Genre Family

A Close Shave (1995)

Item: A Close Shave
Rating: 3.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★½ — A Close Shave (1995)

That washing machine escape sequence. If you've seen A Close Shave, you know exactly the moment I mean, and if you haven't, I'm almost envious of the fact that you've got it still ahead of you. It's the kind of gag that earns a proper laugh out loud, the sort where you find yourself rewinding just to clock how neatly it was set up. Aardman at their most effortlessly charming, and that's saying something given how high that bar already sits.

Thirty minutes. That's all Nick Park and his team take to deliver more wit, warmth, and visual invention than most feature films can scrape together in two hours. Wallace, ever the hapless romantic, falls for the lovely Wendolene, a wool-shop owner with sad eyes and a secret. Meanwhile Gromit, silent and soulful and endlessly resourceful, sniffs out a woolly conspiracy involving sheep-napping and a sinister robotic dog named Preston. It sounds daft summarised like that, and it absolutely is, but it's also surprisingly tense in places and genuinely touching in others. The fact that it manages both without feeling disjointed is the real trick.

What gets me every time is the tactile quality of the animation. Every knit jumper, every tuft of sheep's wool, every expressive twitch of Gromit's brow feels lovingly handcrafted. You're aware, watching it, that real human hands shaped every frame. There's a warmth baked into the very texture of the thing that CGI, for all its polish, still struggles to replicate. The pacing is brisk without ever feeling rushed, the gags land with clockwork precision, and the whole enterprise is underscored by a genuine affection for its characters that you can't fake.

It's also worth noting that this short gifted the world Shaun the Sheep, who makes his debut here as part of the woolly ensemble before going on to headline his own wildly successful franchise. That's a measure of how richly imagined even the background characters are in Aardman's universe. Shaun barely speaks (well, none of them do, in the traditional sense), yet he's immediately distinct. Immediately himself.

I'd put it just a notch below The Wrong Trousers, which for my money remains the pinnacle of the Wallace and Gromit shorts. That one has a flawless heist-thriller structure and a villain for the ages in Feathers McGraw. A Close Shave is slightly looser, slightly more reliant on escalation than on the elegant clockwork plotting that makes The Wrong Trousers feel almost architecturally perfect. But "slightly looser than a flawless short film" is hardly a damning verdict, is it?

If you're working your way through the Wallace and Gromit canon, it fits beautifully between The Wrong Trousers and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and you can feel the ambition growing with each instalment. The storytelling muscles are being stretched here, the emotional stakes nudged a little higher, the action sequences a little more elaborate.

Funny, inventive, and brimming with heart. The best family entertainment speaks to all ages without a single condescending note, and A Close Shave pulls that off with room to spare. Three and a half stars.

Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1995 | Watched: 2026-03-16

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

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