A Matter of Loaf and Death

The Oscars are on Sun, Mar 7. I'm not too excited about most of the films in contention this year, but I thought I'd put a shout-out to my favourite, A Matter of Loaf and Death—nominated in the animated shorts category.

Nick Park and Peter Lord are geniuses and I've been a fan of their Wallace & Gromit stop-motion claymation series from their early days. This new film lacks the amazing visual simplicity and, dare I say it, conceptual abstraction, in their early work (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave), but it's reassuring to see them return to the short format after the disaster of their big Hollywood feature-length ventures Chicken Run, and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. A Matter of Loaf and Death has all the quirky charm that is their trademark and focuses on the core relationship of Wallace and his eternal pup Gromit. And I don't care how good Meryl Streep is, no one can capture as much emotion as Gromit does by simply moving his brows—brilliant!