Sweet Dreams spins an epic tale of adventure, romance and pastry with stop-motion, in which cast, props and settings are constructed almost entirely with real food. © Kirsten Lepore.

Sweet Dreams
Sometimes inspiration is no farther away than your own kitchen. Director Kirsten Lepore's film Sweet Dreams spins an epic tale of adventure, romance and pastry.

The story opens on a "dessert" island as a cupcake and his colleagues, including donuts and other frosting-covered treats, toil away constructing towers from sugar cubes and other edible building materials. Cupcake dreams of a better life, however, so he builds a boat from sugar cubes and sets sail for adventure. When his boat springs a leak, he finds himself on a world unlike any he's ever seen before -- a land of vegetables. He learns all about vegetable culture while on the island, and even falls in love with one of the natives. He eventually returns home, but his experiences on the island have changed him forever, much to the shock and dismay of his fellow islanders.

Sweet Dreams is a stop-motion film filmed with a Nikon D80 and edited using iStopmotion software. The cast, props and settings are constructed almost entirely with real food. This choice results in some great visuals, such as ice cream cone trees lining a brown sugar landscape, or a small tribe of fruits and vegetables working in unison to construct a produce village, but this resulted in some unique challenges for Lepore. Filming real vegetables under hot lights in a windowless studio presented some unanticipated dangers for Lepore: "One time I made the mistake of building one of those carrot towers in the evening and subsequently shooting half the scene. When I came back the next morning to finish the shoot, not only was the tower completely wilted and shriveled, but the smell was near intolerable. I had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch and re-shoot, and that room still probably hasn't aired out yet."

The film was recently named Channel Frederator's Cartoon of the Month, which has helped Sweet Dreams to find a larger audience than it might have otherwise. Lepore has worked for several large clients recently, and after seeing what she was able to accomplish by herself with a budget in the hundreds of dollars, the sky's the limit once she gets herself a crew, an expense account and a discount card at her local supermarket.

In Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death, our popular duo is self-employed at "Top Bun" with a serial killer on the loose who hates bakers. © Aardman Animations.

Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death
There were no surprises in the latest installment of Nick Park's multiple Academy Award-winning Wallace and Gromit series, A Matter of Loaf and Death. And that's a wonderful thing.

The "big" change in Park's latest short is that for the sake of this cartoon, slow-witted but well-intentioned Wallace and his long-suffering canine companion, Gromit, are self-employed at a small bakery called "Top Bun." And, of course, just to make things interesting, there's a serial killer on the loose who has an unhealthy fixation with -- you guessed it -- bakers.

Park and his appropriately named co-writer, Bob Baker (who also co-wrote the hit W&G shorts The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave), know what their audience wants, and that's exactly what they provide with Loaf. Wallace falls in love with an odd-looking girl who owns a nervous pet? Check. Wallace wakes up in the morning and gets dressed and receives his breakfast through a series of elaborate machines that will ultimately cause trouble later on? Check. Gromit tries to warn Wallace of imminent danger only to be ignored until that danger almost literally smacks Wallace in the face? Check. All the chaos leads to a happy ending that has led to Wallace learning almost nothing and having grown not one bit as a character? Check.

And that's just part of what makes the Wallace and Gromit films so enjoyable. They're a classic comedy duo, and they play their parts to perfection each time out in amazing scenarios that engage audiences of all ages. Park's animation, as always, is a joy to behold, and, as always, he makes it look easy. Aardman Studios has such a strong track record that it's easy to take their work for granted. Sets, character design, staging, plotting, scripting, lighting, voice direction, soundtrack -- the attention to detail in Park's films is always so thorough and complete that you forget that you aren't watching a summer blockbuster that happens to star puppets instead of live actors.

Blockbuster isn't a bad way to describe the impact of a new Wallace and Gromit short, either. More than14 million people watched the Christmas 2008 premiere of A Matter of Loaf and Death, which is roughly one-third of England's population. As the film gains wider release worldwide, expect critics and fans across the globe to heap praise and admiration on Aardman, Park, Baker and Wallace and Gromit. Again.

I told you there were no surprises with this one.

Andrew Farago is the gallery manager and curator of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum and the creator of the weekly online comic serial The Chronicles of William Bazillion.