WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Friday, October 07, 2005

There is something inherently endearing about stop-motion animation. Maybe it's because it makes characters move in ever-so-slightly humorous ways; maybe it's because most of us relate it to our early movie loves (O'Brien, Harryhausen, et al). There's something especially endearing about Nick Park's delightfully absurd Claymation creations Wallace and Gromit, a man and his dog (or perhaps more accurately a dog and his man), who live in a '50s-esque English village and have silly adventures that they proceed through in dead earnest.

While Wallace and Gromit have appeared in three stop-motion shorts A GRAND DAY OUT, THE WRONG TROUSERS and A CLOSE SHAVE, with the latter two Oscar winners in the Animated Short category WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT is the first full-length feature starring the duo.

In CURSE, inventor Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis), with Gromit as his loyal sidekick who does everything a human can do except talk (the canine clearly thinks much more coherently than his well-meaning but fuddled companion), is running a company called Anti-Pesto, which offers a humane solution to rabbit problems in a town obsessed by its annual Giant Vegetable Competition. This means that Wallace and Gromit have a basement full of cute, hungry bunnies. Wallace feels bad about confining the fluffy little creatures and wants to impress the bunny-loving Lady Tottington (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter), so he tries to devise a way to make the rabbits less ravenous. The result can be guessed by the title. It becomes up to Gromit to save the day, Wallace, the little bunnies and the giant veggies.

All of the characters, as envisioned by Park and his fellow director Steve Box, are adorable without being annoyingly cute they look a bit like Jay Ward creations given physical texture. The tone set up in the script by writers Box, Park, Mark Burton and Bob Baker sends up classic horror movies (think various versions of Frankenstein and the Wolfman) while maintaining a tone that seems like something Monty Python might have achieved if there had been a streak of genuine kindness running through their work.

Sallis has the slightly absent-minded but nice goofball tones of Wallace down pat, while Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes (as a villainous shotgun-happy fortune hunter) are both clearly having a blast voicing two of the biggest upper-class twits imaginable.

While individually the sequences in WALLACE & GROMIT: CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT range from funny to inspired, the film's biggest problem is that there's eventually a feeling of repetition while there is a narrative arc (and a nicely satirical one it is), the segments collectively create a sense of sameness. The parts are charming, but the cumulative effect is a bit tiring at times. Even so, CURSE is mostly a stop-motion comedy blessing.