I’ve been on a stop motion animation and Wallace and Gromit kick lately, thanks to watching the new movie on Netflix a month or so ago and playing new games and DLC based on the franchise.  So I’ve declared this week to be Wallace and Gromit Week here at GamerDad!  All this week we’ll be looking at Wallace and Gromit films and games, and we’ll start off by ranking the movies and shorts!  So grab your cheese and crackers and let’s begin!

But first a bit of history.  Wallace and Gromit was made by a studio in the UK called Aardman Animation.  They specialize in stop motion clay animation and every time I look up something they do, I’m fascinated by it.  Some of their work you may have heard of, like the movie Chicken Run.  Or if you’re an old fart like me and remember the music video for the song Sledgehammer, yup, that was Aardman, too.  And you know those talking car Chevron and Certa mattress sheep ads?  Yup, that was them too.  But some of their work is more UK centric, like Morph.  But probably their best known work is Wallace and Gromit.  It’s about an eccentric cheese loving  inventor named Wallace, and his loyal, intelligent, yet silent dog Gromit, and they have lots of charming adventures together.

I’ve always been a fan of stop motion clay animation.  Yes I do have other interests besides video games.  One time when I was college age, I even took a just for fun clay animation class!  It took us all day to make a few seconds of crappy choppy clay animation of a boy building a snowman, and then a snake comes out of the ground and eats the snowman’s carrot nose, and then the snowman frowns.  Guess which character I animated?  The snake!  I came up with that ‘story’ too.  Anyway, doing that gave me a high appreciation and respect for what Aardman and other studios do.

So let’s take a look at my favorite and least favorite Wallace and Gromit films and shorts.  We won’t be looking at the mini episodes, like Cracking Contraptions or World of Invention.  Nor will we be looking at the countless ads and spinoffs, like Shaun the Sheep.  Otherwise this blog would be way too long. So we’ll just focus on the shorts and movies.  We’ll start with my least favorite and end with my top one.

6. A Matter of Loaf and Death

Just because this is my least favorite, it doesn’t mean it’s bad.  In this one, the duo are bakers and using Wallace’s inventions to quickly bake bread and deliver it to the town.  But Wallace’s new love interest is actually a mass murderer, killing bakers because she was formerly the Bake-A-Lite bread girl but ate too much bread and got too heavy to ride her balloon!  So Gromit has to figure out how to stop her.  I think the reason why I don’t like this one as much is because the villain isn’t as charming as the others.  She’s pretty mean and meets a grisly demise, too.  This was also the first short to not win an award since the first one.

5. A Grand Day Out

This one wasn’t bad either, but since it was the first one, it’s a bit rough compared to the others.  Wallace and Gromit are on holiday, but they run out of cheese and all the shops are closed.  So they decide to build a rocket to the moon to get more cheese.  And that’s pretty much it.  It’s still pretty amazing that one person did this all the way back in 1989!  The only reason why this didn’t win the Academy Award for best animated short that year is because the same guy made another short that won called Creature Comforts!

4. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

This was the first Wallace and Gromit movie and it was darn good.  In it, the town is abuzz about the upcoming vegetable growing competition, but an infestation of rabbits has gotten everyone on edge.  Wallace and Gromit are running a humane pest control service and catch all the rabbits, but decide to use Wallace’s new invention, a mind control machine, to make the rabbits not like vegetables anymore so they can free them.  It goes wrong, and now the town has to deal with a Were-Rabbit!  Now the duo has to figure out how to stop it, and it’s made even trickier once they find out who it is!  The movie is like a horror film for kids, and it also has quite a bit of hidden adult humor as well.  And it won another Oscar!

3. The Wrong Trousers

This was actually the first Wallace and Gromit short I ever saw.  I watched it on PBS and didn’t know what it was at first.  I tried to describe it to my college roommate and his girlfriend (now wife) because it was pretty amazing.  And then we went to a movie store that was selling Wallace and Gromit merchandise and I said to them, “That’s it!”  Then I bought a T-shirt with Wallace on it saying, “Cracking Toast, Gromit,” and wore it all through college.  To some, this is the most iconic short. In it, the duo are having trouble paying bills so they rent out a room to a penguin.  It’s also Gromit’s birthday and Wallace gets him a pair of “Techno Trousers” that walk on their own so Gromit can go for walkies with them.   But the penguin is actually evil and uses the trousers with Wallace in them to steal a diamond from the museum.  This short has the most amazing chase scene in any film you will ever see!  It also won an Oscar.  A lot of people will claim that this is their favorite, but I’ve got two more I like.

2. Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

This is the most recent one, a movie that came out earlier this year on Netflix.  It’s a sequel to The Wrong Trousers.  Normally when I watch a movie, I don’t feel like I need to watch it again for a long while.  But I’d watch this one again in a heartbeat, that’s how much I liked it.  Wallace has invented a new AI Gnome to do gardening around the house, and everyone in town likes it so much that he hires it out to make more money.  But the evil penguin from The Wrong Trousers finds out about this and hacks into the gnome from his zoo prison and uses it to make an army of gnomes to steal the diamond again and get revenge on Wallace and Gromit.  If I had any problems with this movie, it’s that the plot was too much like The Wrong Trousers.  But it does have a really good message about how machines shouldn’t be used for everything.  I’m kind of sad it didn’t win the Oscar for best animated movie this year.  I guess I need to see Flow and see if that one is really better.  But my personal bias can’t imagine it being any better than this!

1. A Close Shave

Even though this was only a short, it feels like a mini-movie in itself and it also won an Oscar.  Wallace and Gromit are window washers, and their new client is a wool shop.  There is a wool shortage in town, but this shop has enough wool.  Hmmm.  Turns out the owner of the shop, also Wallace’s love interest, and her robot dog are rustling sheep for wool.  But the robot dog goes haywire and starts stealing sheep to make dog food, too!  And even worse, he frames Gromit for it!  So now Wallace and the sheep must break Gromit out of prison and stop the cyber dog Preston!  This was the first appearance of Shaun the Sheep, who ended up getting his own spinoff show that’s still running today!  And that show got a spinoff starring the youngest sheep, Timmy, in a preschool show called Timmy Time.  So Wallace and Gromit is like Mega Man in that even their spinoffs have spinoffs!  The first time I saw A Close Shave was at a clay animation film festival in college.  My roommate even went with me, which surprised me since I didn’t think he was into that.  But I thought it was nice that he went with me anyway.

So that’s my ranking of the Wallace and Gromit movies and shorts!  In the comment section, tell me YOUR favorites as well!  Later!  –Cary

Tags: Movies with Children, Television