Word: shave
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Harryhausen was a master of stop-motion, the laborious, handmade form of animation that lives today in the work of Oscar winner Nick Park (A Close Shave) and Selick, whose previous feature was Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. This is a jauntier piece--more Disneyfied, perhaps, but still apt to leave a haunting impression on the children who see it. And when they finally read the Dahl book, they may be annoyed. Why, they will wonder, couldn't it be more like this movie...
...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 eloquence worthy of Buster Keaton. The put-upon pooch will then save Wallace in a breathless climax whose brio and ingenuity shame any live-action thriller...
...anyone but Mel Gibson and Pat Buchanan have thought Braveheart the very best movie of 1995? But on one matter, few of the cognoscenti would argue. The freshest, most beguiling film to win an Oscar last week was an epic you may have never heard of: A Close Shave, Nick Park's stop-motion, comedy-thriller mini-masterpiece about a dog named Gromit and his pet Englishman, Wallace...
...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...
...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...