The Wrong Trousers

Nick Park's The Wrong Trousers won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 66th Academy Awards in March 1994, Park's second Oscar in a row in the category after Creature Comforts two years earlier. It also won the BAFTA for Best Animated Short and the Annie Award the same year, sweeping the major animation-short prizes of its season.

It is the second of Park's Wallace & Gromit shorts, after A Grand Day Out (1989) and before A Close Shave (1995), and the three together made the pair some of the most internationally recognised stop-motion characters of the 1990s. Park later took them into the feature The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), the BBC One short A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) and the Netflix release Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), which finally brought back the silent penguin antagonist Feathers McGraw after thirty-one years.

About twenty animators made it at Aardman's Bristol studios over roughly thirteen months of stop-motion work; each second of finished animation took the equivalent of two days of model manipulation and frame-by-frame photography. Peter Sallis voices Wallace, as he did for the entire run until his death in 2017, while Gromit and Feathers McGraw are silent. Julian Nott wrote the score. Critical surveys regularly put The Wrong Trousers at the top of the three original shorts and among the great achievements of British animation, and the British Film Institute placed it in its top hundred British films of the twentieth century.