Wallace & Gromit are perhaps one of the most iconic animated duos of all time. This series of four short animated Science Fiction comedy films and two full-length movies — all done using old-fashioned stop-motion animation — is about a kind-hearted but clueless Yorkshire-accented inventor, and his mute, long-suffering sapient dog who nonetheless has Undying Loyalty to his owner.

Created by Nick Park for Aardman Animations, the series has won fans and accolades on both sides of the Atlantic, including numerous Oscars, and is championed for its quirky humour, shout-outs to cinema, and for being a rare example of British suburban life visible in media exported to America.

Although the films are the heart of the franchise, it also includes video games, television series, comics, and books.

Films:

• A Grand Day Out (short – 1989). Wherein Wallace and Gromit realise that they're out of cheese and the shops are closed. The solution? Build a rocket in the basement and take a trip to the moon... which, as everyone knows, is made of cheese. While there, they have an encounter with a coin-operated robot who dreams of going skiing.
• The Wrong Trousers (short – 1993). Wherein Wallace takes in a boarder, a silently menacing penguin named Feathers McGraw, who has sinister plans for both his landlord and Gromit's new birthday present: a pair of "techno-trousers" for automatic walkies. Chaos, naturally, ensues. ("It's the wrong trousers, Gromit, and they've gone wrong!")
• A Close Shave (short – 1995). Wherein Wallace's crush Wendolene turns out to have ties to the local wool shortage, leading to Gromit being imprisoned for sheep-rustling, forcing Wallace to stage a daring jailbreak with the help of a woolly jumper-wearing lamb named Shaun. The three must face the real Big Bad in a final showdown for all the yarn. Shaun later got his own Spin-Off called Shaun the Sheep (which has since spawned two movies).
• The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (feature-length – 2005). Wherein the combination of a vegetable-growing contest and Wallace's latest invention accidentally unleashes a giant rampaging parody of ancient Hammer Horror cliches on their unsuspecting village... oh, also a giant half-man, half-bunny. This received a Licensed Game adaptation and is noted as being one of the very few horror films in existence to feature a vegetarian monster.
• A Matter of Loaf and Death (short – 2008). Wherein the two run a bakery. While Wallace falls in love with a former bread mascot, Gromit attempts to solve the murders of several bakers... no prizes for guessing whether the two are related. Aired on Christmas Day 2008, it was the top-rated programme of the day (ahead of Doctor Who's "The Next Doctor"). Wait, no, scratch that. With 16.15 million viewers, it was the most viewed programme of the year.
• Vengeance Most Fowl (feature-length – 2024). Wherein Wallace invents a "Smart" Gnome that seemingly takes on an evil mind of its own and goes rogue. However, Gromit soon learns that things are not as they seem and that the gnome's actions may be connected to a returning Feathers McGraw, who is out for revenge against the duo after the events of The Wrong Trousers. In the United Kingdom, the film aired on Christmas Day on the BBC, before landing on Netflix for international viewers on the 3rd of January, 2025.

Series

• Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions (2002). A series of ten 2-3 minute shorts showcasing Wallace's latest wacky inventions.
• Wallace & Gromit's World of Inventions: In 2010, BBC One commissioned an educational program about famous or revolutionary inventions, hosted by the duo. It began airing in November of that year with the episode Nature Knows Best.
• Shaun the Sheep: A Spin-Off series about Shaun from A Close Shave.
  • Timmy Time: A preschool spin-off of Shaun the Sheep featuring Timmy the lamb from that series.

Video Games

• Wallace & Gromit Fun Pack (1996): A media collection including mini-games.
  • Wallace & Gromit Fun Pack 2 (2000)
• Wallace & Gromit Cracking Animator (1997): An animation studio for PC.
• Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo (2003): A platformer released by Frontier Developments which saw the return of Feathers McGraw as the villain in an original storyline.
• Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005): A platformer based on the movie of the same name.
• Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures (2009): A series of four episodic adventure games released by Telltale Games for the PC and Xbox Live Arcade. The games are notable for successfully replicating the look and feel of the shorts, to the point of having fingerprints and other clay modeling details visible on the characters.
• Wallace & Gromit: The Big Fix Up (2021): An augmented reality game for mobile devices developed by Fictioneers.
