Wallace and Gromit Films Ranked
Based in Bristol, England, Aardman Studios was founded in the 1960s by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. Initially focused on general animation (including hand-drawn), they worked in advertising for the BBC, and music videos, including creating the iconic and award-winning Peter Gabriel video for “Sledgehammer”. They initially found mainstream BBC success with their character Morph, a small terracotta creature that would interact with Tony Hart on his shows in small segments, beginning with ‘Take Hart’ in 1977. Morph would eventually go on to star in CBBC’s ‘SMart’, and other shows over the decades, including a crowdfunded YouTube series in the mid 2010s.
Despite relative success in these areas, the recruiting of young animator Nick Park, fresh from the UK’s National Film and Television School, would see the stars align. The first of four Academy Awards for the company would come their way with the release of Creature Comforts in 1990, combining man-on-the-street interview audio segments lip-synched to clay stop-motion animals in a zoo. They were well on the way to something special. Not stopping with shorts, they would partner with Pathé, Dreamworks, and Sony at various points to create films such as Flushed Away (2006), The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists! (2011), Arthur Christmas (2012), and Early Man (2018). Their first feature, fan-favourite Chicken Run (2000), is the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time and is one of the primary reasons the Academy created a Best Animated Feature Film category from 2002 (celebrating the films of 2001).
The year before Creature Comforts was released to Oscars success, however, Aardman had produced a 23-minute animation featuring a cheese-loving inventor (voiced by British icon Peter Sallis, known for his role as Norman Clegg in sitcom ‘Last of the Summer Wine’) and his highly intelligent dog. This film was also put up for the same Oscar that they lost to Creature Comforts. A Grand Day Out would start a run of five films in the Wallace & Gromit franchise – four shorts and a feature – that would all be nominated for their respective Animated film Academy Awards, three of which won. A 100% Oscar nomination run for five films over nearly three decades, with a 60% conversion ratio, is an impressive achievement by anyone’s standards.
The characters have endeared themselves in British culture, the repeated showings of the films on television at Christmastime becoming something of both a tradition and a running gag for the general public. Painstakingly constructed through clay stop-motion animation (which Aardman named Claymation), with the creators sometimes managing just three seconds of footage per day, each film is a labour of love and joy. Fun for all the family, the films pay tribute to space exploration, murder mysteries, crime dramas, and, of all things, Aliens (1986). Endearing, entertaining, and completely British, the duo have managed to earn themselves public statues and theme park rides, and even created a marketing campaign that helped to save Wensleydale Cheese (Wallace’s personal favourite) from going out of business. To honour the legacies of both the franchise and the important, unbridled artistic creativity of the independent studio that created them, we at The Film Magazine have ranked all of their films, both shorts and features, for your viewing and reading pleasure.
6. A Grand Day Out (1989)
For many, the original film in a franchise will always be the best. With Wallace & Gromit, it unfortunately isn’t, but it’s where things are tested and ideas are ironed out.
Bored at home, not knowing where to go to spend their bank holiday, the inventor and his dog discover that they’ve got no cheese in the house to go with their crackers. Therefore, they decide they need to go somewhere that has some. As the moon is, as everyone knows, made of cheese, that’s obviously where they need to go. Time to build a rocket in their cellar and go for a grand day out.
There’s a lot to like about the first film. Groundbreaking at the time of release, it contains a lot of the franchise hallmarks that would come to be known and loved. The usual Aardman slapstick is there, with a particularly good example being Gromit getting an electric drill stuck in a block of wood and spinning himself around. The thriller montage they would hone to an art is brilliantly displayed in Wallace running back to get the forgotten crackers before the rocket blasts off. With only a handful of people working on the production, the incredible handmade quality of the film is something to be admired; you can see the fingerprints on the clay in every shot, and nothing is smooth and precise. It also has one of the best robot vending machines ever put to screen.
The trouble with the film is that this rough nature is also part of its problem. Everything is a little stilted, rough around the edges. Wallace hasn’t been fully formed in the shape of his face yet, a lot of the sets look like the miniatures they actually are, and whilst it’s impressive on its own, compared to the others it doesn’t quite have its art as carefully honed.
A Grand Day Out is an experimental first outing. The franchise had yet to refine itself down to a perfect art, or tap into its dark side yet, though it wouldn’t take long for both to happen.
5. A Matter of Loaf And Death (2008)
The last entry for over a decade and a half, A Matter of Loaf and Death might actually be the franchise’s darkest film.
With a serial killer on the loose having killed twelve bakers, Wallace and Gromit’s bakery business seems to be both booming and simultaneously under threat. All is well, however, after Wallace meets Paella, the former pinup for the Bake-A-Lite product brand, with her poodle, Fluffles. Except Gromit isn’t convinced of her romantic intentions towards Wallace, and upon investigating Paella’s gothic mansion, complete with iron-wrought gates and Universal-monster-movie lightning, makes a shocking discovery.
Somehow for a family audience, Aardman managed to get away with the film revolving around an actual killer, explicitly stated, and not just someone that was ‘battered’ or ‘attacked’. No, an actually specified ‘serial killer’. Perhaps it’s the comic escapades with a cake disguised as a bomb that allowed them to pass it off as family humour? Still, there’s a lot that the younger audience would never get, such as the reference of Paella’s introduction, cycling on a steep, cobbled hill, referencing Ridley Scott’s famous 1973 Hovis advert, and a finale which is a straight-up Aliens homage, using a forklift instead of the Power Loader to fight off our story’s villain. It’s all here, as ridiculous as nuns with armfuls of kittens (which also happens). The capering and adventuring is present and accounted for, as you’d expect.
The camerawork is impeccable, the story mad as a hatter, Aardman’s trademarks all present and accounted for. Still, there’s a charm lacking, as if Nick Park and his friends are trying anything they can to return to what they wanted to do after coming out of their Dreamworks era. It’s very similar to The Wrong Trousers in feel, but the villain doesn’t have the same menace. A Matter of Loaf and Death is good and fun, but many of the other Wallace & Gromit films have a spark of genius that this one seems to lack.
Recommended for you: Aardman Animation Movies Ranked
Correct order, no notes.
Correct answer, no notes