Wallace & Gromit In The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit

I walked into this one a little late, so no previews this time. I did, however, catch the last half of the short, “The Madagascar Penguins In A Christmas Caper.” Honestly, I thought it was ok. Not as funny as I had hoped that it would be because, what I saw of the penguins made me figure that they were the funniest part of Madagascar. It kind of lessens my hopes for that movie now. (No, I still haven’t seen it.) Oh well. I’ll check it out eventually. But it just got knocked down my list a bit.

Wallace & Gromit, however, was always near the top. I just never had time to go see it. I’ve loved the shorts since I saw them nearly ten years ago. So I knew that as soon as Nick Park got it together to make a feature for them, I had to see it.

Wallace (still voiced by Peter Sallis despite what DreamWorks originally wanted) and Gromit are the proud owners of Anti-Pesto, a humane pest disposal service. And they’ve got their work cut out for them because the Tottington Vegetable Fair is about to get under way. Everyone is growing their prize vegetables and has hired W&G to take care of them.

Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham-Carter) seems to be having the biggest problem. Her garden is infested with rabbits AND her life is infested with the cruel Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Feinnes). He’s been trying to marry her for a while, but he just wants to kill all of the cute little bunnies. W&G want to capture them and keep them in their already over-flowing containment unit. (Shade of Ghostbusters going on here.)

But when Wallace tries out his new invention to stop the bunnies from loving veg so much, all oh-eck breaks loose. And that’s where we get the Were-Rabbit.

This is a pretty good little movie. And if you love W&G, you’ll love it. One caveat, though: this is a VERY British movie. And at 85 minutes it sometimes feels a bit overlong. This is no laugh-a-minute American animated film. It’s a slow-build British comedy that finally turns into a big, chaotic finish. (Pay attention to the planes that Gromit and his adversary are flying. Hee-hee)

The animation, as always, is old-fashioned and really cool. Because it’s such a big screen you can see all of the fingerprints and scrapes on all of the figures, but that’s part of the charm of Aardman Animation.

Keep an eye out for all of the references to other movies in here. There are a LOT of them that I didn’t even catch.

It’s really too bad that the Aardman warehouse burned down a little while after this movie came out. I’m not sure if that means that end of W&G or not, but they’ve lost all of their sets. Nick Park looks at it as a way to move on to bigger and (hopefully) better things. Healthy guy, that Nick. Let’s hope that his next film comes out faster than this one did.