Ben Whitehead lends voice to Barbour’s festive Wallace animation

In the amber glow of a recording studio, Ben Whitehead leans toward a vintage microphone, headphones bracketing his concentration, as he voices Wallace for Barbour’s Christmas film. The scene captures something of the craft that animates seasonal storytelling: an actor alone with a script, the weight of bringing a character fully into being through nothing but his voice and the precise modulation of feeling.

Barbour’s festive offering centres on Wallace, the character rendered in gleaming cream clay against a backdrop of Christmas warmth. Tinsel catches light above a decorated tree, and a wrapped gift sits at paw’s reach, all rendered in the tactile charm of stop frame animation. The juxtaposition feels deliberate: Whitehead, intensely focused in his black Barbour shirt with its small embroidered crest, providing the vocal pulse for a character entirely made by hand.

The recording process itself becomes part of the story Barbour wishes to tell this season. Behind every animated frame, behind Wallace’s expressions and movements, lies this moment of performance, this bridge between script and screen. Whitehead’s role is one of translation, taking the words on the page and colouring them with personality, humour and the particular cadence that makes Wallace unmistakably himself.

The film sits squarely in Barbour’s tradition of festive storytelling, where craft, character and the textures of British creativity converge. That a heritage brand known for its waxed jackets and country heritage chooses to tell its Christmas story through animation speaks to an understanding of nostalgia not as mere sentiment, but as a living thing, a warmth that can be recreated and shared anew each season.

Imagery courtesy of Barbour (@barbour).