Review of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) by Markb. — 12 Oct 2005

Any reasonable listing of the greatest silent comic actors in film history would have to include Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd...and Gromit the dog. The four-legged half of Nick Park's justifiably beloved plasticine-animated duo Wallace and Gromit , the pooch never speaks, and doesn't even have a visible mouth (we DO see him drinking coffee in one of this film's early scenes).

..but he expresses more with just his eyes in 85 minutes than many actors and actresses have been able to do in 40-year-plus careers with their entire bodies AND voices. It's often been said that Gromit is infinitely smarter than his eccentric inventor master, but I see their intellectual relationship a bit differently: Wallace is a big picture man who sees the forest, Gromit a detail guywho's aware of all the trees.

As such, they're a perfect team, and don't you wish more corporations (and countries) were as balanced in THEIR leadership? In their first full-length feature (but hopefully not their only one) W & G run a 'humane pest control service' called Anti-Pesto, which attempts to save their small village's annual vegetable competition by capturing the town's lettuce-loving bunny population, then brainwashing them to NOT want to eat their veggies.

Delightful complications ensue, with lots of slapstick action to enthrall kids, wonderfully good, bad and so-bad-they're-good puns (check out cheese-phile Wallace's bookshelf!) and parodies of Frankenstein, King Kong and even David Cronenberg's version of The Fly to tickle adults, and plenty of genuine charm and heart to captivate everybody.

(Love how most of the bunnies, once captured, become a kind of squeaky Greek chorus to everything that follows.) Nick Park and codirector Steve Box have plenty of what Hollywood filmmakers working both in and out of animation could use a lot more of: pure integrity.

Here, as in Park's previous W&G shorts and his equally wonderful Chicken Run, he utterly resists the temptation to Americanize the setting, the language or much of the material to broaden the across-the-pond demographic; consequently, paradoxically and gratifyingly, his creations get the same unwavering devotion from Yanks of all ages as do those other uncompromising British imports, Harry Potter and The Beatles.

while it's easy to marvel at the incredibly painstaking hard work involved in adjusting and moving Wallace, Gromit and their supporting cast and world around by hand in every single frame, what really makes Wallace & Gromit: The curse of the Were-Rabbit by far 2005's best animated feature, as well as an all-time classic, is that from every standpoint (especially script), Park and company make it all look and feel so effortless.