For my last birthday I decided to embark on a new movie watching challenge (similar to ones I’ve done before here and here). This year’s challenge is to do four streams of films, and watch one of each stream in each month. On top of that, we’ll have six “wild card” slots through out the year, to bring it up to 54th movies for my 54th year (I am now 53). You can read more about the plan here. This is post #45.
Spoilers Ahead
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
Directed by: Nick Park and Steve Box
Viewing Stream: Animated Movies
My daughter Johanna, who is curating my animated films for me, says she remembers watching this movie and thinking it’s really good. It’s also from a studio we haven’t seen yet, and though it’s claymation, it’s quite different from the other claymation films we’ve watched, with characters that move differently than those other movies.
What it is about: On the eve of a giant vegetable contest, inventor Wallace and his dog Gromit run a humane pest-control business protecting their English country village from rabbits and other pests. In an attempt to brainwash the rabbits to dislike vegetables, Wallace accidentally creates a monstrous creature known as a were-rabbit. At first, they believe this to be a mutated version of Hutch, the rabbit Wallace attempted to brainwash, but its eventually revealed that the were-rabbit is Wallace himself, having taken on the characteristics of the rabbit as an accidental side effect of his experiments. Lord Victor Quartermaine, a crazed hunter who is jealous of Wallace’s friendship with Lady Campanula Tottington (a wealthy woman he is attempting to romance for her money), attempts to kill Wallace, but Gromit is able to save him and set him free from the were-rabbit curse.
Starring The voice cast includes Peter Sallis as Wallace (and Hutch once he gains some of Wallace’s characteristics), Ralph Fiennes as Lord Victor Quartermaine, and Helena Bonham Carter as Campanula “Totty” Tottington. Peter Kay plays the local constable, Nicholas Smith as the superstitious town vicar. Mark Gatiss and Geraldine McEwan also play town residents.
My thoughts: I’m running behind here so I don’t have a lot to say about this movie, except that I really liked it.
I’ve long had a fondness for Aardman Entertainment. Chicken Run and Arthur Christmas are both full-blown winners for me, with their eclectic British sensibilities–this is the kind of all-ages entertainment that I really enjoy.
Apparently, Nick Park and the team who behind Wallace & Gromit resisted pressure from DreamWorks to find ways to glam up their production. They refused to recast Peter Sallis with a bigger name actor and to make other changes to try to make their production more appealing to an American audience. The story goes that the team resisted that change with the comment like, “If the way we were doing things was good enough to win an Oscar, then it’s good enough for this movie.”
This turned out to be true in some ways, as this movie also went on to win an Oscar (“Best Animated Feature”). But it also turned out to be wrong in some ways, as the film didn’t make as much money as DreamWorks was hoping, and so it may have contributed to them cancelling their distribution deal with Aardman.
That might have been sad for the people working for the company at the time, but from my point of view here, nearly twenty years later, looking back at a completed movie, I’m pretty happy that Park & co stuck to their guns.
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit works, really well as a stand-alone, feature length variation on the original, short subject Wallace & Gromit films. The movie smartly strikes the balance between the the zany antics of the more compressed source material, with the bigger landscape that a feature film allows.
We don’t exactly go deeper with Wallace, but we go broader, getting to explore the world around our heroes. This gives the filmmakers the chance to develop some new characters—especially the movie’s villain, Lord Victor Quartermaine, and Wallace’s new love-interest, Lady Tottington. This allows the likes of Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter to lend their voice talents to the film, which definitely elevates the material.
And we also get to see a lot of the quirky English village that our heroes live in, which is the perfect sort of setting for this franchise to have a lot of fun with. Wallace’s home is jam-packed with oddballs and extreme personalities, including a superstitious clergymen and farmers prone to overreaction. And everyone is obsessed with vegetables.
The other thing I appreciate about the film is the balance it strikes between being “family friendly” and being a bit “dark and scary”. This is something that in general I feel the British excel at (see the likes of Mary Poppins or Doctor Who for other examples of what this might look like). Were-Rabbit never gets too creepy or disturbing, but it definitely it avoids being overly-saccherine.
The Were-Rabbit creature is legitimately monstrous, and the humanized rabbit that takes on a version of Wallace’s personality is just bizarre and absurdly weird—it’s funny but also kind of unsettling.
The end result is that the film is not only funny, but it provides an emotional experience which has got enough dynamics to it to hold my interest and keep me engaged.
Incidentally, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is one of two major stop-motion animated films that came out that year. The other one was Corpse Bride, which I watched in this series and wrote back here. Both movies feature Helena Bonham Carter in pivotal roles—quite the niche career she was developing at the time!
Check out the Masterlist here.
Blue Towel Productions 