A Grand Day Out

Nick Park began A Grand Day Out as a National Film and Television School student project in 1983 and finished it as an Aardman Animations short in 1989. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1991 (losing to Creature Comforts, which Park also directed and won with the same year), and won the BAFTA for Best Animated Short. It introduced Wallace and Gromit, the Plasticine duo who would become Aardman's most internationally recognisable creation across the next four decades.

Short on cheese over a bank-holiday weekend, Wallace builds a homemade rocket in the basement and flies with Gromit to the Moon — which to Wallace's delight turns out to be made of Wensleydale. There they encounter a coin-operated robot caretaker (the cooker) whose dream of visiting Earth is repeatedly thwarted by the duo's casual mid-meal departure with their cheese supplies.

Park's original Plasticine animation — every frame moved by hand, twenty-four shifts per second — produced approximately twenty-three minutes of finished film over six years of intermittent production. The film's success at the Academy Awards directly enabled Aardman to fund The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, which followed and confirmed the duo's place in the global animation canon. The Wallace-and-Gromit series eventually included a feature, three additional shorts, and the 2024 Christmas-special Vengeance Most Fowl.