Figure 1. Still image from A Grand Day Out (Park, 1989) where the self-made space rocket encompasses both the primordial technological prowess of predecessors, like George Méliès’s La Voyage dans la Lune (1902) and Hergé’s Tintin album Destination Moon (1953), and the cozy domesticity associated with the ever-occupied Wallace and his canine companion, Gromit – an emblematic mix of the whimsical and the visionary.

This article examines the first installment in Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit series A Grand Day Out (1989) through the lenses of the oneiric and the Dionysian. While scholarship on Aardman Animations tends to emphasize its stop-motion materiality and British eccentricity, less attention has been given to the dreamlike structure of the first entry and its playful subversion of traditional space exploration narratives perpetuated by early 20th-century science fiction. Nevertheless, I suggest that the moon in A Grand Day Out functions as a surreal dreamscape, a locus of subconscious fantasy rather than scientific conquest. By drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1994) and Siegfried Kracauer’s reflections on the oneiric in film (1960), and Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), I propose that Wallace’s craving for cheese serves as an oneiric impulse, triggering a narrative of dream logic in which an ordinary domestic concern spirals into an improbable yet unquestioned adventure.

Later works in the series have gradually perfected the technical aspects of its animation while retaining a high degree of medium specificity. A Grand Day Out’s, by contrast, achieves this specificity not through narrative sophistication but through its whimsical aesthetic and its deliberate neglect of plot, which foreground the materiality and handcrafted charm of stop-motion animation. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) provides an orientation for understanding the short’s Dionysian elements closely connected to the oneiric, particularly its emphasis on pleasure, indulgence, and play. Wallace’s pursuit of cheese is by no means merely a comic obsession but an act of indulgence that transforms the moon into a space of utopian leisure. The handcrafted, tactile nature of Aardman’s animation fosters a sense of dreamlike wonder, while the short’s embrace of physical comedy and excess underscores the notion of animation as a potentially Dionysian medium. Beyond its surface-level comedic appeal, the animated short presents a narrative structure that is fundamentally oneiric, operating within the logic of dreams rather than rational progression. Wallace’s impulsive desire for cheese propels the narrative into an absurd yet internally coherent dreamscape, in which the moon becomes a site of pleasure, fantasy, and play.

Figure 2. A small step for an inventor, a necessary step for a true fromagophile. Still image from A Grand Day Out (Park, 1989).

Bachelard (1994) asserts that dreamlike spaces function as extensions of the subconscious, with domestic concerns often projected onto vast, imagined landscapes. In A Grand Day Out, the Moon is neither an inhospitable wasteland nor a frontier of scientific discovery but an extension of Wallace’s domestic world, corresponding neatly to his whims and desires. This aligns with Kracauer’s (1960) argument that film, as a medium, possesses an inherent dreamlike quality, wherein narrative coherence is often secondary to affect and imagery. Wallace and Gromit’s journey to the moon opts for an intuitive rather than a logical sequence: the idea of cheese sparks an adventure, and the moon’s very substance aligns with this desire. After all, “everyone knows the moon is made of cheese”, Wallace quips in one of the few lines of spoken dialogue. The short thus subverts space exploration narratives that emphasize conquest and survival, instead embracing a structure of whimsical fulfillment.

Nietzsche (1872) describes the Dionysian as a state of ecstatic pleasure, irrationality, and revelry, often opposed to the structured rationality of the Apollonian. This is a far cry from the space-race narratives of the mid-20th century, in which lunar exploration was framed as a triumph of rational human achievement. Instead, Wallace’s quest is a rejection of the Apollonian drive for order and control in favor of gastronomic whimsy. Even the robotic caretaker in the short initially embodies Apollonian control, operating according to strict programming and mechanical routine. However, its transformation, notably achieved through an act of play, marks a transition into Dionysian liberation. The moment the robot constructs makeshift skis and begins gliding across the Moon’s surface encapsulates this shift, rejecting utilitarian function in favor of pure enjoyment. This development also aligns with Abbotson’s (2000) argument that technological entities in the series often evoke unexpected sympathy, with audiences identifying more with the robot’s longing for freedom than Wallace’s casual disregard of it.

A Grand Day Out reimagines space travel as a dreamlike indulgence rather than a conquest of the unknown. Wallace’s cheese-fueled adventure adheres to a logic of fantasy rather than scientific realism and rediscovers the Moon as a site of pleasure and absurdity. Park may have decided on the two’s destination out of pure fascination with previous speculative lunar explorations by artists like Hergé or Méliès, but the moon represents more than mere childlike wonder. The conflation of moon and cheese reaches back all the way into antiquity, as suggested by the ancient Roman poet Martial (1990). Though the idea that the Moon is made of cheese is often dismissed as a naïve misconception, its persistence in cultural narratives suggests a symbolic undercurrent worth examining. However, the age of actual space exploration has seen its depiction of a site for sheer wonder dissipate in favor of more empiric, scientific portrayal, be it geological or astrophysicist. The animated shortmanages to combine both notions seamlessly, as the space rocket’s inventors are here not merely nuts and bolts-oriented engineers, but true connoisseurs of both the Dionysian experience of reality and the dream-like fascination with uncharted cosmic territories. On top of the more foregrounded and at-hand appreciation of, well, cheese, naturally. This is animation as a Dionysian medium: reveling in its own materiality, embracing the imperfections of the handmade, and celebrating the sheer joy of movement and transformation. Wallace’s rocket, with its visible fingerprints and deliberately rough edges, is not the sleek, aerodynamic spacecraft of hard science fiction but a dream construct, a vessel born from the logic of a child’s imagination.

Stop-motion animation, with its tactile craftsmanship and exaggerated physicality lends itself well to both dreamlike aesthetics and Dionysian excess. Aardman’s animation style foregrounds the materiality of its creations, producing an uncanny effect where inanimate objects move with an organic, almost subconscious rhythm. This, too, emphasizes Bachelard’s (1994) notion of enchanted spaces, as objects take on new symbolic meanings within the dreamscape. Moreover, the short’s embrace of slapstick and physical comedy situates it within a tradition of animated excess, a quality that aligns with the Dionysian celebration of pleasure and unrestrained movement. The visual craftsmanship of Park’s first animation in the series, by virtue of its handmade imperfection and surreal tactility, further amplifies the dreamlike atmosphere of A Grand Day Out, as a perceived stutter in movement and a deliberate suspension of gravitational laws aligns closer with the dreamscape than the waking world.

References

Abbotson, S.C. (2000) ‘Nick Park’s Ambivalent Heroes: Technology in Wallace and Gromit’’, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 10(1), pp. 36–40. doi:10.21153/pecl2000vol10no1art1352.

A Grand Day Out (1989). [Blu–Ray]. Directed by Nick Park. Produced by Aardman Animations, BBC Worldwide.

Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Hergé (1953) Destination Moon. Translated by T. & A. Ward. London: Methuen.

Kracauer, S. (1960) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902). [Blu-Ray]]. Directed by Georges Méliès. France: Star Film.

Martial (1990) The Epigrams of Martial. Translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1872) The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Random House.

Christian Wilken is a research associate at the University of Düsseldorf, who specializes in weird fiction, gothic, and postmodernism. He is also a member of the “Hauntology and Spectrality Research Network” at York St John University. His interdisciplinary and transcultural research is supported by a PhD in Anglophone Studies, and degrees in Comparative Literature and Japanese Studies. His monograph Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene is published by Routledge in 2025.