Wallace & Gromit in: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT	Image courtesy of Dream Works Animation
Rabbits, rabbits everywhere, and not one of them to frame – unless you just happen to run across a freakishly large orange one who has an odd hankerin’ for smelly cheese.  It’s about time Nick Park finally paid attention to the children he abandoned back in 1995 while making Chicken Run.  OK, if you want to get technical, Wallace and Gromit weren’t really latchkey kids for a full 10 years.  He only abandoned them for 5; but, only because it’s taken Park and Aardman Animation the last 5 years to complete the stop-motion animation for Curse of the Were-Rabbit.   But, don’t worry, things haven’t changed too much for everyone’s favorite dynamic duo.  Or, have they?  The cheese loving inventor Wallace (Peter Sallis) and his silent canine partner Gromit run “Anti-Pesto,” a semi-humane rabbit extermination business, in a rural English village whose occupants are obsessed with enormously large…er, uh…vegetables.  I guess you can call “Anti-Pesto” humane – as long as you don’t belong to PETA and aren’t offended by a large vacuum sucking pesky rabbits out of gardens.  What I can’t figure out is how they have enough room to store all of those snared rabbits in the basement of their house once the damn things start multiplying.  Following in typical Wallace and Gromit fashion, the intelligent, non-speaking half of the duo (Gromit) spends most of the movie cleaning up the disasters left behind by his absent-minded master Wallace.  Of course, because this is Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Gromit’s biggest challenge turns out to be capturing the giant creature that’s been destroying numerous gardens by the light of the full moon.  You know, the beast probably wouldn’t have been that big of a deal; but, his voracious appetite didn’t surface until days before Lady Tottington's (Helena Bonham Carter) annual Giant Vegetable Contest.
Image courtesy of Dream Works Animation			The unmistakable bad puns of British humor really begin to surface as soon as the annoying Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) arrives on the scene.  I actually had Monty Python flashbacks when the smarmy bastard carefully loaded his hunting rifle with “24 carat” gold bullets before chasing the were-rabbit.  I wonder if Victor also has someone following him around with coconuts.
According to director Park, Curse of the Were-Rabbit is "the world's first vegetarian horror movie;" and, for once, the description’s right.  From the Frankenstein-like monster creation, all the way to the quasi-King Kong ending, Were-Rabbit is full of postmodern horror.  Hell, there’s even an entire scene punctuated by lightning and a “Scooby Doo” style chase through the woods in the middle of the night.  However, once the film switches from substance to spectacle, leaving behind the more clever scenes (like the double entendre Austin Powers melon homage), it starts losing its witty punch.  But, where the movie really starts to falter is in the last 30 minutes when it resorts to using campy chase scenes to fill in some of the lagging time gaps.  Because the absolute worst one has Gromit and Phillip (Victor’s dog) in their own airplane version of the “Wacky Races,” I swore I heard Phillip give a Muttley-esque snicker in the middle of the damn thing.  As long as you’re willing to overlook the “cheese” factor of Were-Rabbit’s final act, Wallace and Gromit won’t disappoint.  Even though it doesn’t have any memorable belly laughs, you’ll still find yourself giggling at all of the witty – albeit a tad campy – British humor.  The stop-motion animation looks great, especially with all of the emotional emphasis placed on the characters’ expressive eyes, especially in the alarms that adorn the walls of Wallace’s house.
So, when things backfire for the cheese loving, absent-minded inventor and he devises a machine to reprogram rabbits’ minds into not liking vegetables, he accidentally turns himself into a giant were-rabbit, leaving Gromit to solve the case by himself.  You know, this only proves what I’ve known all along…dogs are much smarter than their human counterparts.  © Kelly Bartley 2006		Image courtesy of Dream Works Animation