• Wallace & Gromit: The Grand Getaway (2023): A VR game.
• Walkabout Mini Golf (2024): Another VR game, with a Wallace & Gromit DLC showcasing a miniature golf course built inside W&G's house.
• PowerWash Simulator (2025): A "Wallace & Gromit" DLC was added on March 4 offering five settings associated with the duo to be cleaned up.

Live Stage

• Wallace and Gromit Alive on Stage in: A Grand Night Out (1997): A stage show inspired by the original three shorts. Interacting with the audience, Wallace, accompanied by Gromit and Shaun, reveals his newest invention, the Pantheatricon, a fully automated theatre. However, his plans for a big act are sabotaged by Feathers Mc Graw, who has hypnotised Wendolene Ramsbottom to bump off the duo as payback.
• Wallace & Gromit's Musical Marvels (2012): A special performance for the 2012 season of BBC Proms. In a Fantasia-esque novelty show, a composer would collaborate with animated footage of the duo in organising a orchestral performance. Originally a live act, it was later remade in radio and TV format, the latter of which is the one traditionally reaired. The live stage version, redubbed Wallace and Gromit: In Concert has had several retours, with later performances adding Shaun the Sheep to the show.

As well as several runs of comic books, newspaper strips, graphic novels and audio books, both adapting the films and using original storylines.

Cracking tropes, Gromit!

• Alternate Continuity: Released in the long hiatus between A Close Shave and Curse of the Were-Rabbit, The Cheese-Lover's Yearbook was a joint diary shared by Wallace and Gromit, starting from before the events of A Grand Day Out and continuing well after the end of A Close Shave. Much of the content contained in it has been rendered Canon Discontinuity by successive stories, most notably Wallace's continuing friendship with (and infatuation for) Wendolene, despite her cheese allergy, and Shaun the Sheep remaining with the duo as a Power Trio. It also recontextualises certain points of the original shorts, such as The Wrong Trousers taking place before A Grand Day Out.
• Ambiguous Time Period: The exact time in which the shorts take place has never been specified, with modern living conditions and fashion at a roughly 1950s level, but with technology that is occasionally far more advanced, albeit in a distinctly old-school, almost Diesel Punk style. In one particularly amusing instance, Wallace, a brilliant inventor who can build a fully functional rocket in his garage almost single-handedly, is shown using an abacus to check his math in addition to a calculator. One could pass this up to Wallace simply being a cracking good inventor, if it weren't for the occasional appearance of other advanced technology like the Cooker in A Grand Day Out^note who admittedly looks more like a 1940s oven than a sentient robot, the Laser Hallway in The Wrong Trousers, the factory equipment and Preston in A Close Shave and a 1970s-style computer in Vengeance Most Fowl. The absence of any other onscreen humans until A Close Shave and the World Limited to the Plot does little to clarify matters much.
• Anachronism Stew: Wallace and Gromit seems to be set in a Beanotown-type timewarp where technology and fashion remains much as it did in the 1950s, yet more modern inventions such as laser-security systems, 1970s-style computers, and remote controls are also casually present. Wallace mentions that the titular Wrong Trousers are "ex-NASA" technology, which seems to confirm that the setting is at least the 1960s onwards, and the relatively rustic, old-fashioned nature of much of the setting seems congruent with a '60s British setting, but much of the other technology that we see (not just from Wallace) is far more advanced than the '60s would allow. Furthermore, the announcement for the 2024 film describes a "Smart Gnome" as the main villain, playing on the rise of smart devices in The New '10s. A number of pop-culture references from later decades have also been made in the films. Of course, this being Wallace & Gromit, you can chalk it all up to Rule of Funny.
• Animation Bump: A Grand Day Out, was made entirely by Nick Park himself, with Aardman only helping him when he finished ten minutes of the film. By the time The Wrong Trousers was released (the first short where a lot of Aardman work was involved), the animation and models were more refined and more or less closely resembled the later films.
• Art Evolution: The models in A Grand Day Out were very different in design to the models we know now — just look at Wallace in particular. He gained his iconic wide grin in The Wrong Trousers, along with a bouncier lip-sync in Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: "von Strudel" is not a real German name (although it is the name of a German restaurant in Spain). Bert Maudsley chose it just to seem enigmatic.
