The Opposite of Cursed

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Nick Park & Steve Box, 2005)

There are all sorts of things that can cue you in to the fact that you’re about to see a wonderful film, but here’s a new one: fingerprints.

When Aardman made Chicken Run, they accepted that a few compromises were needed in order to make the task of animating a feature-length film possible. One of them was that they moved to a much stiffer style of puppet for most of their main characters: the chickens in that film had almost tubular heads, with expressive eyes, brows and beaks, but otherwise a generally pretty solid and unflinching head shape. If you watch one of the original Wallace and Gromit shorts before seeing Chicken Run, you’ll see the difference: in the earlier films the characters have a malleable plasticiney quality to them that gives them a much wider range of expression than the chickens of Aardman’s first full-length feature. As I settled in for the long-awaited Wallace and Gromit movie, I fully expected that some kind of similar compromise might be needed, and was prepared to accept a little bit of “tweaking” of the original character designs. Yet as the duo appeared on-screen and went through their by-now cosily familiar routines – the inclining bed, the breakfast, the superhero-like descent into their basement – I was delighted to see that I could make out the fingerprints of animators on their heads. It was an enormously reassuring thing to see. Wallace and Gromit were back on the big-screen in all their plasticine glory: they haven’t been redesigned, touched-up, Americanised or otherwise bastardised.

It’s a little shocking to check and realise it’s been more than ten years since the last proper Wallace and Gromit film, 1995’s A Close Shave. As you would expect, however, little has changed in their curiously timeless world (the only sense that time passes for these characters comes in the opening sequence, in which we get still-photo glimpses of their life together, including a fleeting but strangely touching glimpse of Gromit as a puppy). Curse of the Were-Rabbit finds them with a new business venture: Anti-Pesto, a pest-control company, which specialises in humanely relocating rabbits that would otherwise devastate neighbourhood gardens. When a rogue beast starts eating oversize vegetables just days before the local fair, Wallace and Gromit are called on to solve the problem. Their rival is Lord Victor Quatermaine (voiced by Ralph Fiennes), who is also competing with Wallace for the affections of the aristocratic Lady Tottington (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter).

The structure of the plot has vague overtones of A Close Shave, complete with the pair’s employment by a potential love-interest for Wallace, a hungry animal as a house-guest, and an evil dog. Yet familiarity is key to the appeal of these characters, and the film never becomes a re-hash. Instead, it enlarges and populates the world in which Wallace and Gromit live. The shorts progressed steadily in complexity and ambition, and while Curse of the Were-Rabbit isn’t better than its predecessors, there is the pleasant feeling that you are seeing Nick Park and his collaborators finally realise the scope to which they’d previously aspired. The previous Wallace and Gromit films were always economical with supporting characters, but the expanded resources of a Dreamworks-backed feature film means we finally get to meet the community of which the pair are a part (with a big town meeting, no less). Quartermaine is the series’ first human villain, and he’s an object-lesson in how to use celebrity voice-artists. Ralph Fiennes might seem to be typecast as a villainous Lord, but not when you hear the performance: this isn’t Fiennes doing Ralph Fiennes, but Fiennes doing a wonderful comic performance that is reinforced by comic animation. It’s a marked contrast with, for example, the uninspired way a great comedian like John Cleese was used in Shrek 2.

The main attraction, of course, is the central duo themselves. I know there are some who resist the charms of Wallace and Gromit, finding their self-conscious Englishness unbearably twee. Yet I’ve never been able to share this kind of disdain, finding the sheer lack of pretension and good-natured humour of these characters impossible to resist. (It’s much the same reason The Castle was able to get away with the folksiness of its Australians). I’ve read interviews with Nick Park, the pair’s creator, where he frets that they overdid the Americanisation in Chicken Run: given the fine job they did of judiciously introducing some American references into that film without sacrificing its essential Britishness, you would think he might have cut himself some slack. Yet you see the benefits of his vigilance in Curse of the Were-Rabbit, in which the milieu is kept strictly British and none of the eccentricities or local traits of the characters have been sacrificed. Peter Sallis’ voicework as Wallace has lost none of its gusto, and the animation of Gromit is immensely expressive. I should have known Park would never let Gromit’s design be tinkered with: Gromit’s whole character seemingly exists in his marvellously expressive plasticine eyebrows. There’s a really beautiful dignity in this long-suffering dog.

The script is sharp and funny, working simultaneously for kids and adults: the audience I saw it with included plenty of both, and all were lapping it up. As with The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, it builds satisfyingly to a big comic chase that doesn’t feel shoehorned into the film. Like the Pixar films, the Aardman features have an assuredness to their story-telling that makes what they do look absurdly easy, and you wonder why it’s so hard for a studio like Disney to consistently produce satisfying features. Of course, it isn’t easy, and the Aardman crew – again, like Pixar – deserve credit for their obvious commitment to getting a story right before moving it on to full production. Park’s direction (shared with Steve Box this time, rather than Chicken Run co-director Peter Lord) is equally assured. I’ve always thought that the painstaking nature of the animation process makes for good directors, and Park’s work is particularly notable for the fun he has with slightly over-the-top horror movie staging and camera angles. And as I alluded to at the start of this review, the stop-motion animation has a pleasantly low-tech feel to it. Despite a few minor computer-generated tweaks, this is essentially all old-style stop-motion animation, and there’s something comforting about the craftsmanship that is so evident on-screen in this type of film.

Nick Park is an inspirational figure at a time when studio animation is undergoing such upheaval: along with figures like John Lasseter and Brad Bird, he is a reminder that great animated films can still be done for big Hollywood studios. My hunch is that this will be the last Wallace and Gromit film: if it is, I’m glad the characters went out on a high. Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit is just a pure, uncomplicated good time.