The Cinematheque

“Lovable beyond all measure … Wallace and Gromit are arguably the two most delightful characters in the history of animation.”

Roger Ebert

This Halloween season, count your scares in jumps and hares! Winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the first full-length outing for the Plasticine pair is a marvel of stop-motion animation, sophisticated imagination, and tot-friendly frights. When a mysterious creature begins attacking the town’s vegetable gardens—just days before the annual Giant Vegetable Competition!—it’s up to Wallace and Gromit and their humane pest-control company Anti-Pesto to capture the culprit before a trigger-happy archrival beats them to it. As always, nifty Rube Goldberg contraptions and Buster Keaton-style slapstick gags bring forth the laughs. In an era of ever-expanding CGI animation, the movie, five years in the making, was created using traditional, painstakingly detailed methods—a testament to directors Nick Park and Steve Box’s vision and their amazing ability to create such genuine and lovable characters out of clay, wire, and faux-fur.