Wallace and Gromit are the claymation stars of the most ambitiously loopy figure-animation project I’m aware of. If you’ve never run across them, you might still recognize the visual imagination of creator Nick Park and his base Aardman Studios from the video to Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”, or from the films Creature Comforts or Chicken Run. But I didn’t, and it didn’t hurt me none.

The Incredible Adventures of Wallace & Gromit compiles the first three Wallace & Gromit short films (total running length around 90 minutes). If you follow the DVD menu’s prompts without protest, you’ll see them in the order of their creation, which I recommend. The debut, “A Grand Day Out”, is the least impressive of the three: its plot has no urgency, putting more of your attention on the visuals, and yet the visuals of course are the least practiced and expert. But it’s still charming, and it’s the default: a chance to know the daily adventures of the duo, before the outside world has the nerve to interfere.

“The Wrong Trousers” and “a Close Shave” bring the duo in contact, first, with bills, and then with evil. Then with sheep, windows, love, evil, sweaters, and evil, in roughly that order.

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Wallace is a balding stay-at-home inventor from Yorkshire or Derby, with a large round nose and buck teeth. He’s a classic English eccentric, whose morning routine consists of being dumped from his bed into a series of machines that dress him, deposit him at the kitchen table, and lob cooked oatmeal into his bowl (also provided). The lever to start this routine is pulled by Gromit, his mute and patient dog, whose eyebrows express a wider range of emotion than most people’s vocabularies.

We first see them at night, however: they’re pouring over vacation books with such promising titles as Cheese Vacations. Wallace murmurs a list of places where cheese is made, such as Stilton, Wensleydale, Philadelphia, and Tesco’s. All this talk reminds him that it’s time for tea, “tea” being of course an excuse to spread cheese on crackers. He goes to the refrigerator, however, and is horrified to see only empty cheese containers. As he and Gromit ponder the problem, their eyes are drawn to the sight of the moon in the window: “The moon is made of cheese”, Wallace reflects. Obviously they should go to the moon.

We see him sketching furiously on the paper at his easel; we see him flip a used paper over, complete with finished tic-tac-toe game. Two sheets later, he draws the diagram they will work with: a childlike outline of a rocket, with a little dog and a bigger stick-figure man inside, and fire vooming under it all. They set to work.

Gromit is the one studying Electronics for Dogs, but they both work hard: particularly sparkling is a scene where Wallace saws a board from one side while Gromit pounds nails in from the other side, timing his pounding to dodge the saw in an exquisitely silly dance. In a few hours, of course, they have a working rocket: you would normally expect your car to get you to the market, and Wallace’s trip to the moon is just as important to him, right? Music of Spielbergian awe plays as their gaze starts at the rocket’s base and works its way up its smooth, commanding heights. The house’s mice gather to watch, and flip on their safety goggles as the launch begins.

The journey’s mostly uneventful, although a will-he-or-won’t-he? tension is provided by Gromit’s attempt to create a house of cards during landing. But it is on the moon that the story hits its stride, as Wallace agreeably puts some change in a vending machine (set, of course, to measure coins in pence). The vending machine comes to life, and it’s not at all happy to see its home moon violated. But as it chases Wallace and Gromit away, it pauses to examine their travel magazines, and forms little vacation dreams of its own.

Where Wallace is mild and enthusiastic and naïve, and Gromit is a brilliant pushover, and both are easy to like, the vending machine is Nick Park’s first truly brilliant creation in the series. It’s clumsy and menacing and its existence is entirely illogical. It’s conservative and proud, yet lonely and imaginative: it doesn’t want intruders, but it doesn’t want them to leave and abandon it. “A Grand Day Out” may be the least of the three stories herein, but by the time it finds an ending that leaves all three main characters fulfilled, it has established a proud new tradition.

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The last two stories could actually have their plots spoiled, so I won’t do that. I’ll say that we’re treated to a variety of new gadgets: from remote-controlled trousers that take the effort out of walking, to window-washing equipment that would make Rube Goldberg proud, to the “Knit-o-Matic”, where you insert a sheep at one end and get a sweater (and a shivering sheep) at the other. I’ll say that Wallace’s absent-mindedness and lack of backbone don’t always make him the best owner: when Gromit is pushed into a doghouse, shorn of all his household tasks by a new rent-paying penguin, it’s one of the most touchingly sad movie moments I can remember.

Wallace means well, though: a runaway sheep, caught in the Knit-o-Matic, is named “Sean” and allowed to wear the sweater his wool made. And Wallace is capable of both infatuation (at an inventor’s daughter who looks like Wallace with a wig and different teeth), and of telling the difference between a crush and true love.

There’s bad puns: Gromit, framed and imprisoned, reads Crime and Punishment by Fido Dogstoyevsky. There’s lots more visually expressive characters, too. Sean the sheep, in mortal danger, is so lost and terrified (and cute!) that I came the closest to crying at a movie that I’ve done in months, while a rival dog, built like a cross between a fireplug, a small tyrannosaur, and a dominatrix, is obvious trouble from the moment we meet him. Have you ever seen a chicken disguise itself as another form of bird? Now you can.

Most importantly, in the last two episodes, there’s action: ingenious last-second rescues, cartoon physics, and Gromit’s freedom dependent on his ability to lay out toy-railroad track faster than his train can move along it. Nick Park made “a Grand Day Out” with two other people, but by “a Close Shave” the team’s in excess of thirty, and the visuals are a perfect mix of serious cinema with the movies Inspector Gadget always really thought he deserved.

Wallace & Gromit are perfect British eccentrics because changing the world isn’t on their agenda, and neither really is joining it: all they want is a quiet little madhouse in the countryside, a few dozen patents, and enough cheese. Especially Wensleydale. All of us should be as easy to please.

Recommended: Yes