by Abel Horwitz
Daily Lobo
The strongest endorsement I can give "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" is that the children sitting in front of me during the screening laughed and cheered the whole way through.
The film is cute, and, surprisingly, cute has a lot of merit. For starters, "Wallace & Gromit" is a claymation film. The animation is choppy and usually you can see the fingerprints of animators on the clay figures.
There's a bit of a romantic side to this, as if "Wallace & Gromit" has a soul - something that's missing from most animated films these days.
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Three Wallace & Gromit short films have come out since 1989, each one brilliantly funny and clever. Two of them won Academy Awards.
"The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" is their first feature-length film.
In the film, Wallace and Gromit own a humane pest control business mostly concerned with keeping rabbits away from the villagers' gardens. The annual Vegetable Competition is coming up and seemingly everyone in the quaint little British town has been growing prize vegetables for what they consider the most important day of the year.
Wallace is a lovable inventor whose madcap inventions, which are heavily influenced by the Rube Goldberg cartoons of the '20s, give delight to even the simplest task such as getting from the bed to the breakfast table.
His best friend is his dog, Gromit. Gromit mostly rescues Wallace from himself since his inventions don't always work the way he planned. Gromit is silent, expressing himself through a series of eye rolls and shoulder shrugs.
With the competition only a few days away, a mysterious force - much stronger than the tiny bunnies that hop around the village - has been destroying crops in what one villager calls "a night of vegetable carnage." The duo are sent to find out whatever this thing is and quickly discover that it's a were-rabbit.
"The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" is funny, especially for children, though every once and a while a strictly adult joke manages to slip its way in. I did find myself laughing a lot, mostly at the joy of watching Wallace's inventions.
However, this film is very tame. Unlike the "Shrek" or Pixar films that have been coming out recently, "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" clearly defines itself as a children's movie.
The movie is joyfully entertaining. To see a claymation film on the big screen is as much eye candy as anything a computer animated film could be.
However, if you're not a Wallace & Gromit fan or you're not between the ages of 5 and 9, then perhaps you should get yourself familiar with the short films before graduating up to the feature length.
