Five of the most wildly inventive minutes of animation since “Fantasia” arrive this week with an updated DVD release of the classic three “Wallace & Gromit” short films.
Tied to the Oct. 7 opening of a full Wallace & Gromit feature in theaters, the new DVD is a terrific way to relive an exhilarating scene from “The Wrong Trousers,” a raucous chase taking place on a toy train set.
For the uninitiated: You’re in for a repeatable treat. Wallace & Gromit are the claymation creations of Nick Park, who makes painstakingly hilarious films on dollhouse sets in England. Wallace is an aging British bachelor and puttering inventor, keen on argyle vests and tea biscuits, while Gromit is the much smarter dog who tries to keep his owner out of trouble.
The three films, created by smooshing the clay figures a tiny bit, snapping a frame, then smooshing them a bit more, over and over for years, took nearly a decade to finish. The climax of Park’s enormous labors comes in “The Wrong Trousers,” when a suspicious penguin rents a room from the duo in order to case a diamond theft from the local museum.
Park sends up every Hollywood Western and train-robbery film ever made with his chase scene, as the penguin rides the toy engine to get away, Gromit’s car is switched to a side track, and he has to madly lay his own track in front of the speeding car to get back in the chase. Watch it five or six times, and you’ll pick up meticulous new bits each viewing – including how the bullets the penguin fires at Gromit leave tiny black marks on the light fixture he wears as a helmet.
The shorts (Dreamworks, $19.99 list) have been out on DVD and VHS for some time, so the directors threw in a few bonuses. One of them is well worth the purchase, a first-time grouping of 10 super-short films of crazy Wallace inventions, called “Cracking Contraptions,” including the “Soccermatic” and the “Christmascardomatic.”
Gromit knows full well that when Wallace chirps, “I think I’ve fixed it this time,” it’s a good moment to don his raincoat at the breakfast table before the egg-frying robot goes bonkers. Wallace’s inventions always work up to a point, that point being just short of complete disembowelment of the user.
Sadly, the “how they made it” extra offers few real insights into the arduous studio process for the W&G claymation. It serves merely as a promotion for the upcoming movie, “Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”
One grand appeal of the Wallace & Gromit aesthetic is their reflection of the constant human tension between comfort and adventure. Wallace wants to build a rocket to go to the moon, but only because he’s out of cheese for his tea biscuits, and we all know the moon is a great source of cheese. When they finally climb inside the rocket, it’s got the same wallpaper as their living room, and a toaster as a centerpiece of the instrument panel.
All of his high-tech inventions are aimed simply at making a household task easier, leaving the user more time for tea- and-telly.
As one of the animators puts it, “They find the long way ’round of doing anything.”
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
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