A Close Shave

Nick Park's A Close Shave won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Animated Short in 1996, the third Wallace and Gromit short (after The Wrong Trousers the previous year) to take both prizes. It confirmed Aardman Animations as the most internationally recognised stop-motion studio of its era, and Wallace and Gromit as that rare British comedy partnership which travelled to every market without losing anything on the way.

Wallace, the cheese-loving inventor of the pair, falls in love with Wendolene Ramsbottom, a furtive wool-shop owner with a violent dog called Preston, just as sheep begin to disappear around their Yorkshire town. Gromit, as ever, does the actual detective work and most of the emotional work too, while Wallace is busy being smitten. Shaun the Sheep, later the star of his own franchise, makes his first appearance here.

Park's stop-motion craft, his writing partnership with Bob Baker and Julian Nott's score made it one of the best-loved British shorts of the 1990s, and it still plays as well to adults as to children. Aardman went on to Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (the feature-length Oscar winner) and the continuing Shaun the Sheep franchise, but A Close Shave is where the studio first worked at the full height of its powers.