• Author Appeal: Nick Park seems to have thing for Hitchcock-esque thrillers, giant machines and... knitting.^note The knitting is all real. It's done with toothpicks.
• Bittersweet Ending: The first and third shorts have these, although they're both very lighthearted.
  • In a A Grand Day Out, the poor robot who just wanted to go skiing gets left behind on the moon...with two parts of the ship, that it can refashion into skis, and realizes the moon is a pretty awesome place to go skiing.
  • In A Close Shave, Wendolene and the sheep are saved and Preston is stopped, but rebuilt as a much nicer dog. However, Wallace and Wendolene don't end up together, because — horror of horrors — she's allergic to cheese.
• Bland-Name Product: Everything from Smug Fridges and Duck Matches to Sud-U-Like Soap and ''Ay-Up!'' Magazine.
• Blatant Lies: One of Wallace's catchphrases is "Everything's under control." It never is.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Wallace's love interests are Piella (blonde), Wendolene (brunette), and Lady Tottington (redhead).
• Bookcase Passage: Wallace finds one in "The Curse of the Ramsbottoms" comic. It leads to Rhett Leicester's evil lair.
• Breakout Villain: Of all the villains throughout the series, Feathers McGraw remained the most iconic, returning in multiple spin off media, as well as the only one to reprise Big Bad role in another film proper.
• British Brevity: Americans who are aware of the franchise might be surprised to know that in over 30 years, there have been only six (main) instalments, and only two of those six are feature-length. However, this is less to do with it being British and more to do with the agonisingly slow process of stop-motion animation. It also has to do with Peter Sallis' declining health and decision to retire from acting in the early 2010s. Of course, there are two Spin-Off TV series, Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions and Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention. However, Cracking Contraptions consists of only 10 shorts and World of Invention only has six episodes, falling into this trope again.
• British Stuffiness: A major component of the humor is Wallace (and the other human characters when they appear) maintaining their politeness and properness through the utter lunacy of their misadventures.
• Bungling Inventor: Wallace, natch.
  • In one of the comics, we encounter another three named Derek, Derrick and Eric. They invent a wind-up mobile phone, an automatic winder that you have to wind up, and a key to wind up the automatic winder. Mind you, in another one of the comics Wallace invents an indestructible shoe that eventually nearly destroys the Earth because he couldn't find his slippers.
  • The "Cheese Lover's Yearbook" features, as well as the creations of the original shorts: the Recyc-O-Matic, which worked fine until he gave it arms and it ran amok in the town centre eating everything in its path; the Automatic Dairy Maker, which was scrapped after it turned out the "Creamy Wallaby" cheese it produced caused some people to come out in a grassy rash; and the Push-Button Gardener, which raked up all the leaves and dumped them on the living room carpet.
• Butt-Monkey: Poor Gromit falls into this all too often... (usually thanks to Wallace's stupidity). Though to balance it out Wallace himself often gets it pretty bad too.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "CheeeeEEEEeeeeeeeese!" (with Wallace's trademark excited hands).
  • Also, once things inevitably fall apart, Wallace's "GROMIT! HELP! DO SOMETHING!," or the less emphatic "Gromit! Do something, lad!" There's no ceiling on how many times Wallace will say this in a single episode.
  • And "Don't worry! Everything's under control!" Often said when nothing is under control.
• Chekhov's Gun: In any of the times we see one of the many To the Batpole! segments in the opening, it will usually play a crucial role in the climax.
• Civilized Animal: Gromit is usually depicted as walking upright, and is capable of creating and operating complex machinery. Generally he's shown to be significantly more shrewd and sensible than his master. However, despite all of this, everyone treats him the same as you treat any dog. He has both a room in the house and a kennel in the yard, and walks on two or four legs as the plot requires. He's also been shown to eat from a dog dish or at a human table on different occasions. The Aardman book Creating 3-D Animation reveals that Gromit actually has two different armatures to make this work — one for when he's walking on fours, and another for when he's bipedal.
• Cloud Cuckoo Land: As more characters have been introduced over the years it's become more apparent that pretty much everyone in Wallace and Gromit's neighbourhood are every bit as eccentric and as monomaniacal as our inventive cheese-loving protagonists.
