There’s an elite list of British men and women who’ve gone into space in the real world, but in the fictional one at least, one man reigns above all: Wallace, the humble claymation inventor whose very first adventure, A Grand Day Out, made its debut at the British Short Film Festival 35 years ago today. As we get ready to return to the wacky world of Wallace and his canine companion Gromit in Vengeance Most Fowl, it’s amazing to see how far the duo have come… and yet despite all that, it’s A Grand Day Out that remains the series’ strongest link to the world of sci-fi, more than any crazy gadget Wallace comes up with ever could.
In the three and a half decades between Grand Day Out and Vengeance Most Fowl, little has really changed in Wallace & Gromit‘s idyllic representation of quaint, charmingly British life. For all the gizmos that Wallace has come up with over the years—from dog-walking robots to home automation, from transforming bike-planes to an in-house wool manufacturing business—his technological world is still largely an analogue one. Computers exist in some form, but closer to the style of giant banks of machines from the ’70s and ’80s. If someone wants to call someone, they ring a landline, rather than a mobile phone, and the internet doesn’t really exist. Even in the series’ latest adventure, the only real acquiescence to the contemporary is Wallace’s latest invention, Norbot the Smart Gnome, which still feels like an evolution of Wallace & Gromit‘s sideways approach to our increasingly tech-suffused lives, rather than trying to play catch up with how our world has advanced.
Which is why it still remains brilliantly funny that the first thing we see Wallace ever do as an audience is build an actual functioning rocket ship in his basement. A Grand Day Out is arguably the most explicitly science fictional entry in Wallace & Gromit—the duo build a space ship, jet off to the moon, and encounter artificial, alien life—and yet it grounds itself in a layer of absurdist surreality that set the stage for the fantasy version of Britain that the series would go on to both charmingly inhabit and turn itself into an international, cross-cultural exchange of British-ism. We’re never asked to question the hows and whys of Wallace and Gromit building a rocket out of wood, scrap metal, and the design documents of a man still working in stick figures. The desire is not rooted in a need to explore the unknown or prove some grand scientific dream, but because Wallace earnestly believes that the moon is made out of cheese, and building a rocket to go there and get some is somehow a much more reasonable response to realizing you’re almost out of Wensleydale than going around the corner to the shops would be.
And when they do get there, not only are they proven right in that assumption—and don’t have to worry about things like atmosphere or artificial gravity, outside of one specific, hilarious joke of Wallace kicking a ball into the air and it not coming back down—everything is just taken in Wallace and Gromit’s chipper strides. There’s no real awe to what they achieve in A Grand Day Out, other than that they wanted some cheese, and they acquired some: that is what matters, rather than casually breaking ground in space exploration. Even when they encounter alien life, in the form of the coin-operated robot mad that they didn’t clean up after themselves, beyond initial misunderstandings it’s not some grand mystery to be solved. If anything, again, the fact that the short concludes with the now seemingly sentient robot having discovered the joys of skiing from a vacation magazine Wallace left lying around is treated with a matter of factness that can’t help but be incredibly charming.
It is in this surrealist charm that Wallace and Gromit has thrived, not just as an institute of British animation and culture, but in how it’s managed to successfully and increasingly distance itself from the dissonance of our modern technological world, even as its advancing premises continue to stretch the reality of its titular inventor. In many ways, our world is already beyond even some of the wildest inventions Wallace could muster. But where else could he have gone if his first ever outing took him to the stars and back?
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