Tweet

Comments (0)

 1 of 3

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: G Genre: Animated Theater release: October 07, 2005 by DreamWorks Animation Directed by: Nick Park and Steve Box Runtime: 1 hour 25 minutes Cast: Peter Sallis (Wallace), Helena Bonham Carter (Lady Campanula Tottington), Ralph Fiennes (Lord Victor Quartermaine), Nicholas Smith (Rev. Clement Hedges), Peter Kay (PC Mackintosh), Liz Smith (Mrs. Mulch), Geraldine McEwan (Miss Thripp) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Bring out the Wensleydale, and don't forget the crackers! At last, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is the feature-length film that Wallace & Gromit fans have been waiting for. How long have we been waiting? Well, let's put it this way. While Wallace, the dim-witted but enthusiastic inventor of overcomplicated gadgets, and Gromit, his mute but much savvier dog, continue to pop up in the odd two- or three-minute short on British television, this film marks their first significant trip to the big screen since the Oscar-winning half-hour short A Close Shave came out ten years ago. Pixar had just released its first full-length movie, the top-grossing film of all time was still E.T., and no one had ever heard of Harry Potter.

That's all changed, now, and in a way it doesn't matter. The Wallace & Gromit short films have always had a nostalgic sensibility, so they don't really need to keep up with the times; their push-button-operated contraptions are a throwback to the pre-digital age, and the films themselves regularly parody classic film genres such as film noir and old-fashioned horror. (Among other things, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit has fun tweaking the clichéd use of organ music and lightning flashes.) But creator Nick Park and his team, including co-director Steve Box and co-writers Bob Baker and Mark Burton, are fond of pop-culture references—their previous film Chicken Run was a veritable pastiche of movie quotes—and so, as the opening credits scroll by over a series of photos showing how Wallace and Gromit have grown over the years, we see Gromit holding a diploma from a school called Dogwarts. Cute!

The story this time concerns a Giant Vegetable Competition, and while our heroes plan to enter it themselves (Gromit fondly pats an enormous melon while listening to the Venus movement from Gustav Holst's The Planets, here re-named "The Plant Suite"), they also provide the security for all their neighbors' greenhouses and backyards. Under the brand name "Anti-Pesto," they have set up secret cameras inside garden gnomes and the like, each one linked to a portrait of the client that hangs on the wall back home; so whenever a rude little rabbit hops into someone's garden and tries to make off with, say, an absurdly large pumpkin, the eyes in that client's portrait light up, and Wallace and Gromit are swept away, dressed up, and sent off by their machines to go catch the floppy-eared intruder.

Like all entrepreneurs, Wallace (voice of Peter Sallis) and Gromit are always on the lookout for the customer who writes the really big checks, and one day she comes calling. Lady Campanula Tottington (Corpse Bride's Helena Bonham Carter) has a major infestation problem, and while her arrogant would-be suitor Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) is all too eager to blast the bunnies to kingdom come, she prefers the humane approach. And so Wallace brings out the Bun-Vac 6000, a powerful machine that sucks the rabbits into the holes they've made all over the estate, through the tunnels they've burrowed, and up into a big glass receptacle. One of these bunnies is yanked down into its hole a fraction of a second before Quartermaine takes a shot at it, and as it flies through the tunnel and toward the light of the Bun-Vac 6000, it apparently thinks it has died and is going to heaven. In fact, it is destined to live in a cage in Wallace and Gromit's cavernous basement, where the rabbits threaten to make a bigger mess than the sheep that lived there in A Close Shave.

Business is going well, but then disaster strikes. A terrifying creature seems to be striking multiple gardens at once, and the Anti-Pesto squad just can't cope with it. What's more, Wallace, who has been attempting—unsuccessfully—to brainwash the rabbits with his Mind-Manipulation-O-Matic machine, seems to be missing whenever the creature strikes. One thing leads to another—including scenes that pay homage not only to werewolf movies but also the likes of Hulk and King Kong—and suffice it to say that if the trigger-happy Lord Quartermaine hits his target, the consequences for our heroes could be dire indeed.

next page... |  1 of 3 | last page