• Comic Trio: In the instances Wallace and Gromit are paired with a third wheel, they often form this. Wallace is the oblivious Leader, Gromit is the silent and frustrated Only Sane Man, while Shaun, Hutch, and Norbot in their respective films are largely The Fool in their own world.
• Company Cross-References: The original BBC broadcast of Vengeance Most Fowl ended with what appeared to be The Stinger, but turned out to be a trailer for The Traitors (UK) with Feathers McGraw as the traitor.
• Complexity Addiction: Many of Wallace's inventions fall into this category, often to an absurd degree. For example, his "Telly-scope" invention involves launching a tennis ball through a complicated Rube Goldberg-type mechanism which ultimately physically moves the telly closer so that Wallace can press the power button, as opposed to, say, simply launching the tennis ball at the power button or just using the remote that came with the telly. Naturally, this tendency for complication often results in spectacular and hilarious failures.
• Continuity Nod: Frequent and gleeful, starting with a running gag in which the headlines on the paper Wallace is reading or a news bulletin on TV in a short reference events of an earlier short.
• Darker and Edgier: A Matter of Loaf and Death is to date the only instalment to have an honest-to-goodness murderer as a villain, and an actual death at the story's conclusion. It also features some edgier jokes than has been typical for its predecessors.
• Deadpan Snarker: While Gromit is usually a Silent Snarker, the duo's mutual diary — published as the Cheese Lover's Yearbook — has little typewritten notes expressing Gromit's reaction to whatever is happening. After the entries for "A Close Shave":
  Wallace: Relieved to have come out of this in one piece.
  Gromit: Instead of several hundred, like Preston.
• "Die Hard" on an X: The plot of the comic "Anoraknophobia" turns into this, even including the "barefoot with broken glass" scene.
• Diesel Punk: Arguably. Many of Wallace's inventions — a homemade rocket, a Powered Armor exoskeleton (okay, just the legs, but still), and a motorcycle sidecar that transforms into a jet — are way more advanced than much real-world technology, but with a charmingly retro old-school aesthetic to them.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Preston for Gromit in A Close Shave. They're both silent, but Gromit is a loyal if cynical follower while Preston is menacing and the Big Bad.
  • Phillip in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is also this for Gromit; he's fiercely loyal to his master, plays second banana to him, and has a few human traits on par with those of Gromit.
  • In the comics, Herr Doktor Count Baron Napoleon von Strudel for Wallace — both are inventors, and they even look fairly similar, and, back when he answered to Bert Maudsley, "Herr Doktor" went to school with Wallace.
• Evil Twin: In "The Curse of the Ramsbottoms" comic, Rhett Leicester is revealed to secretly be the evil twin of the missing "Cheesy" Cheeseman, the main man in Wensleydale manufacture.
• Family-Friendly Firearms: Averted — Both The Wrong Trousers and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit have the protagonists being shot at with realistic (if somewhat vintage) guns.
• Flintstone Theming:
  • The canine-themed titles of the books Gromit reads are a series-long running gag. For instance, in a 2013 ad spot promoting UK tourism, his holiday reading is Fifty Shades of Greyhound.
  • Wallace tends to read cheese-themed books such as East of Edam and Waiting for Gouda.
• Food Porn: Subtly done, but if you don't leave the four shorts and the movie hungering for some of Wensleydale's finest cheese, you haven't been watching very closely.
• Foot Bath Treatment: In one episode, Wallace soaks his feet after being made into a snowman, although he's just cold, not sick.
• Franchise Codifier: The first film, A Grand Day Out, while having a lot of core elements laid out, was far more surreal and laid back. The second film The Wrong Trousers established a lot of elements to the series that would be a consistent ongoing, including darker more Hitchcockian cinematography, Wallace and Gromit's character dynamics, and the recurrent premise of dastardly villains trying to exploit Wallace's inventions for their own gain. A Close Shave developed on these elements a bit more as well as establishing the tighter, more madcap pacing and a greater array of character archetypes that the later installments would recurrently play off of, such as Wallace gaining a love interest, or the duo allying with a small sidekick.
