You can't go wrong with a disc that features three Oscar-nominated animated shorts, with two of them winners.
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Hayao Miyazaki and Tim Burton are amazing filmmakers, but Nick Park is no slouch either. People took notice when Park's "Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" (2005) beat Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" and Burton's "Corpse Bride" in the Oscar competition for Best Animated Feature Film of the Year.
If you think about it, though, it wasn't an upset, or even much of a surprise. Park's short features had won Oscars three out of the four times they were nominated. And that fourth time Park lost to himself. Moslty it was Park's oddball inventor and feisty dog companion who got him to the Big Dance. And this collection, "Wallace & Gromit: Three Amazing Adventures" gives you all three of them in one package, along with a motorcycle sidecar full of "Wallace & Gromit Crackling Contraptions" short-shorts.
"A Grand Day Out with Wallace & Gromit" (1989) was nominated for an Oscar but was nosed out by Park's "Creature Comforts." This one finds the British "cheesehead" on a quest to discover if the moon is really made of cheese, and so he and his faithful companion Gromit build a rocket ship and blast off while a group of mice watch, wearing protective sunglasses. And when they get there, of course the food-fare isn't what they had hoped, and they encounter a robot who looks like a kitchen appliance and dreams of skiing. In other words, it's just another day in the life of this odd duo.
"A Grand Day Out" is a little rougher looking than later Wallace & Gromit adventures, but in many ways the storyline is more innocent and it seems to celebrate the power of the imagination even more than later installments. The stop-motion claymation seems especially quaint when it's this unpolished, as if to underscore the basic childlike nature of this "adult" inventor and his wide grin/grimace. Sometimes it's never clear who's the adult-figure in this relationship. Gromit reads pretty heady stuff, like electronics magazines, and often serves as long-suffering sidekick to someone whom he clearly thinks should be doing things a different way, or often has to bail out. That, of course, is part of the charm of this series, and what makes it appeal on a visceral level to an audience of all ages. It also doesn't hurt to have wry humor sprinkled throughout and plenty of background sight gags. You could enjoy this "text" just by reading all of the details in each frame.
"Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers" (1993) (and for that matter, "A Close Shave") will be appreciated by anyone who loved "Curse of the Werewolf." It has the same sort of "Rear Window" tone. In this short, a suspicious Gromit spies on a new boarder that the pair was forced to take in due to money problems. It turns out that this penguin has a criminal mind, and he's intent on using one of Wallace's inventions--mechanical pants--to help him steal a precious diamond. The plot itself isn't nearly as twisted as that penguin. Of course it's Gromit to the rescue, and you can see it coming a mile away, as always. But suspense isn't the point. It's the quirkiness of the cartoon that charms the pants off audiences, as well as an adult storyline that can evoke memories of the old "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoons.
With some of the scenes--especially one where Gromit lays down track in front of the train they're riding, to keep them moving forward--there's also a noticeable debt to the old Warner Brothers cartoons. But with the crime mystery to be solved, it also anticipates what will come years later with "Curse of the Were-Rabbit." It's a solid short feature that's extremely deserving of the Oscar it won. Be warned, though, that this print doesn't include the original music.
"Wallace & Gromit in A Close Shave" (1995) also won an Academy Award, but it's considerably more involved than the other two stories. Park tries his hand at juggling a number of plot elements involving sheep rustlers, Wallace's money problems, a mysterious cheese-eating guest, another crazy invention (the Knit-o-matic), a cyber-dog, a romance between Wallace and Wendolene (the owner of a yarn shop), and a frame-up on poor Gromit (who, in prison, reads "Crime and Punishment" by Fido Dogstoyevsky!). For all that juggling, "A Close Shave" begins with Wallace & Gromit working as window washers, and the bottom line is still Wallace's addiction to cheese--Wensleydale Cheese.
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