bilbopooh's Full Review: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Bland can be beautiful. This is a notion one must be prepared to accept coming into Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. You have to be able to embrace the beauty of a simpler way of living, of a hero who is as dull as he is inventive. Actually, it isn't the cheese-loving Wallace who's really the hero here; it's Gromit, his silent, long-suffering pooch who, much like Brain on Inspector Gadget, is forever getting his human counterpart out of nasty scrapes. But the point is that in some small pocket of your mind, you have to crave simplicity, and if you're an Anglophile, it sure helps. Movies don't come much more British than this.
Wallace (Peter Sallis) and Gromit are a familiar pair because creator Nick Park introduced them to the world in three brilliant shorts: The Wrong Trousers, A Grand Day Out and A Close Shave. Wallace is a bumbling inventor who leads a quiet life with his dog, Gromit. Few things give him greater pleasure than crackers and cheese, a fact attested to by his pudgy frame and his shelf full of such literary classics as Fromage to Eternity and East of Edam. His house is full of complicated contraptions, many of which don't work quite properly. A very decent sort of chap, he has a compassionate outlook on life, but his trusting nature makes him easy prey for getting hoodwinked, which is where Wallace comes in.
This particular escapade plays upon the plague rabbits have proven to be in the English countryside. Farmers and gardeners pour loving, tender care into their prize vegetables only to have them ravaged by the hungry hoppers. Wallace's latest venture is Anti-Pesto, a rabbit removal service. He serves a large clientele, but the stakes change when he receives a request from Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter), the aristocrat hosting the annual garden show. She has more rabbits than she knows what to do with, but she refuses to let her boyfriend Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) hunt them down and kill them, as he so wants to do. Instead she takes the compassionate route, and when she meets Wallace there is instant attraction - and infuriation on Victor's end.
Meanwhile, back at home Wallace is fiddling with a mind-control device designed to help him lose weight when it occurs to him that the real solution to the rabbit problem is to brainwash them out of their garden-decimating tendencies. Gromit clearly is nervous about the idea, but Wallace proceeds... with horrific consequences. The film is largely a horror-comedy, something along the lines of Young Frankenstein. We're never really frightened, but Park manages to make the sight of half-eaten vegetables and the shadow of a gigantic fluffy creature truly eerie. There are allusions to other films, most notably Frankenstein, King Kong and Watership Down. If you've ever seen the latter, the connection is inevitable, but Park drives the point home with a snippet of Bright Eyes when Gromit turns on the car radio.
The hilarity for youngsters is in the wacky way Wallace's inventions go awry and in Gromit's desperate attempts to rein them in. There's a particularly amusing sequence toward the end in which Wallace gives chase to the Were-rabbit in a kiddie-ride airplane from a carnival while attempting to shake off Victor's surly dog. I enjoyed these sequences too, but for adults I think the fun is as much in the everyday silliness of ordinary people: the obsessive way the townspeople guard their vegetables, Wallace's awkward crush on Lady Tottington, Gromit's vain attempts to put Wallace on a diet. And of course, there's the visual humor derived from the artistry of claymation, which must be a terribly tedious medium in which to work. Brilliant, but oh so slow. I read that it took five years to make this film. The craftsmanship is apparent on the screen, and knowing the care that went into every frame just makes the film all the more charming.
This doesn't have quite the blockbuster feel to it that Chicken Run did. It seems like a movie that slipped in under the radar and must have been cherished by fans but maybe not a large chunk of the general public. I found the former much more laugh-out-loud hilarious, but Curse of the Were-Rabbit was a long, calm excuse for a quiet chuckle, a peaceful spot in the midst of all the high-powered movies coming out these days, and as such it is something to treasure.
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