A Grand Day Out
Year: 1989
Rating: Not Rated
Length: 23 minutes / 0.38 hours
I grew up watching the Wallace & Gromit shorts on VHS. There’s a certain nostalgia I have for these stop motion films that I wanted to share with my daughter. So I pulled out the DVDs I had of these shorts and watched them again. Not only do they hold up, but just thinking of the technical achievement to create a thing like this is mind-boggling. The first of these, A Grand Day Out, isn’t the best of the original three, but it’s a grand movie, nonetheless.
Like watching a silent comedy of the early era of Hollywood, A Grand Day out has a simple (if not completely absurd) premise of going to the moon because Wallace (Peter Sallis) is out of cheese and he figures it’s the best place to get some. The beauty of A Grand Day Out isn’t entirely in its ability to appeal to children and adults—as it felt most claymation at the time was of the “Gumby” variety. Instead, this Wallace & Gromit short emphasized the use of visual storytelling. Its humor is in all the expressions of the characters who have no voice.
It’s difficult to rate this short compared to all the advances the stop motion medium has gone through in the 35+ years since it came out. At the time, it was quite revolutionary, and it had me blinking and wondering how they managed to get some of those shots. Still, its simplicity is an artifact of the technical limitations of the time. That it took so long just to create 23 minutes of content shows how time-consuming the process was, even if another two minutes for a small conclusion would have made it even better.
A great start to the Wallace & Gromit series, I give A Grand Day Out 4.0 stars out of 5.
