First Big Screen Adventure For Wallace & Gromit Doesn’t Disappoint

This past weekend, the top movie at the box office was a stop-motion animated film featuring Helena Bonham Carter as one of the lead voices. No, this isn’t a retread of last week’s column on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, but a review of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the first feature-length film starring the dynamic duo of an imaginative, yet bumbling, cheese-loving inventor and his faithful, intrepid dog.

The two characters debuted in 1989 with writer-director Nick Park’s short, A Grand Day Out, and then starred in two other Oscar-winning shorts, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. If you haven’t seen those, get thee to a video store and either rent or buy them immediately (a new DVD, which includes all three shorts, was just released in September), but in the meantime, fans and newcomers alike can enjoy their newest escapade, which is filled with sly puns, fun parodies, and all the inspired wizardry fans have come to expect from the craftspeople of Park’s Aardman Studios.

Though The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is the first big-screen adventure for Wallace and Gromit, Park took his first foray into the movie world with his freshman feature, Chicken Run, which was an inspired take-off on old-school prison-break flicks in which a cocky Yankee rooster helps some fellow fowls escape from a chicken coop and a deadly pie-making machine.

Here, aided by co-director Steve Box, Park re-introduces us to Wallace (voiced again by 84-year-old actor Peter Sallis, star of the British sitcom “Last of the Summer Wine”) and Gromit, who now run a humane animal control service called Anti-Pesto. They’re particularly busy because their city is ramping up for the annual Giant Vegetable Competition and the townspeople are on edge because pesky, hungry bunnies are besieging their gardens.

Wallace becomes particularly interested in one of their newest clients, the slightly loopy Lady Tottington (voiced in wonderfully comic manner by Bonham Carter, who gives a much different performance here than in Corpse Bride), whose manor grounds, which are currently overrun by the feisty rabbits, will be the location of the big festival.

Wallace wants to prove that Anti-Pesto can do the trick humanely, while the pompous Victor Quartermaine (a delightfully nefarious-sounding Ralph Fiennes; the normally super-serious actor definitely shows an affinity for high comedy), also a competitor for the affections of Lady Tottington, wants to take care of the problem with a more permanent solution: his gun.

Wallace and Gromit come through, of course… but just as it looks like they’ve defeated the problem, the village comes under attack by an oversized bunny that ravages the gardens under the light of the full moon and threatens to bring the annual festivities to a screeching halt.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, though filmed in a similar, stop-motion technique as Corpse Bride, is a very different film, but equally enjoyable in its own way. Whereas Tim Burton’s flick is a much more dark, lyrical and gothic tale, this adventure of Wallace and Gromit is filled with whimsy, high-flying fun and sneakily cheeky puns. Gromit is ever the crafty, Chaplinesque hero who not only qualifies as man’s best friend, but he’s also truly the brains of the operation, despite Wallace’s inventor whims.

He’s also one of the screen’s best action heroes, as fans of the shorts can attest (in fact, the climax of The Wrong Trousers can stand up alongside any of the best, sustained action sequences of any Hollywood blockbuster), and this feature-film outing doesn’t let us down, featuring loads of wacky and creative action scenes, many of which are inspired by the old Universal horror flicks.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is rated G. It is appropriate for all ages, though there are several puns and visual gags that will certainly go over the heads of the little ones.

Artistically, it’s also nice to have another mainstream, animated film that is not cut from the same cloth as some of the recent CGI-animated flicks.