A Grand Day Out

Nick Park began A Grand Day Out as a student project at the National Film and Television School in 1983 and finished it as an Aardman Animations short in 1989. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1991, losing to Creature Comforts, which Park also directed and won with that year, and it won the BAFTA for Best Animated Short. It introduced Wallace and Gromit, the Plasticine duo who would become Aardman's most internationally recognisable creation over 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, is made of Wensleydale. There they meet a coin-operated robot caretaker shaped like a cooker, whose longing to visit Earth gives the film an odd, touching undertow beneath the cheese jokes.

Park animated it by hand in Plasticine, with twenty-four adjustments for every second of screen time, and six years of intermittent production yielded roughly twenty-three minutes of finished film. It is rougher than what followed, and the roughness is part of the charm. Its success at the Academy Awards directly enabled Aardman to fund The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, which followed and secured the duo's place in the global animation canon. The series eventually ran to a feature, three more shorts and the 2024 Christmas special Vengeance Most Fowl.