Touches You

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

People are voting emotionally.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Wallace (Peter Sallis) falls for Wendolene (Anne Reid), a wool shop owner, while Gromit is framed for the sheep rustling.I have now seen just about every Wallace and Gromit cartoon and I am still confused by their popularity. I like the animation, and I think the themes are sort of neat (the cheese obsession, for example). But the humor largely escapes me. Things that are obviously intended to be funny do not even make me smile.My lack of understanding aside, the film proved to be critically very well-received. Following in the footsteps of its predecessor "The Wrong Trousers", "A Close Shave" won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1996.Not only was it given an award, but Shaun, the youngest of the flock of sheep in this feature, proved to be a very popular character and in 2007 was given a TV series, "Shaun the Sheep", which has been broadcast worldwide. 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.

The first one was okay, it featured the moon. It was cheesy and didn't really have a plot, although the oven creature was interesting to watch. The second was a lot better, involving a penguin who was a bad guy. However, this third was a VERY big improvement. Sheep that are lost, an evil dog robot, a girl that the main character falls in love it. It's all there. With intense scenes and a lot of drama! One of the key improvements was the amount of special effects done. Sure, most of it was pure clay on frame by frame with camera work. But they added some special effects to enhance the clay world and digital world together. Some include the sparks the sheep's chainsaw produced. And when the dog was flying. These were very great improvement! The thing that gets me is the main character's absolute lack of intelligence, and the dog's intellectual yet still emotional behavior. Even the creator said that was the plan. It's funny and annoying, but just annoying enough to make it almost not funny. Hence the 9/10.

A lone sheep, later named Shaun, escapes from a sheep rustling plot and hides in the home of eccentric inventor Wallace and his long-suffering dog/best pal Gromit. A silent but deadly canine down at the wool shop appears to be the mastermind behind the plot and frames Gromit for the rustling scam. With a little help from Shaun, Wallace must rescue Gromit and catch the real crooks.There are more laughs and jokes in this half-hour short than most feature-length comedies manage in their entire running time. Nearly every frame has some kind of wit or imagination. The world of Wallace and Gromit, much like the stop-motion world of Postman Pat, is an incongruous mix of post-war Northern countryside crossed with sci-fi and a touch of horror. The horror themes would be explored in greater depth with Curse of the Were-Rabbit but it's handled with more care and sly invention here than in most slasher sequels.A fun time. Catch it on its inevitable Xmas Day screening.

This time, Wallace and Gromit take in a lost sheep named Sean, and get drawn into a sheep-rustling conspiracy. As always, there's a plethora of wacky inventions (namely the motorcycle sidecar). I think that my favorite scene was when Gromit was reading "Crime and Punishment" (check out the author's name). Nick Park certainly always knows how to come up with something clever in these cartoons, and you'd better believe that he does just that in "Wallace & Gromit in A Close Shave". Park showed the talent that he previously brought to "Creature Comforts" and would later bring to "Chicken Run". You just might think twice about using wool after seeing this movie. Really cool.