A Close Shave

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A Close Shave
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
Editing by	Helen Garrard
Distributed by	BBC Aardman Animations
Release date(s)	24 December 1995 (UK) 29 December 1995 (USA)
Running time	30 min.
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Preceded by	The Wrong Trousers (1993)
Followed by	Cracking Contraptions (2002)

A Close Shave is a 1995 British animated 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 Christmas Eve 1995, BBC Two's Christmas presentation that year (broadcast from the 24th to 26th) featured Wallace and Gromit. The main ident featured the two 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, in 1995 A Close Shave won the Academy Award for an Animated Short Film.

Summary

At midnight a mysterious lorry stops by Wallace's and Gromit's house, allowing a small sheep the chance to escape. A dog tries to get out, but is pulled back inside the truck again, allowing the sheep to eat things around the house. This causes havoc the next morning for Wallace, who is pelted with porridge because of the sheep chewing on the wires of his breakfast machine. It is also revealed in this short that Wallace and Gromit are running a window-cleaning business; their work brings Wallace into contact with wool shop owner Wendolene Ramsbottom.

Wendolene's father left the wool shop to his daughter "along with his debts, and a few other things." When she hears Wallace is a wonderful inventor, she says, "Daddy would loved to have met you. (Sigh) Poor Daddy." Wallace falls in love with Wendolene, but also gets them involved in a sheep-rustling scheme run by Wendolene's sinister dog Preston to provide Wendolene's wool.

After coming home, Wallace and Gromit find their home to be in a mess, and discover that the culprit was the sheep who escaped from the truck. They decide to clean him up in Wallace's wash-o-matic, but due to a malfunction, the sheep gets sucked into another invention, Wallace's knit-o-matic, which shears him completely. Wallace and Gromit decide to adopt the sheep, and name him "Shaun", after his mishap.

Jealous of Gromit, Preston frames him for the thefts and has him sent to jail for life, but Wallace, Shaun and the sheep (who have been living with Wallace since Gromit's arrest) all stand on each others shoulders (with Wallace at the bottom) and cut through the bars of Gromit's cell with an electric buzz saw. Accidentally, Wallace slips on a bar of soap and almost kills himself with sheep flattening him. Wendolene becomes upset and orders Preston to stop the sheep thefts. Instead, he locks her up with the intention of turning her (and the sheep) into dog meat.

Wallace and Gromit give chase on their motorbike and sidecar, but they soon end up separated; Gromit flies off a 2000 foot drop, but activates the sidecar's plane mode, and attacks Preston's lorry with Wallace's porridge machine. Wallace meanwhile attempts to free Wendoline and the sheep from the lorry, but ends up trapped there himself. The lorry goes into a large underground hideout, where Preston has built an exact copy of the knit-o-matic and wash-o-matic. He attempts to feed his captives into it.

With a little help from Shaun, Gromit locates the hideout and attacks Preston head on, firing at him with the porridge gun and flying into him. Shaun then pulls the nozzle to the knit-o-matic over Preston, sucking him into it. Midway through the process however, dents appear on the machine, which stops working. Wendoline then reveals that Preston is a robot dog built by her father.

In the end, Gromit and Shaun knock Preston into the dog food processor, which breaks him up into little pieces which are then packaged into cans. At the end of the film, Wendolene reveals that Preston was rebuilt with completely normal dog behavior. She visits Wallace; however, he learns to his dismay that she can't stand cheese, as it causes her to break out in a rash. A distraught Wallace decides to console himself with some cheese, only to find Shaun eating it.

As before, the 30 minutes are packed with sight gags and exaggerated physical comedy, as well as a few subtle film parodies. Voice acting was before the sole duty of Peter Sallis (the voice of Wallace), as Gromit is always silent. In 'A Close Shave', Wendolene was introduced as the second speaking character for the series, voiced by Anne Reid.

Continuity with other Wallace and Gromit Adventures

• In Gromit's jail scene, the writing 'FEATHERS WUZ ERE' is a reference to the penguin lodger Wallace took in during the previous film The Wrong Trousers, Feathers McGraw. Feathers tried to steal an expensive diamond but was foiled by Wallace and Gromit and jailed (although he was actually jailed in a zoo, and Gromit is shown as being in an actual jail). However, as Feathers McGraw is a known criminal, seen on wanted-posters even before he tries to steal the diamond, it can be assumed that he has been in an ordinary prison earlier in his career and possibly in Gromit's cell.
• The motorbike and sidecar used by Wallace and Gromit in this outing is present in the background during their later adventure A Matter of Loaf and Death.
• Wallace's cleaning overalls are the same ones he wore in A Grand Day Out when painting the rocket.

Facts and Figures

In-jokes and references

Here are a few subtle jokes from the film.

