Review of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) by Twelvefield — 21 Feb 2006

Wallace & Gromit's feature film makes a super family-friendly DVD. While the material defers to monster movies, especially from the Hammer Films genre, it's really a gentle, sweet, and funny film.

The previous Aardman feature, "Chicken Run" also dealt with serious subject manner in a very light-hearted way, yet Chicken Run seems to be a more dark and (pardon the pun) brooding film than W&G, by comparison.

Chicken Run also seems to be technically superior in terms of the animation quality, but there are frequent moments in W&G that really stand out as superaltive artwork. Yet Aardman, like so many other studios, is falling into the cheap lure of 3D computerized animation, so that the obvious and not-so-obvious pixel-pushing special effects actually detract from the joy of the true stop-motion work.

Animation (and Aardman) purists might balk at this -- if you are one of these people, beware of the previews on this disk, as Aardman prepares to roll out its first 3D-computer-composited feature film.

Ugh. The W&G feature film seems especially tailored to those who have more or less memorized the W&G shorts, as it does get very self-referential, especially when Wallace achieves a most unusual existential crisis in the third act.

On the other hand, those of us who are used the the very cozy world of West Wallaby Street, where the only inhabitants are the man, his dog, and the occasional antagonist, may be somewhat unselltled by the addition of several new characters in the film, whocould be seen as diluting the strength of the protagonists.

While this may be true, W&G's main engine still has enough steam to more than carry the film past the occasional gag we've seen before, or the intentionally strange English idioms, or even the very brief but noticeable slow patches in the plot line.

Films like this don't come along very often, so when they do, you'll want to make sure you see it again and again.