Featuring the voices of Peter Sallis, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Peter Kay, and Nicholas Smith

“Wallace and Gromit:  The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” is an enormously entertaining bit of stop-motion fluff, marking the feature-length debut of its eponymous clay heroes.  I must concede, though, that it cheats itself out of greatness by a few too many concessions to the conventions of mainstream kids’ films.  If the previews and the “Madagascar” short film before “Were-Rabbit” are any indication, the vogue for children’s movies is noise, and lots of it.  Maybe that’s the vogue for grown-up movies, too.  The improbably lovable “Wallace & Gromit” shorts—“A Grand Day Out,” “The Wrong Trousers,” and “A Close Shave”— are certainly kid-friendly, but calling them “children’s films” might be a stretch.  Much of their charm derives from how patient, gentle, and leisurely they are.  One can’t imagine that the same children who thrive on computer-generated penguins who know kung-fu and soldier-talk would be able to sit still for “A Grand Day Out’s” quiet cheese outing to the moon.

Because, no, Wallace and Gromit are not stand-up comedians, celebrities, or pop culture icons made to voice Pixar avatars.  Nemo and his Dad always feel like they’re glancing over their shoulders at us, as if to say “isn’t this funny, isn’t this clever?”  Wallace and Gromit are the funniest kind of character:  they don’t know they’re being watched.  They don’t know anything they’re doing is funny.  They’re kin to “The Triplets of Belleville” or people out of a Coen Brothers’ movie.  Their creators convince us that Wallace and Gromit were “discovered,” not created.  When Wallace puts up flower-print wallpaper in the spaceship he made in his basement, he’s not doing it to make us laugh.  We laugh because he’s so focused on his happy little life that he thinks that a spaceship needs wallpaper.

Which brings us to “Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”  Missing is a bit of the gentleness, the slowness, those moments when Wallace’s mellow befuddlement fills us with affection.  “Were-Rabbit” is a bit too revved up and edited a little too fast.  The ubiquitous Hans Zimmer gives it an oversized orchestral score that needlessly reinforces every emotion and drowns out what could have been sweet moments of silence.  It’s like Wallace and Gromit creators Nick Park and Steve Box made one movie, then handed it over to a composer who gave it an extra layer that it didn’t need at all.

“Were-Rabbit” can also be faulted—and here’s when you need to follow me closely—for too many special effects.  Just a moment, you say, isn’t the entire movie done in stop-motion clay animation?  Isn’t it one long special effect?  That’s true but, just like a superfluous score has been put on top of a charming film, a superfluous layer of digital effects has been put on top of the effects that we really want to see.  We want to see little clay people worked by hand, not digitally manipulated.  The same layer of fuzzy electronic gloss that coats many live-action special effects films—think “Kingdom of Heaven” or any of the recent superhero flicks—has now invaded the pleasant world of stop-motion.  We even may find ourselves asking heretical questions during “Were-Rabbit” like, is every single limb and facial expression being created by an artist’s fingers, or are some of them done by computer?

Which isn’t to say that “Curse of the Were-Rabbit” isn’t a terrific entertainment.  On the contrary, it’s probably one of the best movies of the year.  I went in expecting greatness and only got very goodness instead.  Anyway, Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) is still the inventor, a hopelessly middle-class Englishman, armed with endless resourcefulness, optimism, and sweater vests, and Gromit is his dog.  Wallace is at once enormously imaginative and enormously unimaginative:  in “A Grand Day Out” he makes a spaceship to go on a lunar picnic, in “The Wrong Trousers” he gets NASA equipment to help with dog walks, and in “A Close Shave” he uses any number of Rube Goldberg inventions for window washing.  This is fitting, considering humankind, as a species, has put thousands of satellites in space, but few of them are death rays, alien finders, or places to live.  No, most of them are for telephones and cable TV.

