A Close Shave / A Tale of Bread and Death – Wallace and Gromit join two broken coins | Video

Nick Park’s stop-motion Wallace and Gromit films have the uncanny ability to deliver an entire film that takes place in just 30 minutes with a romantic scene and some great visuals thrown in, and A Great Shaving (★★★★★) since 1995 is another example of that. The situation is that Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) is working on his recent invention in his basement, a large machine, like a bungalow, which only shears sheep and makes beautiful wool jumpers.

While they are waiting for this to happen, Wallace and Gromit run a window cleaning business, and it is in this role that they meet Wendolene Ramsbottom (voiced by Anne Reid) who owns a business selling wool not affected by the lack of wool. Wallace falls in love with the beautiful Wendolene and their English and shy love is contradicted by the fact that Wendolene is forced by her evil dog Preston to join the nefarious business of stealing sheep – which is why a runaway sheep enters Wallace and Gromit’s house.

It’s a big leap with ideas of Indiana Jones, Thunderbirds and The Terminator and there’s a lot of running jokes and newspapers that Gromit is seen reading; one of them, the Daily Lamp-Post, has a theater review section on its back page by the diminutive Charles Spencer. Don’t tell me the former Daily Telegraph critic was moonlighting in those days? Or was he the brother of the late Princess Diana?

The Story of Bread and Death (★★★★★)) From 2008 Park was reunited with Doctor Who veteran Bob Baker, his former writer whose name inspired the story about the bread. It’s a Hitchcockian suspense thriller with a punch to the potter’s wheel moment from Ghost, the bombshell scene from 1966’s Adam West Batman: The Movie, and the steel lip horror from The Silence of the Lambs. Once again, the big-hearted Wallace falls in love again and as is often the case in the W&G franchise, Gromit resents this intrusion into his interracial bromance with Wallace.

However, Wallace and Gromit have a new business on the go: a bakery, called Top Bun, whose production process, driven by the storm in front of their small house, shows that Wallace has finally found a job to sell his products. But he seems unfazed by rumors of an apparent murderous target… a baker.

The film opens with a deadly shot of the victim on the verge of death. Wallace is smitten by Piella Bakewell (voiced by Sally Lindsay), a former Bake-O-Lite bakery product girl (the film makes a vague sense of why she was left behind); Gromit may also be interested in Piella’s poodle Fluffles. But Gromit has good reason to fear that Piella is increasingly controlling and imposing on Wallace. It’s both silly and uniquely fun.