A Grand Day Out/The Wrong Trousers review – rereleased Nick Park classics are a complete treat

Each heralded by composer Julian Nott’s wonderful and unmistakable brass-band march theme, the first two of Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit films are now rereleased in cinemas; they are simply great family entertainment.

A Grand Day Out (★★★★★) from 1989 is a terrifically funny sci-fi adventure which gives us a hilarious teatime shot of inventor Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) and his faithful canine companion and helpmeet Gromit sitting placidly side by side in armchairs and in a front parlour that was surely very old-fashioned even in 1989. It was only on watching this again that I realised who they reminded me of: David Hockney’s mum and dad in his famous portrait My Parents.

Wallace is yearning to go on holiday and he wants the destination to have something to do with cheese, for which he has a passion. They ponder the moon and realise that as that is famously made of cheese – the colour green isn’t specified – they should blast off there post haste. But first they will have to build their own rocket ship in the cellar which get them there and back; there is pure genius in this amazing craft and superb comedy when, as the rocket is downwardly spewing flames and smoke and takeoff still has not been achieved, that they realise they haven’t taken the handbrake off. And once they are on the moon, which is more Georges Méliès than Neil Armstrong, they come across a mysterious robot inhabitant which is a fascinating mix of R2D2, gas oven and electricity meter. He is incidentally surely an influence on Pixar’s Wall-E.

Great fun … The Wrong Trousers. Photograph: Photo 12/Alamy

The followup The Wrong Trousers (★★★★★) from 1993 was a more developed and detailed movie, though still only half an hour long, and was a heist thriller which accelerated Park into the big league. While, for me, it doesn’t have the sublime high-concept simplicity of A Grand Day Out, it’s still great fun, and surely no film or cultural artefact has done more to recognise the fact that the word “trousers” is just funny, no matter the context.

In this film we see that Wallace, that inveterate tech enthusiast, has purchased a pair of “techno trousers”, evidently deleted Nasa stock, into which one can insert oneself and be automatically carried about, stomping up walls and along ceilings by these striding futuristic trousers, controlled remotely. They are given as a birthday present to the baffled and unconvinced Gromit, who is furthermore nettled when Wallace decides to take a paying guest into the house; this is the penguin and notorious criminal Feathers McGraw, who has a sinister blank expression. In the middle of the night McGraw inveigles sleepy Wallace into wearing the trousers, and pilots him from afar into the local museum so he will purloin a precious diamond. The feature potential of The Wrong Trousers, and the emotional bromance subplot of Wallace appearing to neglect Gromit and hurt his feelings, was brought out in the 2024 sequel Vengeance Most Fowl

These two jewels of stop-motion animated comedy are such a treat.