A Matter of Loaf and Death

Nick Park's A Matter of Loaf and Death went out on BBC One on Christmas Day 2008 and was the most-watched programme of British Christmas Day television that year, with over fourteen million viewers. The thirty-minute short won the BAFTA for Best Animated Short Film and was nominated for the Academy Award in the same category, keeping up the franchise's regular habit of Oscar attention.

Wallace and Gromit have given up their previous business (window cleaning) and opened the Top Bun bakery in their cellar, while somebody is murdering local bakers one by one across their Yorkshire town. Wallace promptly falls in love with Piella Bakewell, the one-time face of the Bake-O-Lite bread advertisements. Gromit, as usual, takes on the whole of the investigation, all the while pretending to support his oblivious owner.

The craft is Aardman's mature stop-motion at its most refined, with Julian Nott's score and Peter Sallis's long-running voice performance as Wallace, and it showed the franchise in good commercial and critical health more than two decades after A Grand Day Out. The 2024 feature Vengeance Most Fowl later returned to this world with a sequel to The Wrong Trousers, but A Matter of Loaf and Death is still one of the warmest entries in the series, and one of the funniest.