A Grand Day Out (1990)

A Grand Day Out arrives from 1989, a graduation project from the National Film and Television School, fashioned in Plasticine by a young Nick Park. Wallace, an inventor with a taste for cheese, and his dog Gromit find their refrigerator bare and resolve to fly to the moon, which is widely understood to be made of cheese. They build a rocket in the cellar, pack a picnic, and go. That is the entire narrative. It runs about twenty-three minutes and contains no thesis, no agenda, and no apparent awareness that films are supposed to have either.

A single voice is credited, that of Peter Sallis, who performs Wallace in a Yorkshire accent Park had not requested. Gromit does not speak at all, having been deliberately rendered mute during production. Together they constitute a demographic sample of roughly one, and the film shows no interest in correcting this. The moon robot, a coin-operated device that dreams of skiing, exists for a sight gag and a small melancholy. When Wallace feeds it a coin, it wakes. When the coin runs out, it freezes mid-swing. A viewer determined to extract a parable about labor and capital could probably assemble something, though the film offers no assistance and no encouragement.

Nothing here sermonizes. The comedy is slapstick and engineering: a man tumbling off a ladder, a robot issuing a parking ticket to a rocket. Calling the film politically neutral would be generous. It is closer to politically absent, a small clay object concerned only with whether a homemade ship can reach a rock made of Stilton and return before tea. We classify these things as we find them, and here we find a vacuum, serene and complete. There is nothing to measure, which is itself a kind of distinction in an era that measures everything.

The Wallace and Gromit franchise would go on to win Academy Awards and spawn an empire of sheep. This first installment, however, remains innocent of all of it, a quiet origin story about dairy and rocketry, and we file it accordingly, with the mild respect owed to anything that manages to mean so little so well.