12 January, 2006

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Earlier this week I went to see Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It was fucking awesome!! If you haven't seen it, rush to your local cinema right now! Otherwise, it'll be out on DVD on 7 Februrary.

W&G are a couple claymation characters invented by Nick Park over in the UK. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is their first feature-length film. Prior to this, they starred in three 30-minute shorts: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave. Wallace is an old fashioned English everyman who likes to invent and build various contraptions. In addition, he is a hard-core turophile. Gromit is his dog. Unlike Wallace, Gromit never speaks and instead he communicates via his facial expressions. It is he who is forced to save Wallace while he is on his flights of fancy or when his contraptions run amok.



In Curse of the Were-Rabbit, W&G are the proprietors of the Anti-Pesto humane pest control service and it is mere days before the town's Giant Vegetable Contest sponsored by the local gentry in the form of Lady Tottington. W&G rid her estate of some pesky rabbits and it is revealed that Lady Tottington has some affection for Wallace. This incident also introduces us to Victor Quartermaine who seeks Lady Tottington's hand in marriage. victor sought to shoot the rabbits but was upstaged by Wallace and his humane vacuum system. With captured rabbits piling up in the basement, Wallace tries out one of his inventions on a test case. This invention messes with a subject's mind and Wallace seeks to rid the rabbits of their desire for produce. He connects his own mind to that of the test rabbit and switches on the power. Well, his little Clockwork Orange conditioning goes awry and soon the town finds a giant were-rabbit pillaging its gardens. Hillarity ensues.

SPOILER ALERT!











It turns out that Wallace is the giant were-rabbit. One of the funniest scenes in the film takes place after Gromit makes this discovery. He drives Wallace out into the woods hoping to keep him far from the veg gardens of the townspeople when he becomes the were-rabbit. The country road is blocked by a fallen tree and so Wallace tries to move it. Then Quartermaine appears followed by a full moon. Gromit locks himself inside the lorry Quartermaine is thrown onto the bonnet as Wallace is transmogrifying into the were-rabbit and he looks at Gromit through the windscreen in terror. Gromit just looks back at him and shrugs.











END SPOILERS











Personally, I just found the whole movie to be really funny. There were the little sight gags like the names of the books on shelves; light-hearted bits of naughtiness when Lady Tottington would hold a couple veggies up to her chest and ask Wallace what he thought of them; plus lots of goofy expressions. Part of the reason I like W&G so much is that the characters just look cool. Certain features are caricatured or exaggerated. For instance, the eyes of the characters are set very close together. And Gromit just looks cool with no mouth, big floppy ears, big, black round nose, and his arching eyebrows. Plus I just adore the claymation. Nothing against CGI flicks like Shrek, but there's just something about claymation which CGI work cannot replicate. It's the organic looks and not-quite smooth motion. Plus I caught the odd fingerprint on the clay in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It has such a neat homespun look to it.

I want to admit here that I'm a sensitive 80s kinda guy and that my eyes welled up with tears when Gromit's did at the end. And being from Wisconsin, I appreciate the prominent role of cheese in W&G.

By all means, see this movie!

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