Nick Park’s stop-motion Wallace and Gromit animations have an amazing ability to deliver an entire action adventure feature film at just 30 minutes complete with romantic subplot and loads of great visual gags thrown in, and A Close Shave (★★★★★) from 1995 is just another example of it. The situation is that Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) is working on his latest invention in his cellar, a giant machine, like a bungalow-sized cauldron, that automatically shears sheep and knits the product into lovely woolly jumpers.
While they are waiting for this to become a success, Wallace and Gromit run a window-cleaning business, and it is in this capacity that they meet Wendolene Ramsbottom (voiced by Anne Reid) who owns a wool-selling business oddly unaffected by the wool shortage. Wallace falls for the comely Wendolene and their intensely English and shy romance forms an ironic counterpoint to the fact that Wendolene has been coerced by her sinister dog Preston into being complicit in this hateful canine’s sheep-rustling business – as a result of which a runaway sheep finds its way into Wallace and Gromit’s house.
It is a tremendous romp with hints of Indiana Jones, Thunderbirds and The Terminator and there is some great running-gag humour with the newspapers that Gromit is seen reading; one of which, the Daily Lamp-Post, features a theatre review column on its back page by no less a person than Charles Spencer. Don’t tell me the Daily Telegraph’s former theatre critic was moonlighting in those days? Or was it the late Princess Diana’s brother?
A Matter of Loaf and Death (★★★★★)) from 2008 reunited Park with Doctor Who veteran Bob Baker, his longtime writer whose name inspired this bread-related tale. It is a Hitchcockian suspense thriller with cheeky nods to the saucy pottery moment from Ghost, the bomb-disposal scene from the 1966 Adam West Batman: The Movie, and the ghastly iron muzzle from The Silence of the Lambs. Once again, big-hearted Wallace has fallen in love and as so often in the W&G franchise, Gromit mutely resents this intrusion into his inter-species bromance with Wallace.
However, Wallace and Gromit have got a new business on the go: a bakery, brand-named Top Bun, whose lively production schedule, driven by an enormous windmill attached to the front of their little house, indicates that at last Wallace has found a commercial application for his inventions. But he seems oddly unfazed by rumours of a serial killer on the loose targeting … bakers.
The film opens with a classic killer’s-eye-view of the victim about to meet an awful end. Wallace is smitten by the formidable Piella Bakewell (voiced by Sally Lindsay), the former poster girl for Bake-O-Lite bakery products (the film makes a rather ungallant implication as to why she was dropped); Gromit also might have feelings for Piella’s delicate poodle Fluffles. But Gromit has good reason to fear Piella’s increasingly controlling and coercive hold over Wallace. It is all very silly and uniquely entertaining.
• A Close Shave and A Matter of Loaf and Death are in UK cinemas from 17 July.
