Jump to content

A Matter of Loaf and Death

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 121.45.247.249 (talk) at 08:18, 11 December 2008 (→Plot: Fluffles caused the bag of flour to hit Piella). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
A Matter of Loaf and Death
Directed byNick Park
Written byNick Park
Bob Baker
Produced byPeter Lord
David Sproxton
StarringPeter Sallis
Sally Lindsay
Geraldine McEwan
Music byJulian Nott
Distributed byBBC
Aardman Animations
HIT Entertainment
Release dates
AU3 December 2008[1]
UK25 December 2008[2]
Running time
29 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

A Matter of Loaf and Death (formerly Trouble at' Mill) is a television short created by Nick Park, and the fourth of his shorts to star his characters Wallace and Gromit.[3] It is the first "Wallace and Gromit" project since the feature film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005, and the first short since A Close Shave in 1995.[4]

A Matter of Loaf and Death is a mock murder mystery, with Wallace and Gromit starting a new bakery business called "Top Bun". Gromit learns that bakers have been mysteriously disappearing, and tries to solve the case before Wallace ends up a victim himself.[5] This short introduces a new love interest for Wallace, Piella Bakewell, a bread enthusiast voiced by Sally Lindsay.[6]

Plot

When a local baker is murdered, it comes to the attention of the local media that there is a serial killer on the loose, as 12 bakers have been murdered in total. Meanwhile, Wallace and Gromit have opened a bread making business, "Top Bun", and have begun a "Dough to Door" delivery service, where on a morning basis the duo deliver bread to peoples' houses. One morning whilst going on the usual route, they almost run over a fat lady and her dog on a bicycle. Realising that this is the "Bake-O-Lite"[7] lady Piella Bakewell, a former pin-up girl for the bread company, Wallace falls head over heels in love. Suddenly, as she disappears out of the view of the van rear vision mirror, her brakes fail and Wallace and Gromit have no choice but to help her.

The van does a U-turn and chases after Piella. Wallace proceeds to scale the front of the moving van, (which is now moving at the same speed as the bike) in the manner of Spider-Man; and straddles the bicycle's front fork. The duo then use fruit buns as brakes between Wallace's knees and stop the bike. However, the bike stops inside the local zoo next to the crocodile pit and Wallace, Gromit, Piella and her dog Fluffles are catapulted into the air, almost landing inside a crocodile's mouth, but are saved by a quick-thinking Gromit who jams the mouth of the croc open with a bread stick and saves Fluffles.

Wallace and Piella enter into a whirlwind romance, until Gromit discovers Piella's identity as the serial killer. Wallace, however, is too starry-eyed to pay attention to Gromit's concerns, announcing that he and Piella are engaged to be married. Gromit tries all kinds of tactics to thwart Piella (including building and installing an airport-style metal detector in their home), but Piella looks certain to have her way until she is hit by a bag of flour, which coats her from head to foot, prompting an angry outburst against bakers and results in her leaving. Wallace and Gromit return home and Wallace laments the end of his romance with Piella. A short time later, however, Piella appears at the door carrying a large box, which contains a cake. She instructs Wallace to light the candle at four o'clock for a surprise, then makes an excuse and leaves.

Gromit follows Piella home, but is caught and taken captive, along with Piella's poodle, Fluffles. The two dogs manage to escape in Piella's hot air balloon, and arrive at Wallace's house just as Wallace is lighting the candle on the cake. Gromit attempts to extinguish the wick, only to discover it is a relighting candle. In the resulting struggle between Wallace and Gromit the cake falls to the floor, revealing a bomb underneath. Gromit then attempts to dispose of the bomb, but is thwarted when the places he seeks to dispose of it are occupied by a group of ducks and a pair of nuns carrying kittens, in a scene which parodies Batman.

Gromit tries to throw the bomb out of the house (towards the Yorkshire border) but is hit by a revolving part of a machine, and falls into a vat of dough. The bomb falls out the window, and Piella comes after Wallace with a spanner, exclaiming her pure disdain for baking and her motives behind the serial killings. She is stopped in her tracks by a large tractor-like contraption with mittens as hands, with Fluffles at the wheel. Piella picks up two rolling pins and swings them around her head like nunchucks, then tries to attack the machine (in a parody of the climactic scene of Aliens), all the while Fluffles stopping her blows with the mitts, knocking Wallace straight through the wall by a fierce blow in the process. Wallace and the bomb, which are now caught on the revolving windmill, both fall into the house, and Gromit manages to get himself out of the dough.

As the fight ensues, Piella is pushed closer and closer to the edge of the house until Wallace arrives making a remark about the bomb. This is all the time Piella needs as a distraction and she leaps onto the balloon for safety. It is revealed that the bomb is inside Wallace's trousers, and the two dogs desperately use dough pressure to try to equalise the force of the forthcoming explosion. Due to her weight, the balloon can't support Piella, and she comes crashing down into the crocodile pit in the zoo, only to be eaten. The balloon rises up into the clouds where Piella's ghost is briefly visible as her once-thin self; she says goodbye to Wallace with a wave while holding a plate with a loaf of Bake-O-Lite bread. After the climax Wallace and Gromit decide to deliver some bread in order to take their minds off the gloomy turn of events and almost run over Fluffles who is waiting in the driveway. They see she is sad at losing her owner so they let her hop in the van to join them on their deliveries and all three drive off into the sunset as the song "Puppy Love" plays on the van's stereo.

Characters

Production and release

Filming for A Matter of Loaf and Death began in January 2008, and had the fastest production period for a Wallace and Gromit short.[4][8] Commenting on the fact that the short will be made directly for a British audience, Nick Park said: "I don't feel like I'm making a film for a kid in some suburb of America — and being told they're not going to understand a joke, or a northern saying."[4] Regardless, Park changed the title from Trouble at' Mill as he thought it was too obscure a Northern England colloquialism. As well as a final title that references A Matter of Life and Death, the film also parodies Aliens, Psycho and Ghost.[9]

The short had its world premiere in Australia on ABC1 on 3 December 2008 and was repeated again the following day on ABC2.[10] In the UK it will air on Christmas Day at 20:30 on BBC One.[11][9]

The late broadcast puts the film out of the running for an Academy Award for Animated Short Film nomination until 2010,[9] but it has been nominated for an Annie Award for Best Animated Short Subject.[12]

References

  1. ^ http://www.abc.net.au/tv/guide/netw/200812/programs/ZY9756A001D3122008T203000.htm
  2. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_7700000/newsid_7707000/7707062.stm
  3. ^ "Wallace & Gromit Say Cheese!". E! Online. 2008-08-25.
  4. ^ a b c "Wallace and Gromit return to TV". BBC News. 2007-10-02. Retrieved 2007-10-03.
  5. ^ "Aardman Rights Takes Wallace & Gromit, Timmy On International Adventure". Animation World Network. 2008-10-15. Retrieved 2008-10-15.
  6. ^ "Wallace The Voice of Piella is Announced!". BBC News. 2008-03-18. Retrieved 2008-03-21.
  7. ^ Wallace and Gromit: Characters
  8. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/11_november/03/wallace.shtml
  9. ^ a b c "Latest Gromit misses out on Oscar". BBC News. 2008-11-17. Retrieved 2008-11-17.
  10. ^ http://www.abc.net.au/tv/guide/netw/200812/programs/ZY9756A001D3122008T203000.htm
  11. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/proginfo/tv/wk52/bbc_one.shtml#bbcone_wallace
  12. ^ http://annieawards.org/foryourconsideration.html
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A_Matter_of_Loaf_and_Death&oldid=257238587"