golem in some versions of 17th-century Jewish folklore. These were often stories of hubris, of humanity’s inability to think through all that we were setting loose: Synthetic life was constantly breaking away from its creators’ grasp and committing heinous, forbidden acts. Even when the characters were more abstruse, operating beyond the ken of the people they manipulated — like the artificial intelligence Wintermute in William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” — they were, in some sense, gods that we mortals unleashed on the world and then struggled to control.This hasn’t entirely changed. We still enjoy stories about malevolent machines, like the homicidal A.I. doll in “M3gan.” With other fictional robots, it’s not clear if they’re dangerous or merely hapless: Look to “Sunny,” recently on Apple TV+, in which a human protagonist spends most of the series trying to determine if she can trust the upbeat, bumbling homebot left to her by her roboticist husband. That kind of fear and suspicion, though, has mainly been reserved for adults. Children are offered a far more optimistic view — one that has lately seemed to go well beyond the endearing robots of the past, like R2-D2 and BB-8 in the “Star Wars” films, or the Iron Giant, or Sox in “Lightyear.”Take Roz, the main character of the animated film “The Wild Robot,” which came out in September. Like the Peter Brown book series on which it is based, the movie focuses on a robot protagonist that gains emotional complexity after she washes ashore on an island unpopulated by humans, learns to communicate with the animals she meets there and becomes the surrogate mother of an orphaned gosling. Roz changes and adapts; she goes from seeing her care for the gosling as a rote task to welcoming it as a real connection. She embraces the wildness of the animals around her and ceases to be the unfeeling machine that her programming intended. Instead, she becomes an unnatural champion for the natural world — one whose touching incomprehension of how to care for a newborn makes her charming.Or consider “Robot Dreams,” an animated feature by Pablo Berger that came out earlier this year. Based on a graphic novel by Sara Varon, it is set in a version of 1980s New York inhabited by humanlike animals who can, among other things, order build-your-own-robot kits advertised on late-night television. This film, with its theme of loneliness and its surprisingly mature depiction of how relationships change, might be better for slightly older children: It follows a dog and its robot companion as they grow close and then are driven apart, exploring the ways that love can evolve over time. But near the end, it is the robot, not the anthropomorphic dog who built it, that has to make a heartbreakingly human decision.This is all in spite of the remarkably bleak near future portrayed in many of these children’s films. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Creating New Cinematic Languages, Without Words

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      “Flow” is the latest dialogue-free animated film to look to movement and sound to express its characters’ emotions.Like Noah’s Ark minus the humans, a vessel carrying an odd bunch of creatures is afloat after a flood in the immersive computer-animated film “Flow.” Led by a black cat, the group faces the dangers of nature together, often struggling to get along yet communicating entirely without dialogue.It’s the second wordless feature from the Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, who argues that animation is more expressive than live action.“You can use that expressiveness to convey things usually said with words,” he said in a recent video interview.We see how the animals behave — including a stoic capybara, a cheerful dog, a regal secretary bird and a rambunctious lemur — Zilbalodis added, and that’s our way into understanding the characters.The winner of the audience award at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the world’s most prominent event for the medium, “Flow” is now the Latvian Oscar entry for best international feature film, a category for films not in English — an ironic designation, given that it’s a wordless fable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Spellbound’ Review: Borrowed Wonder

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      Any magic this animated musical has feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached.Princess Ellian, heir to the throne of Lumbria, has a problem: A year earlier, her parents, traveling through the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness, fell under a curse. That sort of thing happens when you’re passing through a wood “so dark they named it twice” — but let’s not cast blame. The curse transformed the king and queen into roaring, rampaging monsters. They can’t comprehend much or speak, but they can be distracted with chew toys.Ellian (voiced by Rachel Zegler), now 15, has assumed their duties and, along with two government ministers (Jenifer Lewis and John Lithgow), helped hide news of the metamorphosis from Lumbrians at large. She hopes that somewhere, deep under her parents’ new scales and feathers, the minds of the king and queen are still there. So, too, may viewers of “Spellbound” occasionally sense the enchantment zones of their brains lighting up, more as a reflexive response to dim memories of past animated features than as a genuine reaction to the derivative pastiche onscreen.The movie, directed by Vicky Jenson, one of the filmmakers behind “Shrek,” has assembled all the standard ingredients: fairy tale trappings; a treacherous, “Oz”-ian journey across a mystical land; wizard types voiced by Broadway pros (Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess), for comic relief; and would-be earworms by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater that are catchy in the moment but that you might struggle to hum afterward. Lithgow’s “I Could Get Used to This,” an “Under the Sea”-style showstopper that his character sings after swapping bodies with Ellian’s purple rodent pet, is an exception.It isn’t fair to say that “Spellbound” lacks musical or visual invention. Zegler can belt out a song, and the evil storm that transmogrified the royals is pleasingly lo-fi. (It looks like a scribble-scrabble twister.) But the magic feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached. Ellian rides with her friends on giant, flying cats (shades of “The Neverending Story” and “How to Train Your Dragon”). The idea of emotions made physically manifest is a concept that animated features have used quite recently (“Inside Out,” “Soul”). The oracles played by Lane and Burgess, who argue about having traded in multiple wands for a universal fob, engage in the sort of self-conscious riffing that has become a de facto requirement of family filmmaking.The king and queen eventually find their voices — one assumes that Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, reunited from “Being the Ricardos,” were well-paid for what sounds like swift work — but even flurries of excitement, like an escape over a quicksand desert, can’t shake the sense that “Spellbound” has been consciously designed to play things safe. One of its big numbers is called “The Way It Was Before,” words that sound suspiciously like a mission statement.SpellboundRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Flow’ Review: A Cat’s Life

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      A cat, a dog and a capybara embark on an epic adventure in this earnest and refreshingly unconventional animated film.“Flow,” an animated adventure film with a touch of magical realism, is a welcome entrant in the cat-movie canon, exuding a profound affection for our four-legged friends.Its hero, a plucky black cat with round, expressive eyes, doesn’t speak a word of dialogue, and acts more or less like a domestic house cat, but under the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s doting gaze, he’s as well-developed as Atticus Finch, a noble character you can’t help but root for. Purring, scratching and scrabbling up walls, this cat virtually leaps off the screen.“Flow,” written by Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, concerns the cat’s survival during a flood of almost biblical proportions. The story, simple but compelling, unfolds as a kind of feline picaresque, as he clambers aboard a passing sailboat that drifts from one scenic exploit to another. He soon encounters other stranded animals, including a guileless Labrador retriever and a benevolent secretary bird, who tag along to form what eventually resembles a charming, ragtag menagerie. Their adventures together range from hair raising, as when a thunderstorm threatens to capsize their ship, to endearingly mundane, like when a rotund capybara helps a lemur gather a collection of knickknacks.It sounds saccharine, but Zilbalodis largely avoids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise. The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.FlowRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More