Wallace and Gromit: The Complete Cracking Collection - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Wallace and Gromit: The Complete Cracking Collection



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
Wallace & Gromit has had a storied career on Blu-ray, with various iterations of the short British stop motion “claymation” show coming out on home video. Universal got control of the feature film Curse of the Were-Rabbit, while Lionsgate had the original shorts + the 3-minute original “show”, and then Shout! Studios got access to the series a while back and released it on Blu-ray with the 4 shorts, and the Contraptions show that really got things off the ground all in one package. NOW, it looks like Aardman Animations, the BBC, and Shout! Have worked together to get brand new 4K remasters done for the 4 shorts, and have included a special features disc that not only includes Cracking Contraptions but ALSO Curse of the Were-Rabbit as well (which appears to be a direct port of Universal’s Blu-ray release from 2019.

Going back to my childhood, I remember watching Wallace & Gromit on the BBC channel back in the late 90s and being so excited that I begged my mother to let us have a “tea day” complete with Earl Gay (as British as we had in Arizona), crackers, and freshly sliced cheese just like the show. Fast forward multiple decades and those memories of watching the stop-motion animated show come flooding back, filling my brain with warm fuzzy feelings and a desire to be that young excited kid once more.

First up from the batch is A Grand Day Out, which started in the early 80s as Nick Park was studying film and Television at University, but it would take him another 6 years till 1989 to actually complete the short film with Aardman Animations. The story is cute, simple, and silly as can be, as Wallace and his dog Gromit build a spaceship inside of Wallace’s workshop so that they can go to the moon and see if it really is made of cheese. Once there they decide to have a picnic and snack on….you guessed it… the moon’s unique flavor of cheese. The short was never the best of the bunch, but it’s whimsical and charming. With that gleeful childhood excitement that was so obviously a part of Nick Park’s desire to create something inviting for everyone.

Next up on the list is The Wrong Trousers, which takes the idea of Wallace and his dog Gromit into the world of a mystery heist. Like usual, it starts out with the mundane workings of a working-class (albeit rather posh in nature) British gentleman and his morning breakfast, only to find out that they’re a bit short for the bills after Wallace blew most of their money on a set of gifts for Gromit’s birthday. Including a NASA rejected automated set of ‘trousers’ that he got so that it could take Gromit on a walk. While Gromit is not exactly pleased with the gift, he’s even LESS pleased when Wallace takes on a penguin as a paid boarder due to their money shortages. And while the dog is not exactly enamored with the new intruder, Wallace is more than happy to have a helping hand. EXCEPT for the fact that our dear penguin friend is more than meets the eye, and has HIS eye on a prize that will include manipulating Wallace into stealing an exotic jewel, leaving Gromit the only one who can stop him.

A Close Shave builds upon the history of The Wrong Trousers, creating another mystery. But this time both Wallace AND Gromit are up to the task. The duo has taken up working in town as window washers to make ends meet while Wallace brainstorms another invention (inventing in your basement doesn’t bring in the big bucks I guess) only for the duo to try and figure out why all of the sheep keep going missing in their little village. Turns out it’s not who they thought it was, and it will take every bit of their ingenuity to defeat the invention of ANOTHER mad scientist who created the perfect killing machine.

Last on the list will be A Matter of Loaf and Death, which was originally broadcast back in Christmas of 2008 (which also explains why the animation and colors look so much better than the previous three shorts), and is probably the most “controversial” of the batch. Like Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the short is bigger, bolder, prettier, and feels “different” than the dulled and crude looking animation that was done earlier in Nick Park’s career. The film goes even darker than normal, with Wallace (who’s given up a life of invention for baking) falling in love with a femme fatale female baker known as Piella Bakewell, who has literally become a “cereal” killer and has Wallace on her radar for a good old baker’s dozen 13th kill on her bedpost (or whatever thing serial killers have to in place of a bedpost notch). It’s silly, slightly darker than the rest, but a kinetic whirlwind adventure that keeps a fast pace and a healthy dose of puns and “Wallace and Gromit-isms” galore.




