Aardmania likely comes and goes, and our household caught the '95 wave. I loved the ingenious inventor with his low-key ambitions and his astonishingly mute companion, but then, like Mr. Bean, these childhood favourites went into indefinite storage and I never thought to spare any idle half-hours revisiting them in the decades since, until it became time to pass things down.
With an open mind to modern rubbish, here are my Top 5 Wallaces & Gromits.
It didn't bore me like Chicken Run, but long-form stop-motion is always exhausting, and horror parody stretches the premise a bit thin. I won't watch it again when I could watch all the nostalgic ones in the same time.
Arguably too dark with actual, non-ovine murder (clue's in the title), but '90s kids had grown up by now, and their own kids can wait. It's a worthy entry that mainly suffers from being more of the same, though the whole windmill/bomb sequence was as fun as any other.
The first one I saw, and thus the most nostalgic, this slipped down the rankings as we collected the other videos in favour of those less literally and thematically dark. I suppose the drama is slightly more interesting now than back when I was patiently sitting through it waiting for the jokes, but there weren't any new revelations, and Gromit in the sidecar-plane is still the best bit.
Achieving grander ambitions while remaining modest on the voice acting front (and notably introducing those overcomplicated everyday contraptions), this always had the sense of being the definitive exhibit, even if I was never as close to it as the ones around it. The model railway chase with real-time track-laying may be the high point of the whole series, but I was also particularly tickled by the insistence that Gromit needs to be walked like a regular dog even though he's otherwise an extremely capable person.
I don't know if this was always my favourite, but it's what I think of when I think of Wallace & Gromit. I might have watched it the most, or its more leisurely pace might have lodged those scenes more in my memory. I remember some initial disappointment at the shorter running time and comparative crudity of the models, but its home-made charm was ultimately endearing and inspiring, even if I never did film my plasticine.
