Back to the drawing board: "A Grand Day Out" and "The Wrong Trousers"

To celebrate a half-century of Aardman Animations - and better prepare us for this September's third Shaun the Sheep film - we're getting a full retrospective over the remainder of the summer. Revisited almost four decades on from its making, what's most striking about 1989's A Grand Day Out is how closely its form and content align; how clearly it was the work of a mildly eccentric figure, alone at his drawing table in a basement, assembling what would eventually prove his grandest design. For the plasticine Wallace, building a rocket to retrieve cheese from the moon, read the flesh-and-blood Nick Park, then a boyish NFTS student plotting to both update and revolutionise filmed animation via the reapplication of artisanal craft methods. The result now seems more than ever a time capsule, using jerky stopmotion - the same processes viewers of a certain age will recognise as having given life to Morph, Bagpuss and Windy Miller - to fashion choice sight gags: Gromit being used to prop up a workbench, the mice donning sunglasses as one to witness blast-off, the leads finding different ways to counter the boredom of the long Bank Holiday excursion into space, not something Méliès had allowed himself to consider at the start of the century. These characters would get sleeker and more defined, as human performers tend to upon first contact with stardom, and the vehicles they'd travel in got bigger and zippier. Yet the elements moulded into this clay from the very outset included a great charm and wit, an abundant, irresistible cheeriness (best illustrated here by the benign fate of the machine that pursues our heroes across the surface of the Moon), and an overarching comic philosophy that would define the best of Aardman's subsequent work: treat even stratospheric events as though they were the basis of a wet weekend in Filey.

1993's The Wrong Trousers - the breakout success, the Oscar winner, the quantum leap forward - bears about as much relation to its appealingly clunky predecessor as, say, Terminator II: Judgment Day did to James Cameron's directorial debut Piranha II: The Spawning. We're back on the homefront this time, depicted as no less chaotic and hazardous than the wider universe, especially after we factor in a pair of robotic "Techno Trousers" ("Ex-NASA," Wallace coos, "Fantastic for walkies") and the dire financial straits that lead to our heroes taking in a dodgy lodger we instantly distrust. (Partly because, even by Aardman's standards, his eyes are too close together.) That's right, it's Shallow Grave - Danny Boyle's 18-rated breakthrough of the following year - only with a sociopathic penguin in the place of Keith Allen. Both films, made on shoestring budgets by creatives in the first years of their career, were acutely attuned to the interpersonal jeopardies lurking within the flatshare scenario: no-one has any money (why else would the capable, practically minded Gromit still be living with a clueless bachelor like Wallace?), some folks (Wallace) aren't exactly pulling their weight, others (Gromit) feel left out of key decision-making (perhaps an inevitability when you literally don't have a voice), and there's always the possibility someone sleeping under the same roof wants to do away with you (Feathers McGraw).

All of which is to acknowledge how these well-kneaded blobs of plasticine seem to take on recognisably human contours and characteristics; Park and co. built an entire empire out of modelling clay without ever losing sight of what makes us tick (or ticks us off) on a daily basis. The Wrong Trousers remains very funny in this: clock the sleepy Wallace pulling his PJs over those techno-trousers, or Gromit's rightly cherished eyebrow raise as he realises the berryblast of jam conventionally intercepted by a flying piece of toast is instead bound for his face at a considerable rate of knots. (Genius has a way of stopping time, or making its own time.) Yet the lighting of these models and maquettes alone - particularly during the storm sequence, and Gromit's backstreet pursuit of Feathers - elevates this half-hour to the standing of art, and that's before a superb closing setpiece carried as much by sound (the rattle of the toy train, the click of the tracks, the satisfying clunk of penguin in milkbottle) as by anything we see whizzing before our eyes. Later W&G features would prove slicker and smoother yet: they would be Aardman's Avatars, more ambitious, sometimes dazzling, generally well-liked. But I don't think they ever topped The Wrong Trousers: here, unlike Wallace, Park got the dimensions and speed, the set-up and execution just right.

A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers return to selected cinemas from Friday.