All Things Aardman — PICK

For the most part, Amazon Prime is the place to be for Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and other denizens of the delightful, mostly stop-motion world of the Aardman-verse — among the richest troves of truly family entertainment ever created.

There’s a charm to the Aardman world that makes me smile before anything happens. It was there from the start in Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Adventures, a series of roughly half-hour science-fiction shorts with a dotty English inventor and his resourceful, silent dog.

It won the world over in Chicken Run, a classic wartime prison-break movie that happened to feature a bunch of chickens on a British farm and Mel Gibson voicing a fast-talking American rooster.

It’s given kids countless hours of innocent, wordless entertainment in the Shaun the Sheep series of seven-minute silent slapstick shorts, six seasons of which you can watch on Amazon. Netflix has the seventh season, subtitled Adventures of Mossy Bottom, plus the charming A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon — the sequel to Shaun the Sheep Movie, which you can rent at Amazon Prime.

And so much more! Cracking Contraptions, Curse of the Were-rabbit, The Pirates! Band of Misfits … with Aardman, it’s hard to go wrong. (Flushed Away and Early Man are rare, not-great exceptions.)