A&E - A Cracking Time

Although we are not big filmgoers at our house, there is one movie we are eager to see. It looks like it’ll have to be on video, which is not all that unusual around here. So in a few months, you’ll probably find me sleeping outside the video store, waiting for the arrival of the Wallace and Gromit movie.

Certainly I can tell you all about the first time I saw my wife, and I have a similar clarity about my love affair with W & G. We were living in Ohio, about 1995, in an apartment just outside Dayton. Kelly was in seminary and I was working all sorts of part-time jobs to pay the bills. It was late one evening – it strikes me that it was a Saturday night about 11 pm. I don’t know why we didn’t just go to bed, but instead we were lying on the couch flipping through the TV channels, when we hit upon the public TV station playing an odd sort of animated show.

Within minutes, I was lying on the couch alone – because my wife, whose strongest response to the comics page or a TV sitcom (or my jokes) is usually, “That’s funny,” had begun to laugh so hard she had literally fallen on the floor… an instance of ROTFL that predates instant messaging.

Needless to say, that viewing of “The Wrong Trousers” made us instant converts. Thanks to our friends at that Cincinnati PBS station – and we really owe them a donation! – we soon had a chance to watch the first W & G, “A Grand Day Out”. And to complete the experience, the third short, “A Close Shave”, came to a theater in Dayton some months later.

For the uninitiated, Wallace is a middle-aged and eccentric inventor who is continually developing ideas to improve "our modern lifestyle". Gromit is his dog, the real brains of the operation. Their inventions are often aided by Gromit's perusal of his well-thumbed (um, well-pawed?) copy of "Electronics for Dogs".

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the whole series is that Gromit is a well-defined and consistent personality despite the fact that he doesn't speak. However, he communicates more intelligence and humor with his eyes and eyebrows than a full season of your average sitcom.

We’ve been waiting desperately for a follow-up ever since our Ohio days (what I always call "the exile" -- perhaps a topic for another day), and finally our dream has come true. If the movie got you hooked, or if you didn’t “get” what all the fuss was about, anyone who hasn’t seen the short films should check them out… in the following order:

• “A Grand Day Out” is pretty entertaining, but obviously the first in the series. It looks a little like they shot it in someone’s basement. I have to admit, I would be hard-pressed to give a plot synopsis beyond "the lads run out of cheese and decide to go to the moon to get more" -- it just didn't stick in my head. Give it the bronze medal.
• “A Close Shave” is very funny and technically quite good, but somehow doesn’t take the gold for me. It does have the advantage, and also the disadvantage, of featuring a larger variety of characters. Also, although it is animated, and very funny even for kids, it does have some pretty scary moments, so parents might exercise caution. Very enjoyable, but I have to give it the silver.
• I guess you never quite get over your first – if you have to pick one, go for “The Wrong Trousers”. It’s just packed with classic moments; if you haven't seen it, I fear I will fail to explain why a penguin giving a sidelong glance is hilarious. And I honestly believe in my heart that the train chase sequence is perhaps the funniest 3 or 5 minutes of film you will ever see. I just defy anyone to watch that without laughing.

I'm proud to say that I'm not alone in my high esteem for these guys... see Roger Ebert's review of the movie ("arguably the two most delightful characters in the history of animation"). I broke down and bought the DVD collection for my wife for Christmas, so with any luck I will survive till the big-screen version arrives on video as well.