Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit review
Wallace and trusty canine comrade Gromit have become something of an English institution. With their first escapade, A Grand Day Out, now past its sixteenth birthday, the trilogy is now just about old enough to have gained classic status. Wallace’s trademark unrealistically-wide grin and Gromit’s accompanying concerned facial expression have become iconic, and the three television episodes have become must-re-run Christmas viewing.
The critics speak with one voice on this latest outing, citing it as a culmination of the series, surpassing its predecessors, transforming medium from small-screen spectacle to big-screen blockbuster, and yet staying true to its modest roots.
Is it even possible that Wallace & Gromit can have achieved such dizzying success and critical acclaim without recourse to totally selling out?
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit follows the pair after they have settled down into steady self-employment as gadget-happy pest controllers Anti-Pesto, keeping the generic northern town in which they live free of rabbits. Their array of inventive contraptions is mirrored by similarly inventive parodies, with a wonderful over-hammed, Thunderbirds-esque launch sequence immediately following the titles introducing a swathe of semi-plausible machinery.
However, despite such successes in this regard as the wonderful bunny vacuum, the array of inconceivable gadgetry is stretched a little too far with what is, quite literally, the film’s ‘plot device’: a large, head-mounted goldfish bowl which is, apparently, a brainwashing device. Where building a rocket to go to the Moon or creating a pair of mechanical trousers seemed odd, but plausible, this contraption stretched my credulity beyond breaking point.
The other issue I have with the brain-washer is that its use is illustrated almost exclusively through use of computer graphics. Indeed, the film is saturated with computer effects; starting with little tweaks to the Plasticine reality (smoke rising from gun barrels, bubbles in water bottles) but eventually culminating with a full-blown mushroom-cloud-shaped ball of fiery gas in an explosion towards the end of the film. This, for me, rather discards some of the point of stop-motion; yes, clay is a restrictive medium, but thinking around this is half the excitement of the medium, isn’t it? If you’re going to add detail to your animation by calling in the computers, why waste five years doing it in clay to begin with? Cut out the middle-man and go straight to George Lucas or Peter Jackson who will happily provide you with teraflops of computing power to create CGI which will utterly suck the character from your production!
Anyway, lest the same criticisms be levelled at me as those at Jackson or Lucas, I should probably examine the scripting and characterisation rather than assessing the film entirely on its merits as a vehicle for gadgets and effects…
Gromit, I can happily report, is still the sweet, silent sidekick he has always been, constantly looking out for Wallace’s welfare and waistline. His anthropomorphic antics are still every bit as entertaining and endearing as they have been in the past.
Wallace, however, has been emboldened from introvert inventor to implausible cross-class ladies’ man, with a fairly large portion of the film being dedicated to his ‘romance’ with Lady Tottington, the lady of a local manor into whose employ they are called.
This subplot leads to a number of silly innuendoes which deviate entirely from the original Wallace & Gromit creed. Indeed many of the jokes have a clinical feel, like so many American team-written blockbusters, and have less of the small-town British humour that we’d come to expect from the trilogy which came before it. Wallace & Gromit seem to have taken a leaf from the highly successful, but, I would argue, somewhat inappropriate, Shrek book.
As if the Shrek analogy hadn’t been taken far enough, the were-rabbit, which I had hoped would turn out to be a cruel hoax or have some rational explanation, turns out to be not only real, but actually the night-time transformation of…well, something, I shan’t give away one of the small surprises of the film…taking my poor, already-stretched credulity and jumping on it a few times for good measure.
Supporting characters are somewhat one-dimensional, with a foolhardy and wantonly cruel villain (accompanied by his lawsuit-from-Muttley-worthy dog), a lady who loves all things fluffy, and a crowd of generic villagers providing almost the entire background. However, the entertaining “back in my day” interjections from one of the villagers, despite that being the only aspect of his entire personality, almost absolves them of their decision not to develop any other characters.
Were-Rabbit is certainly joke-packed, but its style has more in common with modern CGI blockbusters than with its humble thirty-minute origins which so endeared it to the British public.
Like the new Star Wars trilogy, you probably ought to see it, but, if you’re expecting classic claymation to rival chasing an evil penguin in disguise on a model railway, you’ll probably be disappointed.
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