Wallace & Gromit:
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

An Oscar-winning comedy duo finally debuts in a feature film, and it's just as harebrained as you'd expect

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit Voices by Peter Sallis, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes, Peter Kay, Nicholas Smith and Liz Smith Directed by Nick Park and Steve Box Written by Bob Baker, Mark Burton, Steve Box and Nick Park DreamWorks Animation SKG Rated G Opens Oct. 7

he brilliant inventor Wallace and his even more intelligent dog Gromit have their own business, Anti-Pesto, as we meet them in their first feature film. Wallace (voiced by Sallis) has noticed that the veggies in the neighborhood are being ravaged by an abundance of bunnies, and that's particularly bad timing, because the Giant Vegetable Competition is approaching. So, with their Anti-Pesto security system, they are notified about the long-eared intruders (sometimes through a seeing-eye garden gnome) and yanked out of bed by their wake-up contraptions, and they humanely capture the culprits.

They take the rabbits home to their basement—which is beginning to look like the starship Enterprise in "The Trouble With Tribbles." Wallace and Gromit are heroes, making the front page of the paper every time they catch a rabbit, and that draws the attention of the highbrow hostess of the vegetable competition, Lady Tottington (Bonham Carter). She has a bit of a rabbit infestation of her own, and although she loves the cuddly bunnies, she can't have them around during the vegetable contest, and her snotty suitor Victor Quartermaine (Fiennes) is about to declare an all-out hunting war on them. Lady Tottington is delighted by the humane way the Anti-Pesto guys suck the bunnies out of the ground with their Bun-Vac 6000—which inadvertently also sucks in Quartermaine and his toupee into it. Lady Tottington is rather taken by Wallace, and Gromit gets jealous—complicating the mysterious events that they are about to face.

While Gromit is stuffing the bunnies into the basement, Wallace is trying to figure out a way to control the bunnies with his latest invention, the Mind-O-Matic. Gromit is increasingly irritated that his master—er, sidekick?—is cheating on his diet by eating cheese, and the Mind-O-Matic could control Wallace's urges and perhaps even control the rabbits' feeding frenzy for veggies. Wallace stashes his cheese in a bookshelf filled with books called "East of Edam," "Grated Expectations" and "Gone With the Cheese." The Mind-O-Matic seems to be somehow connected to the latest rash of devastating vegetable ravaging caused by a super-rabbit, or Were-Rabbit. Gromit is even more concerned because he's nursing a prized super-cucumber in a greenhouse and hopes the rogue rabbit won't damage his prized produce. And so the dog ends up sniffing out the culprit, with some surprising results.

Claymation makes its mark

Plasticine figure animation, or claymation, developed by Nick Park and his team for their runaway hit Chicken Run five years ago, takes a long time to do. Each minute of filming requires a minimum of 24 camera setups. So it's fascinating that within a few weeks, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and the long-anticipated Wallace & Gromit feature are both being released—and both with the distinct voice of Bonham Carter. Inevitably, the two will be compared, and it's very obvious that Corpse Bride is far more entertaining.

That's not to say that the man and his dog aren't entertaining. It's just that the whole story, even the big surprise, are somewhat predictable and feel a bit familiar. Of course, the team of animators obviously love movies, so there are references to Ray Harryhausen, King Kong and even Frankenstein. But it's more fun to watch the goofy inventor and his dog just hanging around their house with their Rube Goldberg contraptions than it is to watch them on car or plane chases in an overly contrived plot. The Aardman team loves puns, and it does get into the risque territory, with Lady Tottington holding up her melons at chest level and spouting off some Mae West-like lines. But it is G-rated, and so it's safe for children—but will they enjoy it as much as adults? It is very British, after all, and sometimes hard to understand, even though they reshot a few lines to make it more clear.

Wallace & Gromit are already an established lovable team, much like an old couple. Gromit, the silent dog, says more with a raised eyebrow and a pained expression than his human counterpart. They are a great Oscar-and-Felix team, and their two animated shorts, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, won Oscars. Also, two of the voice actors in the film, Bonham Carter and Fiennes, are Academy Award nominees, so that's why the expectations may have been higher for their first feature. The contraptions, the characters, the expressions and the action are magnificent, but overall the movie seemed rather simplistic, linear and predictable. It simply turned into a game of finding the sight gags in the background and listening for the puns—even musical puns, like the Watership Down rabbit movie's theme song playing in the background at one point. Stop-motion animation can be successful, and this and Corpse Bride may prove that audiences like it and could revive the genre. As long as it doesn't follow in the footsteps of Team America, a film that killed any more marionette features for a while (unfortunately).

No doubt Wallace and Gromit will be back for another movie, perhaps with a bit more bite next time. —Mike