Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Cracking Collection [Blu-ray]

Fantastic! Great for kids and adults.

Fast delivery. Item like new, rather than very good. Highly recommend this seller.

My son got this for his wife. She love it

I enjoyed all the content of this Blu-Ray. I think the inventions are very imaginative.

Bought this for my partner, he loves these classics and is very happy.

Though aware of their existence and somewhat curious about them for some time, I had not previously see any of the Wallace & Gromit shorts prior to seeing "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" when that hit theaters. The movie made me a fan and soon enough I grabbed the DVD collection of the first 3 shorts. More recently, I grabbed the Blu-Ray Collection to grab the 4th short, and to get the HD versions. This Blu-Ray Collection is absolutely THE way to see Wallace and Gromit. The colors are much more vibrant, and details hidden previously by the overly dark presentation on the DVD set now stand out and make this so much more enjoyable to watch.The 4 shorts are often reported as being presented in the aspect ratio "as intended", and that was the impression I was under for quite a while, but that is debatable with regards to one of them. "A Grand Day Out" and "The Wrong Trousers" are shown in 4:3 aspect ratio, as they are on the DVD release. The short "A Close Shave" is shown in an odd 1.66:1 ratio that is not quite the more standard widescreen of 1.78:1 that the final short, "A Matter of Loaf and Death", is in. On the DVD release, "A Close Shave" is shown in a 4:3 aspect ratio. If you watch the DVD and Blu-Ray versions side-by-side, it's a lot more obvious that the Blu-Ray version was simply cropped at the top and bottom to make it "widescreen"... and clumsily so in retrospect. I had thought before that they simply opened up the framing on the sides and cropped a little on the top/bottom, but that's just not the case. It's easy to overlook how badly the cropping is since the Blu-Ray version looks a LOT nicer with the colors more accurate and details popping out that were hidden on the DVD. Why they did this is rather baffling.So, what about the videos themselves? Starting with "A Grand Day Out", it's obvious from the get-go that this was an early effort from the animators as they were refining their skills. The production is lower in quality, with the animations being somewhat jerkier than the others, and the characters' features a bit cruder than what we know and love today. The pacing I feel is a bit stilted, and it seems to me that the video serves largely as a showcase for demonstrating some of the more complex animations that had to be difficult to pull off. This doesn't mean that the video wasn't enjoyable. Quite the contrary, despite being something of a freshman effort, it was full of the witty little bits and pieces that their work is so well known for.The second video, "The Wrong Trousers", is my personal favorite. The character animation is much smoother than before; their features developed to how we know them today; and the story was a fair bit more complex and paced much better. It feels like the animators had really gotten comfortable with their craft and, rather than devising a series of scenes to show off their animation skills, paid much greater attention to the story than before. It's truly a great piece. The same can be said for the latter two shorts, "A Close Shave" and "A Matter of Loaf and Death".In addition to the four short films, they've included as extras the 10 Wallace & Gromit short shorts collectively known as "Cracking Contraptions", and an episode of "Shaun the Sheep", a spinoff series featuring Shaun, a character who was first introduced in "A Close Shave". I didn't watch "Shaun" all the way through, so I can't comment much other than it being in standard def and is basically there to promote the DVD set for that series. The "Cracking Contraptions" extras were rather disappointing in that they appear on the Blu-Ray in standard definition (480p). Compared to the feature short films, the CC shorts (which are 1-3 minutes long each) are noticeably blurrier on my 50" HDTV and much of the little details that the W&G films are known for don't stand out like they do in these HD versions of the featured short films. For as short as the "Cracking Contraptions" episodes are, roughly 20 minutes or so in total, surely they could have been remastered in HD along with the featured W&G short films. For this reason, along with the butchering of "A Close Shave", I consider this worth a 3-4 star rating out of 5 stars, rather than a full 5 of 5. Hopefully we'll see "A Close Shave" re-released in HD without the butchering some day. I'd especially like to see "Cracking Contraptions" remastered in HD and released perhaps as a digital download also. Better yet, as extras on a yet-to-be-announced-but-hopefully-is-coming-soon Blu-Ray edition of "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" (please pretty please!!!).

These little shows are so fun to watch and I can’t help but appreciate the obvious hard work that went into every single frame.

Quick response with the email, got it as soon as I got home from work.