Word: gromit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Wallace & Gromit $25; BBC/CBS Fox video; all ages Strictly speaking, this boxed set isn't a toy. But on a rainy day or when a child is sick, each video is 30 min. of delightful distraction. Wallace is a flatheaded, cheese-loving inventor, Gromit is his genius dog (he knits, he paints, he outwits evil penguins!). They (and creator Nick Park) have won an armful of awards, including two Oscars...
Wallace has the nuts-and-bolts romanticism of a crackpot inventor; Gromit, a bookish sort, gets his friend out of wild scrapes when not reading Crime and Punishment (by Fido Dogstoyevsky) or Pluto's Republic or Electronics for Dogs. The typical plot: Wallace will be seized by some selfish idea--flying to the moon for a cheese snack in A Grand Day Out or renting out Gromit's room to a pistol-packin' penguin in The Wrong Trousers or courting a sheep-napping femme fatale in A Close Shave--and Gromit will pitch us a conspiratorial sigh with a mute...
...series of spots for Britain's Heat Electric utility. But Park is best known for his own four films, all Oscar winners or nominees: Creature Comforts (1989), a five-minute potpourri of comments by ordinary English folk put into the mouths of zoo animals; and the three Wallace-and-Gromit adventures, A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave. All but the last one are on video; several will be shown this week and next in festivals in New York City and Los Angeles...
...character and prop made of clay or plastic must be adjusted 24 times for every second of film, is a technique that requires a masochistic devotion. Park has that and more: a storyteller's genius for incident and personality. Wallace--an airplane-headed, cheese-loving bachelor--and the silent Gromit share a village home, less as man and dog than as two longtime companions stolidly accepting of the other's quirks. They are, in a way, the definitive English odd couple...
...Close Shave, which would make a fine companion piece to Babe, is a dazzly melodrama about criminal woolgathering and an adorable lamb named Sean (as in shorn). Its blithe originality suggests that Park could make terrific Wallace-and-Gromit films forever. But he already has a feature-length project on a new subject. Park is right to think big. In a year or two, he could be holding an Oscar for best picture...