Dog Bytes

By RICHARD CORLISS

They are everyman and everydog. Cartoon lovers embraced Wallace and Gromit when Nick Park created them out of Plasticine for three stop-motion animated shorts (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave), two of which won Oscars. Here was the definitive English couple, manacled to each other for life: Wallace, a bachelor with a love for cheese and a weakness for inventing things that blow up, and Gromit, his silent pet, indentured servant and reluctant savior. Next year they'll star in The Great Vegetable Plot, Park's first feature film since the delicious Chicken Run in 2000. But now they can be seen, in byte-size form, on the Internet (at www.atomfilms.com) 10 savory japes with the general title Cracking Contraptions.

In each two-to three-minute film, Wallace concocts a daft labor-saving robot--meant to serve dinner or overcome a burglar or produce Christmas cards or vacuum up cracker crumbs--while Gromit watches in mute exasperation or buries his snout in a favorite book (one is Men Are from Mars, Dogs Are from Pluto). Something usually goes explosively wrong, but that doesn't dampen either Wallace's enthusiasm or Gromit's obligation to restore the status quo.

These little films, supervised by Park and directed by Loyd Price and Chris Sadler, have a lovingly handmade look to them. They might be Wallace's crackpot creations, except that here everything works beautifully. The only explosions are of the viewer's laughter. --By Richard Corliss