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 consecutive Oscar in the category after Creature Comforts two years earlier. The film also won the BAFTA for Best Animated Short and the Annie Award the same year, sweeping the major animation-short categories of its season.

The film is the second of Park's Wallace & Gromit short films, after A Grand Day Out (1989) and before A Close Shave (1995); the three shorts together established the property as one of the most internationally recognised stop-motion animation works of the 1990s. Park would later extend the property 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) — the last of which finally returned the silent penguin antagonist Feathers McGraw to the property after thirty-one years.

The production was the work of approximately twenty animators at Aardman's Bristol studios across roughly thirteen months of stop-motion work; each second of completed animation took the equivalent of two days of model manipulation and frame-by-frame photography. Peter Sallis voices Wallace (as he did across the entire run until his death in 2017); Gromit and Feathers McGraw are silent. The score is by Julian Nott. The Wrong Trousers is regularly cited in critical surveys as the strongest of the three original shorts and one of the great accomplishments of British animation; the British Film Institute placed it in its top hundred British films of the twentieth century.