Film
A Grand Day Out
Nick Park's original clay-animated short, made on a shoestring at art school, launched one of Britain's best-loved double acts. Wallace and Gromit run out of cheese, build a rocket from odds and ends, and pop up to the moon to fetch some. Homemade, wonky, endlessly inventive — 24 minutes of pure comfort and a masterclass in doing more with less.
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The Wrong Trousers1993
The pair's next outing turns a stolen diamond and a penguin with sinister intentions into one of the tightest, funniest chase sequences ever animated.
But Slightly darker and more thriller-ish than the sunny original — if you wanted that same innocent holiday mood, this has real menace in it.
A Close Shave1996no page yet
Gromit gets framed for sheep-rustling in a shaggy noir spoof, complete with a robotic dog and a wool-obsessed villain — the most confidently silly entry in the series, and an Oscar winner.
But The plot juggles more characters and subplots than the earlier shorts, so it loses a little of that stripped-back, two-hander charm.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit2005
The feature-length graduation, swapping cheese heists for a vegetable-growing contest gone monstrously wrong — every frame is stuffed with visual gags and the puns come thicker than ever.
But An hour longer than anything else here, and the horror-movie spoofing might feel like a bigger, louder animal than the cosy shorts.
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
A Trip to the Moon1902
Same daft premise — ordinary people build a device and pop up to the moon — done nearly ninety years earlier, with a rocket landing in the Man in the Moon's eye instead of Wallace's back garden.
Georges Méliès's fourteen-minute fantasy is the first time cinema sent anyone to the moon, all painted sets and theatrical trickery — utterly charming, and you can feel Wallace and Gromit's whole DNA sitting right there in it.
But Silent, black-and-white unless you find a hand-tinted print, and its special effects are theatrical stagecraft rather than anything resembling realism — a real museum-piece watch.
More like this (8)
Chicken Run2000
Aardman's other great stop-motion triumph, a chicken-coop prison break played dead straight as a war movie, with the same handmade texture and dry British humour running through every plasticine feather.
But No Wallace, no Gromit, and a slightly more anxious, escape-thriller tone than the gentle holiday spirit of the original.
Shaun the Sheep Movie2015
Made by the same studio with the same tactile charm, this one drops the dialogue entirely and tells a whole city adventure through mime and slapstick — astonishingly, nothing is lost.
But If part of the joy for you was Wallace's daft narration and inventions, the total silence here is a very different flavour of Aardman.
Early Man2018no page yet
Aardman go prehistoric, pitting cavemen against Bronze Age football tyrants in a gag-a-minute sports comedy with the same fondness for rubbish contraptions and underdog pluck.
But It's broader and more slapstick, aimed a notch younger, without quite the same wit or warmth in the writing.
Paddington2014
Not stop-motion, but the same very English blend of gentle whimsy, homemade solutions to absurd problems, and unwavering kindness — a bear in a duffel coat instead of a man in a knitted jumper.
But It's live-action with CGI, so you lose that specific tactile, fingerprint-on-clay texture that makes Aardman's world feel handmade.
The Iron Giant1999
A hand-drawn American cousin in spirit — a boy, an unlikely companion, and small-town ingenuity against something huge and strange from the sky, told with real warmth and a surprising emotional gut-punch.
But Considerably more serious and Cold War-anxious than anything Wallace and Gromit ever attempted; it earns tears rather than laughs.
My Neighbor Totoro1988
Miyazaki's hand-drawn classic shares that same unhurried, cosy sense of wonder at ordinary life interrupted by something magical — patient, gentle, and beloved by generations of kids and grown-ups alike.
But Almost no plot in the conventional sense — if you need momentum and jokes, its slow, dreamy pacing might test patience.
Moon2009
Swap the cosy allotment-shed rocket for genuine isolation: both put a solitary figure and a loyal non-human companion alone on the lunar surface, but this one asks what that trip does to a mind rather than an appetite for cheese.
Sam Rockwell gives an extraordinary, near-solo performance as a lunar miner unraveling something unsettling about his own contract — a lean, atmospheric slice of hard science fiction that trusts silence and dread over spectacle.
But This is adult, melancholic, and quietly disturbing where the original is pure comfort — nothing here is for children, and there's no cheese in sight.
In the Shadow of the Moon2007
The other side of the same joke — real astronauts, in their own words, talking about actually going to the moon, the genuine awe and terror underneath the fantasy Wallace and Gromit turn into a day trip.
A gorgeously assembled documentary built from NASA archive footage and present-day interviews with the surviving Apollo astronauts, funny and moving in ways that make the moon landings feel newly astonishing.
But It's a talking-heads documentary with real emotional weight and mortality in it — a much slower, more reflective watch than anything animated on this list.
People
Cast
Peter SallisWallace (voice)