• Fun with Acronyms: The comic "Anoraknophobia" has SPARROW — an operation to Steal, Pilfer And Recklessly Requisition Other People's Work. Wallace gets somewhat sidetracked by there being only one P in "Sparrow".
• Gadgeteer's House: Wallace and Gromit's house has all sorts of inventions built in. Examples include a hinged bed arranged next to a trap door so that Wallace can go straight from bed to the breakfast table, and a toy train that carries mail and other goods around the house.
• Genius Ditz: Wallace's inventions range from malfunctioning Rube Goldberg-esque devices to clever and groundbreaking gadgets — which also have a tendency to malfunction. Notably, he seems more competent in his element in the feature films than in most of the shorts (though still characteristically clueless otherwise).
• Gone Horribly Right: About 1/3 of Wallace's inventions. (e.g. the time Wallace wanted to pump up some honeybees with Muscle-Gro to make them super-efficient honey-producers, and wound up making giant bees that rampaged all over town), or the Recyc-o-Matic (which rampages down the main street recycling everything in its path in "Cheese Lover's Yearbook").
• Gone Horribly Wrong: About 1/3 of Wallace's inventions, due to accidents (e.g. The Rabbit Rehabilitator), or misuse (e.g. the Techno-Trousers).
• Hammerspace: Used by the animal characters. They have been known to produce coins, penknives and, in the case of Feathers McGraw, a gun, despite having no pockets.
• Herr Doktor: Part of Napoleon von Strudel's list of titles in "Anoraknophobia" is "Herr Doktor" — it comes first, before Baron and Count. Given that he's really named Bert Maudsley and he went to school with Wallace, it's unlikely to be legit.
• Historical In-Joke: One comic has Wallace building a time machine to find his missing slipper, leading to him getting involved in all kinds of variably intelligent encounters in time — most notably when he inspires a Paleolithic Wallace to build Stonehenge... as a stage on which to show off his rollerblading.
• Homemade Inventions: The series trademark, and the propellant for most of the plots. Cracking Contraptions is exclusively about these.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Gromit ususally ends up being the one to save Wallace's bum when his plans or inventions go drastically awry.
• Hypno Fool: Queenie in the "Anoraknophobia" comic is a hypnotist by trade, at one point mesmerising Wallace into thinking he's a dog.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Given most installments don't have recurrent characters, and usually have a Minimalist Cast to begin with, it says something when a character besides the main duo makes a mark:
  • Feathers Mc Graw appeared as the antagonist for the second film, The Wrong Trousers. His ironic but genuinely sinister and devious presence made him a truly memorable villain, even as later works tried to bring in new bad guys that exceeded his menace. He recurrently returned in several spin-off works before finally reappearing in another film Vengeance Most Fowl, making him the franchise's Breakout Villain.
  • Shaun the Sheep appeared as a sidekick for Wallace and Gromit in the third film, A Close Shave. The character's endearing design and Plucky Comic Relief personality made him a huge hit in marketing, appearing in tons of merchandise and promotional vignettes for the series. Unlike Feathers, Shaun didn't return in later films, instead getting his own spin-off series. Shaun the Sheep is now such a Long Runner that it has formed its own films and specials, with Shaun contending with Wallace and Gromit as Aardman's most iconic star.
• Identical Grandson: In one of the comics, he encounters Stone Age and 11th century versions of himself.
• Impact Silhouette: Gromit in one of the Crackling Contraptions shorts.
• Informed Location: The name of the town is never given, though freeze-framing reveals Wallace's post is addressed to Wigan. A poster in Loaf And Death also shows a performance of Carmen taking place at the "Wigan Palais", and Wallace's house facing the Yorkshire border to the north. And the van in Were-Rabbit has a Wigan A-Z.
• Informed Poverty: Wallace is ostensibly on the edge most of the time — the entire plot of the "Anoraknophobia" comic came about in an effort to win enough to replace a busted washing machine, and his statement of finances in "Cheese Lover's Yearbook" is simply annotated "Oh dear" by Gromit. This does nothing to prevent him from buying the parts to all those new machines. This gets Lampshaded in Vengeance Most Fowl, when Wallace (having arrived at the breakfast table via the most elaborate morning routine machine yet) sees Gromit going through a stack of final demands, and blithely comments that inventing can get a bit expensive.