Wallace is such an intensely likeable, daffy sod that we understand why Gromit—who is, 9 times out of 10, the brighter of the two—is so devoted to him.  Wallace is utterly transparent, thinks little that he is not willing to say, and is cheerful without bound so long as his genius can be put to work and rewarded with tea, cheese, and crackers.  Gromit, on the other hand, never says anything, sees much more than Wallace, and is capable of jealousy, prejudice, and instinctive likes and dislikes.  His feelings can be hurt and his ego can be bruised, and he rolls his eyes a lot at Wallace, a motion of which his human counterpart doesn’t seem capable.

In “Were-Rabbit” Wallace and Gromit run Anti-Pesto, a non-lethal pest control service that captures rabbits but does not harm them.  After an exciting night saving the townsfolk’s vegetables, we return to Wallace’s house to find rabbits everywhere:  in cages, in the fridge, in every nook and cranny, eating everything.  We can imagine Wallace getting all fired up about pest control, even getting the job off the ground, without ever considering what he would do with the bunnies after he caught them.  He can’t kill them—could you?  In “Were-Rabbit,” the bright, stupid-eyed little bunnies are the most wretchedly adorable creatures you could possibly imagine.  Things really get out of hand when Wallace uses his mind-swapping gadget to try to “rehabilitate” the rabbits, i.e., train them not to eat people’s vegetables.  The experiment goes wrong—as we imagine a lot of Wallace’s experiments going wrong—releasing unto the unwitting populace the dreaded Were-Rabbit…

Rather than expanding on the characters of Wallace and Gromit—which would be a tactical error because they are as developed as they need to be—“Were-Rabbit” reaches feature-length by creating an entire town as eccentric and lovable as its two protagonists.  “W&G” co-creator Nick Park was also behind the adorable “Chicken Run,” which sports a huge cast of chickens who are essentially middle-aged Cockney housewives.  The standard array of English country folk—grubby old men, crotchety housewives, batty nobility, stodgy vicars, and an “alright, what’s all this then?” bobby named PC Mackintosh—are given exciting and exaggerated life in clay form.

The Were-Rabbit has picked an unfortunate time to strike, what with the 517th annual vegetable competition being only 3 days away.  The panicky townsfolk go to measures usually reserved for Frankensteins and Draculas in order to protect their ridiculously over-sized melons and pumpkins.  (At one point, a local vendor slaps a sign reading “Angry Mob Supplies” on his store.)  All this culminates in the kind of slapsticky, physics-defying climax familiar to enthusiasts of the “W&G” short films, involving a gun that can fire a golden carrot, and a dogfight that’s accurate in both senses of the word.

Wallace woos the high-voiced Lady Tottington, who owns the big manor, looks vaguely like a carrot, and is drawn to Wallace’s humane approach to animals.  Her voice is provided by Helena Bonham-Carter, who can be heard in three movies this summer (this one, “Corpse Bride,” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) but only seen in one.  Competing for her heart is the swaggering big-game hunter Victor Quatermain, perpetually swinging his gun, his gut, and his pompadour.  He is voiced by Ralph Fiennes (“The Constant Gardener’s” constant gardener), whose heretofore unheard skills as a voice actor can only be called a revelation.  Usually when we hear big names in cartoons we’re distracted, not because they’re famous, but because they’re not good at voice acting.  The rich, pompous ass who thinks he can own a woman is one of the most hackneyed and uninteresting types in the movies, but Fiennes—as well as the animators—breathe no end of life and vigor into him.

The other pleasant surprise is the arm-waving, panicky vicar (“to stop the Were-Rabbit, you will need…a bullet!”), whose chief duty is to make dire predictions and intone things solemnly while his face is illuminated by lightning.  His voice drove me mad with its familiarity.  It took my genius wife to recognize that the anonymously-named Nicholas Smith had played the tidy bureaucrat Mr. Rumbold on the long-running BBC comedy “Are You Being Served?”

At about 80 minutes, “Were-Rabbit” is as long as it needs to be.  It is so guileless, so innocent, so cheerful, so energetic, and not at all tedious, even as it follows the familiar path of the village monster movie.  Just writing this review makes me want to see it again.  Count on it to be nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, alongside “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” and some computer-generated nonsense, and expect it to win.


Finished Monday, October 10th, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night