thePeanutBloggery

If you skipped Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, you probably contributed to the split between Dreamworks and Aardman Animation. Now you feel guilty enough to watch it, don’t you? Well, don’t watch it out of guilt. Watch it, because it’s an incredibly smart, creative, and funny film.

Using stop motion clay animation (like Gumby and Davey and Goliath), Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit concerns an annual Giant Vegetable Competition, which has gone on for 500 years and appears to be the most important part of the townspeople’s lives. Wallace and Gromit run “Anti-Pesto,” a vegetable security and humane pest control company, but when a vegetable ravaging beast threatens to ruin the competition, the rabbit-chasing duo find themselves in over their heads. Wallace is a cheese-loving inventor whose creations seem to complicate rather than simplify life, and Gromit is his faithful dog who cooks, drives, and even knits in his spare time. Peter Sallis provides the Yorkshire accented voice of Wallace, but Gromit relies solely on body language and facial expressions for communication, yet he speaks soliloquies.

While this movie is chock full of adult jokes that fly over kids’ heads (most animated features are these days), the humor intended for children is also genuinely entertaining for adults. I have to giggle every time a bunny says “weeeee” as it is tossed, sucked, or blown out of the Bunny Vac. Still the highlight is a brilliant hat-tip toward the end to King Kong, perhaps the most famous stop motion feature.

Wallace and Gromit aren’t new to film. They are the subject of three half-hour shorts including A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), and A Close Shave (1995) for which they earned three Oscar nominations and two awards for Best Animated Short. They had a lot to live up to with the first feature length film, which they did by winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

You may want to warm up for the movie with one of the 2.5 minute shorts from the series entitled Cracking Contraptions. Here’s my favorite, “The Snoozatron.”

I also like “Shopper 13,” “The Tellyscope,” and “The Turbo Diner.”

Spend this Friday night in with Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and if you have a beloved dog, invite him to curl up on the couch with you…after he makes you some popcorn and knits you some slippers.

Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is available on HBO On Demand until March 25.