“Wallace & Gromit Shorts”
Museum of the Moving Image
December 26-31

“Wallace & Gromit Shorts,” a six-day series of three films presented by the Museum of the Moving Image at Astoria in Queens, was, I’m guessing, scheduled for that kids-out-of-school dead-zone beginning after Christmas Day running until the new year. Parents will need something to do with their charges. Still, it’s likely that a lot of those attending the museum’s Redstone Theater will have long since shed their knickers and received their diplomas. The adventures of Wallace and Gromit are, if you will, adult entertainment of a smashing sort.

That is, providing those adults have a taste for the wry, the absurd, and the intensively clever. If eccentricity is one the hallmarks of our friends across the pond, then the adventures of a stalwart cheese-loving inventor and his bemused-bordering-on-fatalistic dog are as indelibly British as George Sitwell, Morrissey, and Spotted Dick. Actually, Wallace and Gromit have proved a more exportable commodity than the aforementioned due, in large part, to their malleability. Never underestimate the appeal of the tactile.

Aardman Studios, a company established a good 50 years ago at Bristol, England, has made a specialty of claymation — that is to say, the painstaking process of animating films using clay models. Co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton began by providing animations (one can’t quite call them “cartoons”) for children’s television programs, music videos, and advertisements. One of their commercials for Lurpak Danish Butter featured an ersatz ’50s greaser, backed by singing curls of butter, riding his motorcycle across the kitchen table and spreading his largesse over a myriad of foodstuffs in desperate need of buttering. Drollery was an Aardman standard from the get-go.

“Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” the sequel to Aardman’s hugely successful “Chicken Run” (2000), recently had its premiere on Netflix, and the yet-to-be-titled Wallace and Gromit feature will be released sometime in the coming year, being the follow-up to 2005’s “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” All of these pictures turned a tidy profit, and “Were-Rabbit” won Best Animated Feature at the 78th Academy Awards. Yet it is the first three Wallace and Gromit shorts — “A Grand Day Out” (1989), “The Wrong Trousers” (1993), and “A Close Shave” (1995) — that Aardman fans continue to hold dear to their hearts. Sometimes love does happen at first sight.

Wallace and Gromit were created by Nick Park, an animator and director who had a significant hand in crafting the first season of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” and was responsible for the plucked, butchered, and ready-to-cook chickens doing the shimmy in the music video accompanying Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” (1986). Mr. Park won his first Oscar for “Creature Comforts” (1989), a hilarious short film in which the voices of everyday Britons talking about their homes were placed in the muzzles, beaks, and maws of sundry zoo animals. All the while, “A Grand Day Out’ was in post-production.

The opening moments — indeed, the title credits — set the tone. The introductory music tootles along to a jaunty marching song. A folded canvas deck chair rests against a wall covered with a vintage floral wallpaper, the kind of thing you’re likely to find in your grandmother’s home. Time has come and gone: The seams of the wallpaper are peeling and the camera seen hanging from a hook is beyond retro. The lone painting on the wall isn’t dedicated to a relative or a landscape, but, rather, a wedge of cheese. Swiss, in case you were wondering.

When we finally see our heroes, they are ensconced in the quaint environs of a council tenancy flat. Wallace, he of the jug ears and befuddled demeanor, is spinning a globe while leafing through an abundance of travel guides. Gromit, a beagle sitting in an easy chair directly next to his owner, is reading a hefty tome of one sort or another. 

Whilst preparing for high tea, Wallace discovers that there’s not an ounce of cheese to be had in the flat. Whereupon he does what any dairy fancier on the isle might be inclined to do: stride directly into his basement workshop and build a rocket in order to travel to the moon. It’s made of cheese, after all.

And that’s only the beginning of their misadventures. Along the way, our heroes meet an alien that is part vending machine and part oven, a criminal mastermind who happens to be a penguin, robotic pants that go awry, and the inimitable Wendolene Ramsbottom, a woman who would be his true love were it not for the cheese allergy. 

Each of the films runs about 30 minutes and is packed with abundant whimsies, quirky asides, genuinely thrilling denouements, and laconic vocal work, particularly by the late Peter Sallis, who provided the voice of Wallace. Oh, and that moon cheese? After contemplating that it might be Wensleydale, Wallace avers that “it’s like no cheese I’ve ever tasted.” Big dreams die hard, but Wallace and Gromit, typically through the latter’s ministrations, always find their way home.