• When Wallace receives a call for window-cleaning service, his method of getting to his motorbike and out onto the road is a direct homage to the Thunderbirds TV series (specifically, the way Virgil Tracy gets to Thunderbird 2 and into the air). Pastiche music in the style of Barry Gray's Thunderbird's music support this spoof.
• Beside Wendolene's Wools is a store entitled "Bob the Baker" in reference to Bob Baker, the co- writer of A Close Shave.
• The name of the heroine, Wendolene, is a pun on "Windolene" - a proprietary window-cleaning solution.
• The name of Wendolene's scheming pet with a dark secret, Preston, is the name of Nick Park's home town in Lancashire.
• Shaun the Sheep's name is a pun, alluding to the way the sheep is left 'shorn' after falling foul of Wallace's latest invention.
• There is a sign next to the balls of wool that Wallace collapses that reads "Wool rations: Two balls per person."
• Graffiti on Gromit's prison table has many references to prison escapes, including The Great Escape (with an accompanying drawing) as well as Papillon. The table and graffiti are visible for less than one second before they are obscured by Gromit placing the present on the table.
• Also in the jail scene, Gromit is reading a book called 'Crime And Punishment' by 'Fido Dogstoyevsky'. Crime and Punishment is a classic novel written by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, so the author name on Gromit's book is a double-pun on the original author's name. The spine of the book also has a penguin on it that looks like Feathers McGraw, with the words "A Penguin Classic", another double-pun, which also derives from the name of the book publisher Penguin Books.
• The penguin, Feathers McGraw, actually makes a reappearance in one of the scenes when Gromit is separated by Wallace during the truck chase. In the shot when Gromit is about to be hit by the sign that informs him of the drop, Feathers can be seen for a split second to the bottom right in the beginning of the shot. However, it is difficult to tell whether it is actually him, or just a rock that looks like him.
• When Gromit plummets down a precipice, the side-car he is travelling in turns into an aeroplane at the touch of a button. Gromit first avoids certain death, then uses the plane to attack Preston's truck. The side-car aeroplane is reminiscent of the gadgetry used by James Bond in his various films. Coincidentally the death-defying escape down the precipice is mirrored in the opening scene of GoldenEye which opened in cinemas one month before A Close Shave was first shown. However, considering the length of time needed to produce each Wallace and Gromit film, the scene was most probably storyboarded and shot months or even years in advance and it seems unlikely that the scene could have been influenced by Goldeneye. Its more immediate influence (supported by the music, the bombardment of Preston's van and Wallace's RAF salute) is Second World War air-battle movies such as Battle of Britain and 633 Squadron.
• Gromit, while flying the sidecar, mimics Snoopy flying atop his doghouse in Peanuts.
• The sheep's arrangement on top of Wallace's motorcycle during their escape in the chase scene parodies that of motorcycle display teams.
• There are a number of instances in the film which are obvious parallels to the films The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

• As the truck catches up to Wallace's motorbike, Wallace exclaims "We're going at maximum speed". A scene in the second Terminator film has Arnold Schwarzenegger stating that their vehicle "has reached its maximum speed" as a truck is bearing down on them from behind.
• Preston is described as a "Cyber-dog", and emerges as a robot from Wallace's "knit-o-matic" with fur and skin removed. This is a parallel with Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator from both films, whose flesh is removed to show its robotic structure.
• Preston punches through a door and opens the handle from the other side much as the Terminator does in the first film, in the same exposed robotic state.
• As Gromit pounds Preston with his Porridge-gun, he drives Preston further back to the edge of a precipice, where he could be sucked into the Knit-o-matic. At just the last moment, Preston avoids this fate. In the second Terminator film, Linda Hamilton's character pounds the T-1000 (played by Robert Patrick), with shotgun rounds, forcing it to the edge of a precipice. Hamilton's character then runs out of shells, allowing the T-1000 to avoid destruction at the last moment.

• The screenplay for A Close Shave was co-written by Nick Park and Bob Baker. In addition to Preston the cyber-dog, Baker also co-created another mechanical dog, K-9 from Doctor Who.
• In another Aardman Animation production, Rex the Runt, Wallace is seen as a window cleaner, as he is in this film. In Rex the Runt, Bad Bob pushes Wallace and his ladder away from the window, making him fall.

Deleted scenes

Because of the time-consuming nature of production, the running length had to be worked out by estimating each storyboarded shot's rough time, to avoid wasting days or weeks filming too much footage for the 30 minutes. The original storyboard was estimated to take up as long as 42 minutes of film, so an entire section at 'Ramsbottom Manor', featuring homages to the horror genre, and Walt Disney's Bambi, was cut out of the story and never shot. However this was a motif that would seem to have later found a place in Curse of the Were-Rabbit.^{[citation needed]}

Eventually, about 5 minutes of actual shot footage had to be cut out of the film to trim it to the usual 30 minutes. The cut footage included some shots with Wallace and Wendolene in the wool shop recalling the Noel Coward film Brief Encounter.^{[citation needed]}

Episode Endings

The film was first transmissioned on BBC 1 on 24th December 1995. It was repeated on BBC 2 in April 1996 in episode format during the Easter holidays.

Episode One Gromit sees Shaun in the back of Preston's truck and unties him. Suddenly, the door slams shut in front of Gromit. Shaun watches helplessy as the truck drives away with Gromit inside it...

Episode Two Gromit is following Wallace and the sheep in his plane. Wallace waves to him and smiles. But the smile vanishes from his face when he sees the motorbike is heading for a low narrow bridge...

Episode Three Life is back to normal in Wallace and Gromit's house. Wallace takes the lid off the cheese jar, revealing Shaun underneath. He tells Shaun to go away, but Shaun ignores him. He then turns and bleats at the camera.

Sequels

After A Close Shave, Wallace And Gromit's next major outing was in a set of 10 2½-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 true sequel to A Close Shave is the feature film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. In 2007, a Shaun the Sheep spin-off series was also released. The next major short would be A Matter of Loaf and Death however, first broadcast in Britain on Christmas Day 2008.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Wallace and Gromit

• A Close Shave at the Internet Movie Database