Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Michelle Ridley The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

classicsoncall The reviews here on IMDb for this first film short featuring Wallace and Gromit range the gamut from calling it the least enjoyable to the best. Having seen "The Wrong Trousers" and "A Close Shave", I guess I'd have to go along with those who say this was the weakest entry, but I'll have to qualify that by saying that I don't really care for any of them in the grand scheme of animated features. The principal characters don't strike me as particularly endearing, although Gromit's a dog, so I can cut him some slack. The story here seemed to move at an incredibly slow pace and I didn't have any kind of sense of what that yellow box on the moon was supposed to be. With the premise of the story having Wallace and Gromit heading for the moon in a spaceship to score some cheese, what it looked like to me was Gromit slicing off a piece of play-dough for his crackers. Have you ever tasted play-dough? Very salty. As for the story - very cheesy. The folks at Aardman may have been on to something with this one.

gavin6942 Wallace (Peter Sallis) and Gromit have run out of cheese and this provides an excellent excuse for the animated duo to take their holiday on the moon, where, as everyone knows, there is ample cheese.Frankly, I never got the charm or appeal of the Wallace and Gromit animations, and do not really care or much of anything Aardman has done. It seems to me not much better than the old Gumby cartoons, and the humor largely escapes me.That being said, this is my favorite Wallace and Gromit. It is simple, effective, and has a nice story. We get a good sense of how brilliant (yet lacking in common sense) that Wallace is, and the moon robot is a good character in himself. What is his back story? Who cares!

DAVID SIM Aardman Animation started as a small company founded by Peter Lord and David Sproxton in the mid-70s. They're speciality was the almost lost art of stop-motion animation, particularly with claymation figures. They enjoyed some success with the eye-popping Peter Gabriel music video Sledgehammer. But the company really found its feet when novice animator Nick Park joined the studio.It was Park who would put the company on the map, and introduce two of the most endearing animated characters the world would ever see, Wallace & Gromit. The Wallace & Gromit world is a most peculiar one. Wallace is a scatterbrained, cheese-obsessed inventor, always working on the next madcap invention. Gromit is his faithful dog, and much smarter than Wallace ever will be. With his incredibly expressive monobrow, he watches in silent dismay as Wallace's cock-ups get them into the wackiest adventures.Each one of the Wallace & Gromit shorts has been a delight. So far we've seen the likes of a skiing oven, robotic trousers, a cyber-dog, a cereal killer, and with they're feature film debut, a Were-Rabbit. The films manage a perfect blend of laugh-aloud comedy and smart visual invention. My mouth always waters at the prospect of the next adventure.And A Grand Day Out is where it all began. Wallace and Gromit are lounging they're Bank Holiday away, so Wallace wants to go somewhere exotic. With not a piece of cheese in the house, Wallace on an impulse decides to build a rocket ship and fly to the Moon (which is made of cheese, to Wallace's thinking). But when they get there, they instead have to contend with a ski-obsessed oven/cooker, who won't leave them in peace.Even in they're debut, Wallace & Gromit and A Grand Day Out is a charming adventure. All of the things we would come to expect about them are plain to see, albeit in a slightly rougher, uncut form. They're characterisations have already been established, with Peter Sallis nailing Wallace's dimwitted inflections. And Aardman's love of nutty contraptions is there too.The film comes with many delightful sight gags tucked around every corner. I especially liked the rocket ship's wallpapered interior, and the throwaway sight of a handbrake on the control panel. But the most inspired idea is a coin-operated oven lying neglected on the Moon. I've always been an enormous fan of silent comedy (why I like Gromit so much as a character). And Park and Aardman create an intriguing character with this oven.Wisely, they don't give it a voice of its own (perhaps the budget wouldn't stretch that far?). Instead, they just build a character out of incidental details and its all enacted in total silence: the cooker's daydreaming of skiing; writing out a parking ticket to Wallace's rocket; gluing the surface of the Moon back together; trying to hit Wallace with a truncheon only for the money to run out mid-swing, etc.Nick Park directs it all with such a light touch that the film breezes by. However, as much as I enjoyed the film it does have its flaws. A Grand Day Out is probably the weakest of the Wallace & Gromit shorts. The animation is a little rough around the edges, and lacks the pristine sleekness of the subsequent entries. It also falls down in the plot department. All of the other Wallace & Gromit films are driven by far stronger stories. This one is quite thin. For instance, we never learn how the cooker wound up on the Moon in the first place. (you'd swear it's one of Wallace's failed inventions). The plot, such as it is, is made to take a backseat to the (admittedly funny) visual puns and Wallace & Gromit's effortless double-act.Perhaps A Grand Day Out hasn't aged as well as the other films, but a lot of the things we've come to love about Wallace & Gromit are already in place. One area where it does have the edge is its the most conceptually ambitious. All the other films in the series have remained earthbound and A Grand Day Out is the only one so far to aim for something more profound. It touches upon themes rarely seen in animation today. If it had the budget accorded The Curse of the Were-Rabbit then perhaps A Grand Day Out may have become something extraordinary rather than just an engaging entertainment.To look at it in the harsh light of day, A Grand Day Out is the prototype. It was The Wrong Trousers that really set the style for the series, and struck up the balance between top quality writing, sidesplitting comedy and fabulous animation in all of the right places. Still, a highly promising debut nonetheless that rightfully converted an entire nation.

MartinHafer This is the first Wallace and Gromit film and while not quite as polished as later ones (hence the 9 and not a score of 10), it was a magnificent film. In light of its fantastic graphics and lovely story, it was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film--which it lost, oddly enough, to another film from the same studio! CREATURE COMFORTS is a much simpler film--shorter and with a single gimmick (which you either loved or hated--I hated it) and I have no idea why the Wallace and Gromit short lost--it was head and shoulders above this other film.This short has to do with both introducing the characters as well as giving them something to do--in this case, taking a trip to the moon to satisfy Wallace's pathological love for cheese! It's got all the expected gags and style--a lovely film really and one you MUST watch (really)!