• Intellectual Animal: Gromit, though he makes barely audible whining sounds at points.
• The Jeeves: Gromit acts as Wallace's valet, ready to do his master's bidding at the touch of a button: "Slippers, Breakfast, Newspaper, Walkies." Like every good Jeeves, though, his real job is to keep his Cloud Cuckoolander boss out of harm's way.
  • Also Jeeves-like are his highly expressive eyebrows.
• Jump Scare: While not in the series proper, the Thrill-O-Matic dark ride at Blackpool Pleasure Beach seems to end with a cheerful video clip of a smiling Wallace and Gromit... only for the Were-Rabbit to roar at the riders menacingly.
• Mad Scientist: Wallace's inventions range from malfunctioning Rube Goldberg-esque devices to clever and groundbreaking gadgets — which also have a tendency to malfunction. Notably, he seems more competent in the feature film than in most of the shorts.
• Meaningful Name: Wallace can be diminutised as "Wally", a slang term for a naïve or foolish person. A grommet is a rubber ring used to seal the edge of a hole, to stop it chafing the insulation of wires passed through the hole, mirroring Gromit's commonplace responsibility of decoding the plot to preserve Wallace from death or undesirable fates.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: One of the first stories in the comic books has Wallace invent indestructible clogs that end up putting the planet on the edge of destruction, requiring him to go back to the various time periods he's left them in and round them up, marking possibly the first time that Wallace's inventions were a threat to the planet, rather than just Wallace and everyone near him.
• Minimalist Cast:
  • In the half hour shorts, only characters relevant to the plot make an appearance. This meant that A Grand Day Out and Wrong Trousers had a cast of only three, of which only one (Wallace) has a speaking part. Wendolene was the first (and until Were-Rabbit, the only) human to appear other than Wallace.
  • Even the cast of Were-Rabbit is very limited by the standards of a feature-length film (though significantly larger than any of the shorts). Outside of the major players: Wallace, Gromit, Lady Tottington, Victor, Phillip, and Hutch; the supporting cast consists of a handful of neighbours, the local minister, and a police officer.
  • The comics get a little more elaborate, because they don't need to build models or find voice actors. "The Curse of the Ramsbottoms" has Wallace, Gromit, and Wendolene, but also Rhett Leicester, "Cheesy" Cheeseman, and the occasional robot, "The Lost Slipper" has various cross-time Wallace-equivalents, King Harold, William the Conqueror, some Egyptian royalty, and a cat, and "Anoraknophobia" has Mr Patel, three even less talented inventors than Wallace, the hotel's overworked owner Mr Do-It-All, and four villainous von Strudels.
• Mini-Mecha: With oven mitts.
• Misapplied Phlebotinum: Wallace, all over. This is especially true in the comics, where he invents a time machine in order to find his lost slipper and a nigh-invulnerable superclog to replace it.
• New Job as the Plot Demands:
  • Wallace has currently worked on-screen as a window cleaner, an exterminator, a baker and a television presenter.
  • In the Grand Adventures games, a bee-keeper, runner of an indoor holiday resort, ice-cream vendor and detective. Grand Adventures also provides a possible explanation (and a Continuity Nod to their debts in The Wrong Trousers): Wallace's mail in the first episode is full of bills that are in "final demand", so it's possible that Wallace keeps changing jobs because his business ventures keep failing.
• Newspaper-Thin Disguise: Several of them.
• Nice Guy: Wallace and Gromit are two of the most lovable characters in Britain.
  • Wallace is a good-natured, kind-hearted, and gentle person.
  • Gromit is a Silent Snarker, but he has Undying Loyalty to Wallace and is also a good-hearted and caring soul.
• Not Now, Kiddo: In a 2013 ad spot promoting UK tourism, Gromit's attempts to show Wallace a travel brochure are ignored as Wallace is in the throes of planning an unnecessarily elaborate travel device. After its inevitable dramatic malfunction, Wallace notices the brochure and complains that Gromit should have shown it to him sooner.
• Obsessed with Food: Namely, cheese, at least in Wallace's case.
• Once per Episode: With the exception of A Grand Day Out, all the main Wallace and Gromit animations have the following:
  • Wallace rings down to Gromit for breakfast in most of their outings, each time using the same buzzer mechanism next to his bed.
