Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions (2002)

Cracking Contraptions is a colourful collection of animated shorts from the award winning Aardman Animations featuring their most successful creations: Wallace, the enthusiastic inventor, and Gromit, his long-suffering pet pooch.

The shorts are best described as slices of life. Each adventure features one of Wallace's crazy labour-saving inventions that go awry. Gromit knows that if he's to ever have the quiet life he craves he'll need to prevent disaster and then clean up the mess. The idiom 'a dog's life' applies to Gromit in more ways than one.

The episodes were created to slot into the BBC's 2002 Christmas TV schedule, between the soap misery and the festive crap, meaning episode length is much too short for any extensive character development to happen. They rely instead on your knowledge of the claymation duo from the previous W+G releases. If you haven't watched those yet, I recommend you do because they're fantastic.

The collection was released as a limited edition R2 dvd that's now hard to find, but Aardman have since posted them all on their YouTube channel (HERE).

10 episodes, approx 3 minutes each.

3 developments out of 5