Grand Day Out, A
Entry updated 29 May 2026. Tagged: Film.
UK animated short film (1989; vt Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out). Aardman Animations / National Film and Television School. Directed by Nick Park. Written by Nick Park and Steve Rushton. Voice cast includes Peter Sallis. 23 minutes. Colour.
Amateur inventor Wallace (Sallis) is horrified to discover he has run out of cheese; so with his very clever Dog Gromit he builds a Rocket to take them both to the Moon, which as everyone knows is made out of cheese. There they encounter a coin-operated Robot, who finds a skiing magazine among their belongings and determines to go to Earth to ski. After various misunderstandings, the robot accidentally causes the rocket to ignite, sending Wallace and Gromit back to Earth, and manages to fashion skis from the debris. The film ends with it happily skiing across the surface of the moon.
The first of the immensely and deservedly popular Wallace & Gromit films from stop-motion specialists Aardman is modest in scope compared to later entries, but immediately establishes all the elements which have raised the characters and Nick Park to near national-treasure status. The Humour is very British, based around endless puns and quotable lines ("Stilton? Wensleydale? It's like no cheese I've ever tasted, lad."), with Wallace's broad Yorkshire accent and the expressive possibilities for facial expressions that plasticine animation allows, all central to its appeal.
Later Wallace & Gromit films are more earthbound, with the sf elements largely confined to Wallace's Inventions, such as the repurposed NASA robotic trousers in the brilliant The Wrong Trousers (1993), the simultaneous sheep-shearing and jumper-knitting Knit-o-Matic in A Close Shave (1995) and the Mind Manipulation-O-Matic in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), which attempts to brainwash rabbits into disliking vegetables. [CWa]
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