A Grand Day Out originally aired in 1989 at the Bristol Animation Festival and later broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1990. After 8 years of production Nick Park introduces us in this short, but sweet film to the now legendary characters of Wallace and Gromit. What Park accomplished within a 23 minute run time and using nothing more than a camera a pile of Plasticine is nothing short of astounding. In the short, Wallace and Gromit decide to take a trip to the moon after they run out of cheese to bring back to Earth, after they become bored during a Bank Holiday (this is based on an old folklore tale that the moon is made of cheese.) While there they meet an old rusted gas cooker that initially attempts to see them off before having a rather humorous dream of becoming a skier. Despite the character models and sets not being as refined as the follow-up shorts 'The Wrong Trousers' and 'A Close Shave' also not particularly having a complex or well developed plot. A Grand Day Out is still to this day is a brilliant work of art. With a simplistic, but stylish design and plot, some humorous and witty moments for both kids and adults to enjoy and more importantly packed with plenty of charm as well as a pleasing and satisfying finale. A Grand Day Out is a bold statement to how much of an impact a simple stop-motion clay animation short has on the world of film. 8/10

Wallace wonders what to do for the bank holiday. He finds that he's run out of cheese and decides to go on a cheese vacation. He and his dog Gromit build a rocket and travel to the moon. While sampling the moon cheese, they encounter a robot set up as a vending machine. The robot gets fascinated from Wallace's travel magazine about skiing.Nick Park has created one of the funnier claymation characters in this 23 minute short. They are fun together. Wallace is great as the clueless inventor and Gromit is the smarter of the two. They are just fun together like an old married couple. The claymation also gives a charm to the animation. It's a great start for these characters.

There is a lot of be admired about the Wallace and Gromit short films. The intricate craftsmanship is always excellent, and you can only imagine how long it must have taken to film even a second of the stop-motion animation. The humour is gentle and family-friendly, and also very British… if that can serve as an adequate description. In this, the first film out of three directed by Nick Park – not including the Oscar-winning feature length film of 2005 – 'A Grand Day Out' is a genuinely entertaining 23 minutes of imagination and creativity, completed over six years by Park, who produced the film as part of his graduation project from the National Film and Television School.I have heard some remark that the animation in this film is poor, and yet I find myself wondering how they came to this conclusion. Of course, the work may not be as refined as the later additions to the series, given that Park was less experienced and was undoubtedly working on a smaller budget, but the quality is still never anything less than excellent. The story begins on a rather dull banking holiday, and the good-natured Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) is unsuccessfully trying to decide where he and his canine companion Gromit are to spend their day off. Suddenly, Wallace makes a horrifying discovery: their house is completely devoid of dairy products! And so – as anybody might do in such a situation – the pair endeavour to travel to the Moon, which everybody knows is comprised of cheese.Wallace, being an enthusiastic inventor, casually tosses together a space rocket, and pretty soon they are ready for their big journey. In probably the film's most memorable sequence, Wallace realises, just as the launch countdown is beginning, that they forgot to bring the crackers. Imagine going to the Moon without crackers! However, some quick-thinking and agility from Wallace eventually saves the day, and the pair pass their otherwise uneventful Moon-ward journey by reading the newspaper and building delicate playing card pyramids. Their picnic on the lunar surface offers a hint of imaginative absurdity, with the main storyline concerning a coin-operated gas oven who lives on the Moon, writes out parking tickets and dreams of skiing.All this makes for a quirky, clever and humorous short film that literally anybody can enjoy. Interestingly, 'A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit' was nominated for Best Animated Short at the 1991 Academy Awards, but failed to take the statue. I don't imagine, however, that Nick Park would have despaired; he lost out to a film called 'Creature Comforts'... directed by Nick Park!

Modelling clay/Plasticine animation was nothing new at the time of this project -- remember "Davey and Goliath"? But Park had something more ambitious in mind.Here, the inventor (Park) fabricates a world from scratch and places his alter-ego (Wallace) in it...he's an inventor, too. The inventor outside this world engineers this so the inventor within does all of the creating -- Park invents the movie's mechanics by having Wallace invent the movie's mechanics: the spaceship. Simple and brilliant self-reference.What makes this of cinematic interest is the homage to the masters of innovation and invention, notably Welles (the 'Rose Bud' sled from "Citizen Kane"), and the Hitchcockian camera adventure...the spaceship is designed the way H.G. Wells would imagine it -- Wells being the father of science fiction and the early master of abstract thought.So there you have it, a cinematic invention that's all about inventing, and the masters of invention.