Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Wallace and his loyal dog, Gromit, set out to discover the mystery behind the garden sabotage that plagues their village and threatens the annual giant vegetable growing contest.

AMG Plot: Eccentric inventor Wallace (voice of Peter Sallis) and his faithful if often perplexed dog Gromit are back in their first feature-length adventure from animator Nick Park. Wallace and Gromit have launched a new business venture just in time for a major gardening competition in their neighborhood of West Wallaby. "Anti-Pesto" is a humane pest-relocation service in which Wallace and Gromit capture rabbits and other critters who have been eating the produce from local gardens and give them new homes somewhere else. Business has been going well, and when the woman hosting the garden show, Lady Tottington (voice of Helena Bonham Carter), discovers a massive tribe of rabbits has been making a mess of her garden, she calls in Wallace and Gromit to move the bunnies elsewhere. Wallace is quite taken with Lady Tottington, but he's not the only one — Victor Quartermaine (voice of Ralph Fiennes) is a slick but arrogant upper-class type who wants to win Lady Tottington's hand (and fortune) and is convinced he can do a better job capturing the rabbits than Wallace. However, Wallace's attempts to brainwash the rabbits away from veggies using his latest invention has disastrous results, and soon Wallace has to deal with a beastly bunny as well as a heavily-armed Quartermaine. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit followed Park's previous film with the duo, A Close Shave, by ten years, and was produced after Park broke through to mainstream success with the feature Chicken Run. — Mark Deming

AMG Review: While folks don't generally cite Nick Park as a major figure in the independent filmmaking movement, there's no arguing that he's a director who has created a handful of truly distinctive movies and a clearly recognizable creative voice while working entirely on his own terms, both within and without the Hollywood studio system. Park has fashioned a visual and narrative style every bit as strong as Wes Anderson or Paul Thomas Anderson, and he's a lot funnier than either of them, and half the fun of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is seeing a movie that's so obviously the product of one man's (very witty) personal vision emerge as a tent-pole release for a major studio. Anyone who was afraid that the DreamWorks brass were going to mess with what made the early Wallace and Gromit shorts so much fun can breathe easy — if The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a bit more manic in its pace and broader in its humor than A Close Shave or A Grand Day Out (which is probably the product of its 85-minute running time as much as anything else), the characters and their comic style remain thankfully intact, and if one buys into Chuck Jones' theory that an animator is really an actor, then Park and his crew have delivered Oscar-caliber performances as Gromit (whose eyes are more expressive than most human actors onscreen the same year) and Wallace (though Peter Sallis' veddy-British voice work certainly deserves a mention as well). Park and his collaborator Steve Box have packed their frames with layers upon layers of comic detail (if ever a movie was made with the DVD freeze frame in mind, it's this one), and in between laughs they've delivered a loving homage to the classic Hammer horror films of the 1950s and '60s, with a keen eye toward their shadowy visual style and color scheme. The humor manages to be smart and just a touch corny at the same time, and the laughs roll out consistently throughout the movie's running time. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a thoroughly and delightfully enjoyable moviegoing experience, and an even better big-screen vehicle for Nick Park's gifts than Chicken Run. — Mark Deming