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




4K Video: Video:

[/FLOAT_LEFTUggg, here’s where things get sticky. According to everything I could gather from the interwebs and talking with people behind the scenes, BBC, Aardman Animations, and Shout! Studios worked together to bring new 4K remasters for the 4 major shorts in the set, and the results are a bit weird. Let's just say that some of James Cameron’s vices are transposed over to this set, with what LOOKS to my eyes to be some sort of AI integration into the remastering, resulting in some soft and smooth-looking images. Not to mention a few tell-tale AI artifacts along the way. Gamma and minor color changes are apparent too.

THAT BEING SAID, this is not some total train wreck like I’ve seen bandied about online. The upgrades over the Blu-rays are very subtle, but they are there. Colors appear a bit richer and more vivid, and if you look closely some of the clay art and lines look a bit nice. There’s not a massive upgrade here, but it IS a slight upgrade nonetheless. I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s pretty good in some scenes, and others look so smoothed out and “odd” (the curse of AI tinkering in this early stages of its development) artifacts make you scratch your head. I love Shout! And Scream Factory to death for what they put out, but visually this is one of the more frustrating releases I’ve seen from their 4K efforts to date. I wanted to give this a 3.75/5 rating vs. the 3.5 I'm giving it, but a 4/5 is a bit MORE than I wanted to give it so I'm erring on the side of my frustration here.







Audio:

The audio track feels like it’s the same 5.1 DTS-HD MA track from Shout’s previous Blu-ray release of these films, but I can’t 100% verify that as I don’t have the original Blu-rays to compare against. That being said, I remember Lionsgate’s audio mix for the show to be highly problematic, with pitch issues and timing quirks due to the conversion from 25 fps PAL up to Western rates, and the results felt very weird. Higher pitches than normal echoes, and a few random moments where I felt like they were talking with helium in the lungs. Shout’s Blu-ray release (and this one) seems to have been done a bit better, with more attention to smoothing out some of those issues. Sadly there are still some problems with the mix, as I noticed PLENTY of reverb going on, and some of the pitch issues are still there. It’s more than serviceable for what we get, but I was really hoping with all of the remasterings of the discs for 4K that we would get a new audio mix as well. It is what it is, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard the 4 shorts THAT good, but yeah, it’s a problematic situation. They sound decent, and most people probably won’t even notice the issues. It’s just that when you’re as -retentive about audio as I am, you start picking up on these things.






Extras:

Disc One - 4K UHD
• NEW Restored Masters In 4K
• NEW Restored Audio
• Audio Commentaries.

Disc Two - Blu-ray
• NEW Restored Masters In 4K
• NEW Restored Audio
• Audio Commentaries.

Disc Three - Special Features Blu-ray
• Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit (2005)
• Peter Lord & Nick Park Interview
• “The Amazing World Of Wallace & Gromit”
• “Inside The Wrong Trousers”
• A Close Shave – How They Did It
• The Making Of A Matter Of Loaf And Death – How They Donut
• When Wallace Met Harvey
• Picture Gallery
• Invention Blueprints
• 28-Page Booklet
• Stickers

Final Score: ​

Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Cracking Collection is a solid array of Wallace & Gromit pieces that conglomerate most everything that is out there outside of the spin-offs like Shawn the Sheep. We get all 4 major shorts remastered in 4K (with some controversy) and the original little blip shorts on the extras disc along with Universal’s 2019 film as well (I think it’s a DIRECT port of the 2019 Universal disc, as I didn’t notice any of the AI remastering done to the previous shorts replicated on that film). The extras included in the box are rather cute, but sadly don’t really justify the high price tag on this set, ESPECIALLY considering how frustrating the video encode’s are for the 4K discs (and technically the Blu-ray as well, as the Blu-ray appears to use the same master instead of the older 2009 Lionsgate master). This pains me to say it, but I would personally wait until this hits a lower price point, as the upgrades are very subtle, and the Universal disc of Curse of the Were-Rabbit can still be bought separately.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Louis Koo, Sammo Hung, Richie Chen, Raymond Lma, Philip Ng
Directed by: Soi Cheang
Written by: Kin-Yee Au, Tai-Lee Chan, Li Jun
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1/ 1.66:1 / 1.33:1 HEVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, English DTS-HD MA 2.0 (Cracking Contraptions is DTS-HD MA 2.0 Only)
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Shout! Studios
Rated: NR
Runtime: 138 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: December 10th 2024

Recommendation: Good Set, with some caveats

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