Wallace and Gromit: Three Amazing Adventures (1993)

Directed by Nick Park. Aardman.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

Variously released as Wallace & Gromit: Three Amazing Adventures, Wallace & Gromit: The First Three Adventures or The Incredible Adventures of Wallace and Gromit, British Claymation guru and Aardman Animations co-founder Nick Park’s three 1990s shorts featuring dotty, cheese-loving English inventor Wallace and his loyal but dubious dog Gromit are hilarious, brilliant half-hour masterpieces jam-packed with dazzlingly inventive sight gags and quintessentially eccentric British humor.

First is A Grand Day Out, the slightest and least impressive of the three, with Park focused on developing his technique while working a feather-light story about a trip to the moon. Next is the series’ high point, The Wrong Trousers, an astonishingly inventive sci-fi thriller spoof pitting our heroes against a fiendishly clever criminal mastermind who is also a master of disguise. Last is the almost equally good A Close Shave, a comic tale of romance and noir-like mystery involving a sheep-rustling operation.

What makes Park’s little gems (especially the Oscar-winning latter two) so rewarding for film lovers is the way Park lovingly evokes whole genres and cinematic conventions through attention to every element of the moviemaking process: lighting and shadow, score, art direction, even pacing and timing. Park’s more recent feature film Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit gave him the opportunity to extend his genre satire — and the redoubtable duo’s dotty world — on a bigger canvas. At the same time, the very crispness and brevity of the shorts is part of their charm.

DVD note: Aardman fans rejoice! Shaun the sheep, a supporting character in Wallace & Gromit’s third amazing adventure, A Close Shave, has his own spin-off series on British television — and now eight of Shaun’s brief adventures are available on Region 1 DVD in Shaun the Sheep – Off the Baa, available alone or bundled with Three Amazing Adventures.

In these episodes, Shaun the sheep (get it?) is part of a flock on a small English farm with a trio of mischievous pigs, a tolerant farm dog who tries to keep order, a stereotypically nasty housecat, and a dim-witted farmer who speaks only in mumbles.

Like the “Road Runner” shorts, Shaun’s adventures are modern animated slapstick silent films, with a goofy creativity that is all Aardman. Shaun’s best adventures include an impromptu game of football (soccer to Yanks) with a head of cabbage and a stealth mission into the farmhouse to retrieve a beloved teddy bear. Others are sillier, like a war with a swarm of computer-animated bees.

I’m a huge fan of watching silent films with children (Buster Keaton’s The General, also newly available in a new DVD edition, is an ideal starting place). Between Wall‑E (also new this week on DVD), Mr. Bean and Shaun the sheep, the joys of silents seem to be enjoying a sort of mini-resurgence in family entertainment. More, please!

Some comic menace.