Wallace & Gromit:
The Curse of
the Were-Rabbit
Reviewed by Liam Lacey
***½
Directed by Nick Park and Steve Box
Written by Nick Park, Bob Baker, Steve Box and Mark Burton
Voiced by Peter Sallis,
Helena Bonham Carter
and Ralph Fiennes
Classification: G
There's a wash of relief settling into the comfy, old-fashioned environment of Nick Park and his Aardman Animation. Computer imagery can create animated worlds of astonishing, if sterile, trompe l'oeil perfection. In contrast, Wallace and Gromit, brought to life in the antique stop-motion animation, retain all their lumpy, squeezable Plasticine tactile charm.
The feeling is like a warm homecoming.
Over the past 16 years, there have only been three Wallace & Gromit short films and a series of 2½-minute animations, but this is the pair's first feature film (though Park and his animation team created the feature Chicken Run in 2000).
For the uninitiated, Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis), is a bald, square-toothed, cheese-loving bachelor who is simultaneously a nitwit and an ingenious inventor of elaborate labour-saving contraptions. Gromit is his heroic and patient dog, as well as valet, technician, nutritionist and frequent rescuer. Wallace and Gromit are as English as HP Sauce, rooted in a P. G. Wodehouse-era past of hunting and gardens, aristocratic estates and autos with cranks to get them started.
In this current incarnation, Wallace is running the Anti-Pesto humane pest-control company. Their system for capturing rabbits -- from using garden gnomes with remote sensors in their eyes to the Bun-Vac 6000 and other ingenious devices -- are cutting-edge, but storage is a problem. Their house, from the basement to the breadbox, is infested with captured bunnies. More urgently, the issue of vegetable security is reaching a critical point.
Tottington Hall's Giant Vegetable Competition is about to take place and the villagers are jealously guarding their swollen pumpkins and puffed-up melons from marauding rabbits. When one of the gnomes triggers a late-night alarm, Wallace has devised a chain of devices that wake him, toss him out of bed, serve his tea, and pop him into his clothes and car before he's barely awake.
After one such emergency call, Wallace uses his Bun-Vac to bag a field full of burrowing bunnies on the estate of Lady (Totty) Tottington. Totty, who has what appears to be a startling red rolling pin for a hairdo, is voiced by an unrecognizably plummy-sounding Helena Bonham Carter. As the patron of the Giant Vegetable Competition, she represents an important contract. Moreover, she expresses warm admiration for Wallace's rabbit-removal techniques: "I believe the killing of fluffy creatures is never justified," she opines.
But not everything goes well. Because of an unfortunate toupée accident, Wallace has offended Totty's suitor, the bombastic shotgun-wielding Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes), who is chomping at the bit for revenge. Then one of Wallace's brainwashing experiments goes awry: He inadvertently creates a monstrous bunny that rises with the full moon and ravages the giant vegetables of the village. Wallace and Gromit's task is to humanely capture the floppy-eared menace before the vegetable competition is cancelled, or Victor blows the beast to bits.
Although the idea of the vegetable-mangling evil rabbit may sound suspiciously familiar to fans of James Howe's Bunnicula children's books, the first shadowy appearance of the monster were-rabbit is where the movie's fun really starts. Parodying the camera angles and lighting of such classic 1930s horror thrillers as Frankenstein and King Kong, Park and his team, already exceptional at pun-stuffed, relentlessly inventive scenarios, have fashioned an entertaining 85-minute feature-length W&G adventure. Savour the movie as both a 24-carrot comedy and a tail to remember.
Two of the three Wallace & Gromit movies have won Oscars for best shorts (in 1991, Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out was nominated but lost to another Nick Park work, Creature Comforts). At first glance, these lumpy creatures do not strike you as the best claymation efforts since God created Adam but Park's work is brilliantly understated. The scene that shows a field of floating bunnies stands out, but then so does just about everything that Gromit does. One of the greatest minimalist mute actors since Buster Keaton, Gromit registers a wide range of mortification to elation by moving a few lines on his face. Some minimally competent actors have won Oscars, thanks to clever directors and editors; it seems a shame a clay dog can't have the same opportunity.