Salute Your Shorts: Wallace and Gromit

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Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

Begun while director Nick Park was still in college, the Wallace and Gromit series is likely the most successful franchise ever built out of a student film. That the film "A Grand Day Out" went on to an Academy Award nomination at the same time as another of Park's works, the equally surreal "Creature Comforts," is a testament to just how good Park was right out of the gate, appearing in even his earliest works as a fully-formed artist in a way that’s pretty rare for any medium, let alone one which requires the shear level of craft as animation. Since then, the Wallace and Gromit pictures have gone on to win three Academy Awards as well as pretty much every other award offered to animated films under the sun. Not bad, considering that the series has only had one feature film and, frankly, it’s not even the series’ strong point.

But let’s back up a minute. Wallace and Gromit were created while Park was studying at the National Film and Television School in Britain. Park failed to graduate at the time because the culminating film of his studies, "A Grand Day Out," was incomplete. Meanwhile, he took up working for Aardman Animations where he spent time working on commercials, children’s TV shows, and, most famously, the video for Peter Gabriel’s "Sledgehammer." Park worked his way up the ranks at Aardman, eventually becoming a director and helming the Academy Award-winning "Creature Comforts," which recorded animals in a zoo complaining about their living conditions.

In the background of all his other work, though, Park was permitted to continue with "A Grand Day Out" on the side, which due to its seven-year production time (!!!), was released in 1989. Unlike a lot of Aardman’s other early works, it was comparatively long and not commissioned for a project, existing only due to Park’s determination to finish the film despite a lack of care as far as actually graduating was concerned. The immense time spent on the film paid off, though, and while it had little immediate effect on Aardman, the short and its sequels soon became the calling cards for the young studio.

Park’s vision of Wallace and Gromit was a bit more straightforward than what they’ve become since, but the foundation is all there. In "A Grand Day Out," Wallace is off on a bank holiday and decides to visit the moon because, as he says, "Everyone knows the moon is made of cheese." Gromit then helps him build a spaceship which they head off on to the moon, which does turn out to be made of cheese, though not a type Wallace is familiar with. At this point, they interact with an odd vending machine/alien cooker device that lives on the moon before eventually heading back home, nearly assaulted by the irate vending machine for their inconsiderate ways.

Even at a quick 22-minute length, there isn’t much plot to "A Grand Day Out," but that’s not really its point. The film ends up largely being about the possibilities of animation and the relative ease it offers of creating, say, a moon made of cheese or a homicidal vending machine. Relative because of the immense effort the short required (from a surprisingly large number of people), but Park’s easy directing makes things feel like the whole movie made itself. There’s almost a show-offy nature to the short at times, as it refuses to take any short cuts and insists on making every one of its twenty-four frames per second unique.

While a lot of traditions for the series were kicked off with "A Grand Day Out," Wallace and Gromit themselves were a bit ill-defined. Wallace’s love for cheese seems somewhat random rather than his utter pathos and he lacks the Rube Goldberg machines that were his calling card in later films. However, his interactions with the long-suffering Gromit were already spot on, and the characters themselves were compelling enough to warrant another film or, as would be the case, a series of them.

Four years after "A Grand Day Out" introduced Wallace and Gromit’s world, "The Wrong Trousers" perfected it. During the intervening years, and likely due to a much larger budget, Park smoothed out the edges of his style and created the slick, utterly professional short that began the series' more regular tone. "The Wrong Trousers" centers on Wallace’s need to offer rooming to a lodger after bills have piled up (especially due to an expensive gift of Techno Trousers he gives Gromit on his [Gromit's] birthday) and the havoc wrecked when that lodger turns out to be a jewel thief intent on framing Wallace for his crimes.

"The Wrong Trousers" not only smooths out Park’s stylistic quirks, but also tones down the surrealism (a bit) in favor of a more classically taut work of storytelling. While the pair’s first film is a random jaunt, "The Wrong Trousers" is a Hitchcockian suspense tale, only with a penguin as the villain. The film is Park’s first mature work, and no small part of this comes from the brilliant character Feathers McGraw, whose sinister nature lends a degree of danger to the film and makes something really at stake. It’s arguably still the best Wallace and Gromit film and the one that set the bar for the series to come.