Nick Park’s beloved British claymation characters invade America in their feature length debut, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The movie revamps the old black-and-white horror genre by throwing in the antics of the two endearing and often bumbling main characters … and lots of vegetables.
In Were-Rabbit, Wallace, a cheese-loving, absent-minded inventor, is up to his usual hi-jinks, running Anti-Pesto, a service to guard the villagers’ precious vegetables from the ravenous rabbit population. Gromit, his silent, sweater-knitting dog, follows behind, fixing his blunders.
The annual giant vegetable contest is just around the corner when a giant were-rabbit begins wreaking havoc on the town’s crops. Wallace is determined to save his business and his veggies, quell the angry mob of villagers and stop the vegetable massacre.
Wallace and Gromit started with “A Grand Day Out,” creator Nick Park’s graduate thesis project about a man and his dog building a rocket and having a picnic on the moon. Since the duo’s 1989 premiere, Park’s follow-ups, “The Wrong Trousers” (1993) and “A Close Shave” (1995) have been released in 45 countries and have won the Academy Award for best animated short. Park’s style may look familiar to fans of 2000’s Chicken Run, which Park made before making a feature-length version of Wallace and Gromit.
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is sure to please old fans, but will also pick up new ones. In the vein of Shrek, there are some veiled adult jokes that protect the innocent, but leave everyone else giggling.
Advancements in claymation technology and the use of CGI (making such wonders as floating bunnies possible), make for a seamless and smooth look, but Park maintains that at least 99 percent of the animation is claymation, not digital effects.
The project was a long, grueling one that took five years, half of which was shooting.
“Days were good if we got a minute’s worth of footage,” Park explains. Park has certainly come a long way from his start in his parent’s garage making movies at age 13. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a mature step in the development of his characters and the years of planning certainly shine through. m
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