Film
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
- Director
- Nick Park, Steve Box
- Certificate
- U
- Running Time
- 83 mins
Prior to its release back in 2005, alarming stories from well-placed sources at Aardman told of American interference, disastrous test screenings, and DreamWorks execs practically disowning The Curse of the Were-Rabbit on the grounds that “it doesn’t fit the formula”. These same execs, you’ll note, were happy to green-light the dreadful Shark Tale. But what wound up on screen is a delight, effortlessly rising to the challenge of expanding those W&G shorts to feature length. Apart from a handful of double-entendres that it’s hard to imagine Nick Park writing, there’s little here to betray the hand of a corporate meddler.
Perhaps deliberately, the opening scenes are somewhat familiar, introducing dim, increasingly corpulent dairy product enthusiast inventor Wallace (Peter Sallis) and his mouthless yet endlessly expressive canine sidekick to the half-dozen or so members of the audience who haven’t heard of them before. Then it’s on to the new adventure as W&G find their humane pest control business thriving in the run-up to their village’s annual vegetable growing competition. But when their home fills up with rabbits sucked from the ground using Wallace’s bun-vac machine, he comes up with a new device to put them off veg for life. Meanwhile, Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham-Carter), with whom Wallace is infatuated, is being pressured by her bloodsports fanatic suitor Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) to allow him to blast the cute, squeaky bunnies with his shotgun.
Pleasingly, the 50s-style northern terraces of West Wallaby Street and its environs were not polluted by modish references to the latest soon-to-be-forgotten blockbusters, which means that The Curse of the Were-Rabbit will retain its classic feel for decades to come. Apart from a brief, forgivable nod to Watership Down, this is a beautifully observed and lovingly crafted plasticine homage to the Universal monster movies of the 30s, with a pacy plot, superb comic timing, and plenty of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it incidental funny business. The voice cast are spot-on, especially Peter Kay’s village copper, the attention to detail quite extraordinary (keep an eye on Lady Tottington’s ever-changing outfits), and the climactic dogfight right up with the chase sequence in The Wrong Trousers.
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