A Close Shave

A Close Shave
Original USA VHS artwork cover.
Directed by	Nick Park
Produced by	Peter Lord David Sproxton
Written by	Nick Park Bob Baker
Starring	Peter Sallis Anne Reid
Music by	Julian Nott
Cinematography	Dave Alex Riddett
Edited by	Helen Garrard
Production company	Aardman Animations
Distributed by	BBC (UK, TV) 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (US VHS)
Release dates	24 December 1995 (1995-12-24)
Running time	31 minutes[1]
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	£1.3 million[2]

A Close Shave is a 1995 stop motion animated short film directed by Nick Park at Aardman Animations in Bristol, featuring his characters Wallace and Gromit. It was his third half-hour short featuring the eccentric inventor Wallace and his quiet but intelligent dog Gromit, following 1989's A Grand Day Out, and 1993's The Wrong Trousers.

To celebrate the film's premiere on 24 December 1995, BBC Two's Christmas presentation that year (broadcast from 17 to 22 December) featured Wallace and Gromit. The main ident featured the two (Wallace wears a red crown and Gromit wears a green crown) eating Christmas dinner, with a large blue 2 (the channel's logo) situated in the middle of the table, covered with flashing Christmas lights. Several Christmas themed stings also involving Wallace, Gromit, and the 2 were shown between programmes. The animation of these idents appeared slightly different from other Wallace and Gromit shorts.

Following in the footsteps of its predecessor The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1996.^[3]

Summary

In the middle of the night, a small sheep escapes from a mysterious lorry and enters the house of Wallace and Gromit, who are currently running a window-cleaning business. The next morning, Wallace and Gromit fail to notice the sheep chewing at their food and furniture, as well as their new Porridge Gun, before they leave for work. While they clean the windows of a wool shop, Wallace meets and falls in love with Wendolene Ramsbottom, the shopkeeper. She is the daughter of a late inventor and owns a sinister dog named Preston, who runs a sheep-rustling scheme to supply the shop. After returning from work, they finally discover the sheep, who has wrecked their furniture and is covered in mess.

To clean him up, Wallace puts the sheep into one of his inventions; the Knit-o-Matic. Gromit programs it to give a "Wash". However, the device unexpectedly becomes faulty and resets to "Light Shave", and proceeds to suck the sheep into the rest of the machine, give him a shear and knit his wool into a small sweater. The sheep emerges from the machine shivering, despite being unharmed; Wallace names him "Shaun" (a pun on the word "shorn") and dresses him in the sweater. Preston spies on the scene while hiding in a drain and after they leave, he sneaks in and steals the design blueprints for the Knit-o-Matic.

The next day, Wallace and Gromit are cleaning the clock tower outside Wendolene's shop, and Wallace pays Wendolene another visit. Gromit attempts to investigate what Preston is doing, but accidentally ends up getting framed for the sheep rustling and is captured by Preston. Gromit is handed into the authorities and sentenced to life in prison while Wallace finds his house overrun with sheep. Wendolene tearfully visits to tell him not to visit her anymore out of her concern for Gromit.

Wallace, Shaun and the other sheep rescue Gromit from prison and they hide out in the fields, where Wallace attempts to talk Gromit into fleeing the country. Wendolene and Preston arrive and round up the sheep. While rounding up the sheep, Wendolene rebels against Preston after seeing him threatening Shaun, demanding that he should put an end to his rustling. However, Preston turns against Wendolene and locks her in the lorry with the captured sheep (including Shaun) and drives away. Wallace and Gromit overhear Wendolene pleading "Let me out! You're not going to turn me into dog meat!", thus revealing Preston's true intention: to slaughter the sheep from the thefts in an attempt to secure his own brand of dog food for profit, even if it includes murdering his owner in the same manner.

Wallace and Gromit give chase on their motorbike, hoping to save Wendolene and the sheep and clear Gromit's name. During the chase, the sidecar Gromit rides in separates and heads down another road before flying off the edge of a cliff. Gromit saves himself by activating the sidecar's ability to turn into an airplane, and flies after Wallace's motorbike and the lorry. Both their attempts to stop Preston, including Gromit using the Porridge Gun, fail, and Preston traps Wallace in his lorry. The captives are taken into Preston's factory, where Preston has used the stolen blueprints to build a giant replica of the Knit-o-Matic machine, much to Wallace's objections. The captives are loaded into the wash basin, with Shaun escaping, and Preston pulls out the nozzle to suck them into the Knit-o-Matic.

As Wallace and Wendolene fight against the suction, Shaun activates neon advertisements, revealing the factory's location to Gromit, who then flies in and attacks Preston with the Porridge Gun. Shaun is then able to pull the nozzle away to suck Preston into the Knit-o-Matic, which Gromit programs to give a "Close Shave". During the shearing, Preston—revealed by Wendolene to be a malfunctioning "cyber dog" built by her father to protect her, but for reasons unknown has "turned out evil"—breaks out of the machine with his fake fur ripped off, revealing his robotic form. Unable to see after being dressed in a sweater knitted out of his fake fur, Preston blunders around and accidentally loads himself and Gromit onto the conveyor belt of his "Mutton-o-Matic" mincing machine. Wallace's attempts to turn it off end in all of them getting loaded on (except Shaun). As they all fight against the conveyor belt, Shaun swings over them on an anvil and knocks Preston into the machine, where he is destroyed and his remains are turned into his own dog food.

At the end of the film, Gromit is exonerated from all charges of the thefts, Wallace has rebuilt Preston back to the harmless pet he used to be with a remote control, and Wendolene stops by to thank him. However, when Wallace invites her in to have cheese, he learns that she's allergic to cheese, much to his dismay ("Not even Wensleydale?"). What's more, Shaun has been hiding in the cheese tray and despite being ordered by Wallace to go for him, Gromit ignores both.

Cast

• Peter Sallis as Wallace
• Anne Reid as Wendolene

Sequels

After A Close Shave, Wallace and Gromit's next major outing was in a set of 10 2¹⁄₂-minute shorts called Cracking Contraptions, each showing one of Wallace's inventions, usually with disastrous results. These appeared on the Internet and were also released as a limited edition Region 2 DVD, later on the Curse of the Were-Rabbit DVD. The sequel to A Close Shave is the feature film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The next major short was A Matter of Loaf and Death, first broadcast in Britain on Christmas Day 2008.

Spin-offs

Shaun, the youngest of the flock of sheep in this feature, proved to be a very popular character and in 2007 was given his TV series on the BBC, entitled Shaun the Sheep, which has been broadcast worldwide. The first two seasons (80 episodes, each approximately 7 minutes long) are available on DVD. Each episode contains slapstick and situational humor with Shaun as the leader of the flock dealing with everyday farm issues while exhibiting a high level of intelligence and human-like behavior to a level much like Gromit.

In 2009, Shaun the Sheep itself spun off another series, aimed for toddlers, entitled Timmy Time. Timmy was a baby sheep in Shaun's flock, and the series was an educational one about his time at playgroup.

In 2015, Shaun the Sheep received his own feature film.

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Wallace and Gromit

• Official website
• A Close Shave at the Internet Movie Database