  • Wallace and Gromit have a new profession, usually tied to Wallace's inventions. (Landlord, Window Cleaners, Pest Control, Bakers and Garden Landscapers.)
  • Wallace has a new invention that factors into the plot, either as the main threat or a major component of the villain's plan.
  • From A Close Shave onwards, the duo gets a new companion that helps save the day. (Shaun the Sheep, Hutch the Rabbit, Fluffles the Poodle and Norbot the Gnome)
  • When complete chaos has ensued, Wallace says some variation on "Everything's under control!" typically in a situation where absolutely nothing is under control.
• Only One Name: Wallace. Even his post is addressed to just "Wallace" although all the other human characters have surnames.
• Oop North:
  • Specifically, Oop in Wigan, Lancashire (Wallace's accent is actually Yorkshire). Kept vague until Loaf and Death, when Gromit tries to dispose of a bomb by throwing it across the Yorkshire border, although this is itself moderate artistic license, given that Wigan is not adjacent to Yorkshire either historically or currently.
  • Multiple characters affectionately address Gromit as "Chuck". In context it's something like "dear" and is a local colloquialism.
• Parody: A major feature of all the films except for the first. Although A Grand Day Out was funny and surreal, it was with the spoofing of old heist movies in The Wrong Trousers that the series found its true direction.
• Punny Name: Everybody bar the two mains, and trying to list them all would take most of the entry as even one-offs get names like this.
• Rail-Car Separation: Spoofed in The Wrong Trousers, with Feathers McGraw separating the engine of a toy train to get away from Gromit. Gromit quickly improvises a new track to catch up.
• Riding into the Sunset:
  • Spoofed in The Wrong Trousers, which ends with the techno-trousers walking off into the sunset.
  • Played straight with A Matter of Loaf and Death, which ends with the duo (and Fluffles) driving off into it.
• Rube Goldberg Device: Wallace's method of invention has been described by Nick Park as the equivalent of cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.
• Serious Business:
  • Wallace's business ventures always take otherwise mundane concepts such as window washing or baking to a ludicrous extreme to accommodate the previously mentioned Rube Goldberg Device methods he feels are necessary to do the job.
  • Ping-pong, in "Anoraknophobia", to the point where the villain has built an exploding ping-pong ball and a racquet that's tuned to the same "evil radio frequency" as the ball...with effects that are never explained, but which he claims make him unbeatable.
• Shout-Out: Most of Aardman's work use this with amazing frequency. The Wrong Trousers contains an extended spoof of heist movies, just as Were-Rabbit parodies a number of horror tropes. Individual shout outs are so numerous as to take up a ridiculous entry length, but viewers paying close attention are well rewarded.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Very much on the idealistic end. The main characters are perfectly kind and lovable, the villains — while frequently legitimately-murderous and malevolent — are always foiled and every short ends on a happy note with everything returning to normal.
• Sliding Scale Of Silliness Vs Seriousness: Pretty far down on the silly end — even the emotional beats of each story tend to be played relatively tongue-in-cheek.
• Silent Partner: Gromit, who is also...
• Silent Snarker: ...and it's quite shocking how expressive he is considering he is always portrayed without a mouth, leaving his eyebrows to convey all of his emotions.
• Skewed Priorities: Wallace tends to be only half-aware of when he is in mortal danger. In the "Anoraknophobia" comic, Wallace gets very badly sidetracked by his discovery that the villains' organisation has a name that doesn't match the acronym.
• Smart Animal, Average Human: Wallace is a Bungling Inventor whose inventions often go awry, and it's up to his dog with common sense, Gromit, to clean up the mess. A poster for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit probably sums it up best; it has Wallace with the caption "master", while Gromit has the caption "mind".
• Something That Begins with "Boring": "Cheese Lover's Yearbook" has them going on a caravan holiday...where it naturally rains pretty much the whole time. Entries included "Played I Spy with Gromit all day"^G"R for rain featured regularly" and "There are 756 flowers on the wallpaper in the caravan".
• Speech-Impaired Animal: Gromit, though he makes barely audible whining sounds at points.
• Spin-Off: Shaun the Sheep got his own TV series and movie.
  • And then Timmy from that series got his own Spin-Off in the form of Timmy Time.
