When Nick Park started working on his first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, in the early 1980s, he was still a student who was doing every bit of the work by himself. For years he toiled on the project, and he was only able to complete it when he was hired by Aardman Animations and was allowed to finish the film while working on other projects, including Peter Gabriel's ground-breaking “Sledgehammer” music video. The story begins simply enough, with Wallace and Gromit looking through vacation books and trying to decide where they want to spend their holiday. When Wallace discovers that they are out of his favorite food--cheese!--he concocts a plan to build a spaceship and fly to the moon to supply his crackers with the needed topping.

A Grand Day Out is a brilliant first film, and even if it seems slightly crude and rough by the standards of the other Wallace & Gromit films, it is nonetheless an amazing piece of work, not only for the intricacy of its animation, but also because the characters are already fully formed. They are introduced as if they have always existed--Wallace in his green sweater vest and red tie and Gromit with his perpetually confounded looks and expressive ears--which is central to their unique charm. Their whimsy is timeless, and they don't need extensive backstories or long-winded explanations. They just are. The film also introduces one of the key components of the Wallace & Gromit films, which is a curious secondary character/nemesis, in this case a moon robot that looks like an oven on legs and dreams of skiing (that this somehow makes sense is testament to Park's genius).

A few years later, Park produced a second Wallace & Gromit short, this time with the full support of Aardman Animations and its resources. With its more polished and complex animation and photography, delightfully bizarre storyline, and pesky penguin adversary, The Wrong Trousers is generally considered the best of the three W&G shorts. Cowritten by Bob Baker, a veteran of British television, The Wrong Trousers begins with Wallace's latest invention, a pair of self-walking robotic Techno-Trousers. The story's real dilemma, though, is when Wallace allows a diabolical penguin to room at his house and the flightless waterfowl begins to usurp Gromit's place. While the scenario is certainly funny, there is a real sense of poignancy when the duo are temporarily split up emotionally and physically. One of the keys to the success of the W&G shorts is not just the understated verbal gags and wonderfully timed slapstick, but also the fact that the main characters are indelibly sympathetic, which is amazing considering the fact that Gromit expresses most of his emotions through his eyebrows.

The Wrong Trousers ended up winning an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, as did its follow-up and the last of the W&G shorts, A Close Shave. Like its predecessor, A Close Shave continued to advance the art, adding more complex scenarios, backdrops, and situations, including an entire truckload of sheep (some of this was accomplished by using digital compositing to enhance the traditional stop-motion techniques). The story this time around (again concocted by Park and Baker) involves Gromit being falsely accused of being a sheep rustler. Wallace's new uncanny contraption is the deliriously enormous Knit-O-Matic, and we're also introduced to a potential love interest in Wendolene Ramsbottom (Anne Reid), a buck-toothed wool-store owner. A Close Shave also introduces an indelible cutie named Shaun the Sheep, who, despite constantly quaking in his boots, turns out to be a real hero.

And that's the real beauty of these films: They merge the expected and the unexpected in consistently clever and inventive ways, forging a completely believable world out of clay and time. Wallace and Gromit have gone on to become cultural icons both in their native England and abroad, which is quite amazing given that their stature was initially based on three short films. Of course, when those three shorts are of the quality imparted by Nick Park and his creative team, their popularity and critical acclaim was nothing if not inevitable.

Copyright ©2008 James Kendrick

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