After a tiresome workday, I enjoyed Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. As I suspected, I found it cracking good fun, having liked writer/director Nick Park’s previous outings with wily inventor/cheese aficionado Wallce and his faithful/exasperated dog Gromit: the trio of shorts A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave.
I predicted there could be strain stretching the duo’s adventures to feature length, but the movie doesn’t flag, plunging right into the world of Wallace’s Rube Goldberg inventions and his newest business venture protecting his town’s vegetables against rabbits. On a moonlit night, something goes horribly awry in the lab, bringing rise to the dreaded Were-Rabbit, a giant fuzzy lummox with a polka-dot bow tie and an insatiable appetite for fresh produce.
Much physical comedy (the best is the bit with the hairpiece), plentiful British humour, wild car and plane chases, some welcome pokes at the clergy, plenty of in-references for fans of Wallace & Gromit’s previous adventures, childish in-jokes for the adults in the audience (involving melons and nuts), and some classic British caricatures in the gun-loving fop Victor Quartermaine (voiced by Ralph Fiennes) and the carrot-haired apple of Wallace’s eye, Lady Campanula Tottington (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter).
The traditional Plasticine animation is still painstakingly poky to produce; according to the IMDb, the film took five years to produce, with animators averaging three seconds of usable footage per day. This time around, it’s supplemented with some seamless computer animation, including animated smoke, fire, fog and hovering bunnies. But I still like that handspun molded clay movement, with its shifts and lags, the animators’ fingerprints often still visible on the surface of the characters.