Small-Screen Aardman: Wallace & Gromit Shorts and Shaun the Sheep
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Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep (DVD)
Note: Shaun the Sheep: A Woolly Good Time, the latest one-disc Region 1 collection of Shaun’s adventures, debuts on DVD on February 8.
By Steven D. Greydanus
It all started in 1989 with A Grand Day Out, a feather-light tale about a bald-headed, slightly eccentric cheese enthusiast named Wallace who decides to take the ultimate cheese vacation — to the moon — and, with the aid of his trusty dog Gromit, builds a rocket ship in his own cellar.
Cheese, not technology or inventing, was Wallace’s first love; the rocket was merely a means to an end, and there was no clear indication at the time of Wallace’s inclination to improve all aspects of human existence with gadgets and gizmos. By the 1993 sequel, The Wrong Trousers, the full Wallace & Gromit premise was firing on all cylinders.
Along with the 1995 threequel A Close Shave, British Claymation guru and Aardman Animations co-founder Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit trilogy — variously released as Wallace & Gromit: Three Amazing Adventures, Wallace & Gromit: The First Three Adventures or The Incredible Adventures of Wallace and Gromit — are hilarious, brilliant half-hour masterpieces jam-packed with dazzlingly inventive sight gags and quintessentially eccentric British humor.
A Grand Day Out, the slightest of the three, reveals Park focused on developing his technique. The Wrong Trousers remains the series’ high point, 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 Jeeves & Wooster 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.
After Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Park returned to his roots with another Wallace & Gromit short, A Matter of Loaf and Death. It’s a pleasant lark, but the least impressive of the duo’s outings since A Grand Day Out. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the bounce has gone from their bungee, but the formula is wearing thin. Just once, I’d like to see Wallace save Gromit, rather than the other way around. Still, it’s enjoyable fun.
Meanwhile, Shaun the sheep, a supporting character from A Close Shave, has his own spin-off series on British television — and several collections of Shaun’s adventures are available on Region 1 DVD.
The seven-minute episodes feature Shaun (get it?) as part of a flock on a small English farm with a trio of mischievous pigs, a tolerant farm dog named Bitzer who tries to keep order, a stereotypically nasty housecat, and a dim-witted, near-sighted farmer who speaks only in mumbles.
The running gag is that Shaun’s ovine posse get into all kinds of un-sheep-like escapades, from a harmless game of soccer with a head of cabbage to outings to a pizza joint or a local fair, but Bitzer and Shaun collude to make sure the farmer never notices anything strange. Occasionally the sheep must make covert incursions into the farmhouse; other times the farmer dallies in the farmyard, dabbling in oil painting, sheep shearing or some other unwonted activity. Silliness ensues.
Like most of Aardman’s output, the “Shaun” episodes spoof various cinematic genres and and conventions. They also amount to modern animated slapstick silent films in the tradition of the “Road Runner” shorts, with a goofy creativity that is all Aardman. I’m a huge fan of watching silent films with children (Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother or Buster Keaton’s The General are ideal starting places). Between Wall‑E, Mr. Bean and Shaun the sheep, the joys of silents seem to be enjoying a sort of mini-resurgence in family entertainment.
Discs so far include Off the Baa!, Back in the Ba-a-ath, Sheep on the Loose, Little Sheep of Horrors, and A Woolly Good Time. The early discs included eight episodes and ran about an hour long, but starting with Sheep on the Loose they cut back to six (boo-o-oo).The discs are a hodgepodge of episodes from different seasons; perhaps in the future there will be proper “Shaun the Sheep: Season 1” and “Season 2” releases. For now, though, this is the only way for North Americans to enjoy Shaun’s adventures. I’ll take what I can get.