• Station Ident:
  • To mark the showing of Loaf and Death, BBC1 ran a number of specially-filmed 'Wallace and Gromit' idents during Christmas 2008.
  • This was done way back in 1995, with several Christmas-themed idents for BBC2.
  • Also done years earlier where a scene from A Grand Day Out is modified to show the Channel 4 logo drawn by Wallace when he flips over his drawing paper.
  • And again in Christmas 2024, for Vengeance Most Fowl, with scenes of Wallace, Gromit and Norbot putting up their decorations or building snowmen.
• Stop Motion: All animated in Claymation.
• Super Multi-Purpose Room: Basically every room in Wallace's house has built-in intricate mechanisms and contraptions to help him wake up, get dressed, effortlessly get seated for breakfast, get the breakfast prepared, get into the car, and and and ... See To the Batpole!
• Technology Porn: Wallace's inventions — elaborate, ridiculous and oh so fun to watch.
• Too Dumb to Live: Wallace has been close to death far too often, mostly due to his absent-mindedness, and not paying attention to Gromit's warnings.
• To the Batpole!: A Close Shave, the feature film Curse of the Were-Rabbit and A Matter of Loaf and Death all feature our heroes suiting up via a Heath Robinson-esque process, depicted in all its absurd detail. (In A Close Shave, only Wallace goes through the process; Gromit then simply walks through a door from the kitchen, rolling his eyes.) An earlier example is established in The Wrong Trousers: Wallace apparently begins every day with his bed tilting up and dropping him into a trapdoor from his upstairs bedroom to a chair at the dining room table, with mechanical arms providing a costume change. Both of these examples are intended as direct references to Gerry Anderson and Thunderbirds.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Cheese, particularly Wensleydale, is Wallace's favourite, but he's also pretty enthusiastic about toast.^note It was Wallace's love of Wensleydale that actually saved the real-life Wensleydale Creamery in Yorkshire from suspending production of the cheese altogether in the 1990s.. Wallace loves cheese on crackers so much he flew to the moon on a whim to acquire the former. Additionally, children who watch the shorts usually become fond of the snack too.
• Trilogy Creep: It was a trilogy up to A Close Shave for ten years, after which it suddenly wasn't.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: Herr Doktor Count Baron Napoleon von Strudel in "Anoraknophobia". Real name Bert Maudsley.
• Ungrateful Townsfolk: Wallace and Gromit tend to be routinely demonized by their neighbors despite all the good they do for them. Even after being hailed as heroes for getting Feathers McGraw arrested and (seemingly) returning the Blue Diamond, Gromit is then wrongfully charged with the mass murder of sheep in Preston's place and receives life in prison, and Wallace gets it twofold by becoming a pariah for failing to rid the town of the Were-Rabbit and having his Norbots turn on him and rob the town of their belongings, with Inspector Mackintosh in particular wanting to arrest Wallace because he wants a quick arrest before he goes into retirement.
• Verbal Backspace: In "Anoraknophobia", when Mr Patel's favourite pigeon has taken an exploding ping pong ball for a flight:
  Mr Patel: Don't worry about him! He can tell the difference between an exploding ping pong ball and margarine all right!
  [BOOM]
  Mr Patel: Well he can now!
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Outside of the cooker in A Grand Day Out, the villains tend to be intimidating and genuinely evil figures that all end up trying to outright kill the main duo, despite the overall lighthearted and silly feel.
• Vocal Evolution: Ben Whitehead took over as Wallace in many side projects before finally graduating to the film series Vengeance Most Fowl onwards. His voice has become a much better replicant of Peter Sallis compared to how he was in Grand Adventures series.
• The Voiceless: Gromit himself makes a few audible yelps and growls in The Wrong Trousers.
• Wacky Wake Up Gadget: The films feature elaborate devices designed to get Wallace out of bed (usually by upturning said bed and sending Wallace down a chute) and get him ready for the day ahead. As is typical of most of Wallace's handiwork, they often backfire somehow.
• World Limited to the Plot: None of the short films show us any more of the unnamed northern English town where the duo live than is absolutely necessary, and Wendolene was the only character other than Wallace who actually had dialogue up until The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (and the only other human period, unless you count her deceased father in a portrait.)