The reviews here on IMDb for this first film short featuring Wallace and Gromit range the gamut from calling it the least enjoyable to the best. Having seen "The Wrong Trousers" and "A Close Shave", I guess I'd have to go along with those who say this was the weakest entry, but I'll have to qualify that by saying that I don't really care for any of them in the grand scheme of animated features. The principal characters don't strike me as particularly endearing, although Gromit's a dog, so I can cut him some slack. The story here seemed to move at an incredibly slow pace and I didn't have any kind of sense of what that yellow box on the moon was supposed to be. With the premise of the story having Wallace and Gromit heading for the moon in a spaceship to score some cheese, what it looked like to me was Gromit slicing off a piece of play-dough for his crackers. Have you ever tasted play-dough? Very salty. As for the story - very cheesy. The folks at Aardman may have been on to something with this one.

Although the Aardman animation (or 'claymation' if you prefer) has improved over the years, I still really love the look and feel of this short. The voice of Peter Sallis as Wallace is perfect… I couldn't imagine anyone else voicing the part. I find the comic timing works to a tea and the storyline is both wacky and brilliant. There are very few things that make me laugh out loud, but there are several jokes in this film that still crack me up even 22 years later! Long may the BBC keep showing it! For me… VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.My Score: 9.5/10IMDb Score: 7.8/10 (based on 12,962 votes at the time of going to press).Rotten Tomatoes 'Tomatometer' Score: 100/100 (based on 19 reviews counted at the time of going to press).Rotten Tomatoes 'Audience' Score: 36/100 'Want to See' (based on 12,098 user ratings counted at the time of going to press).You can find an expanded version of this review on my blog: Thoughts of a SteelMonster.

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.