Look, ma, all hands!

Noel Vera

Not exactly true: Steve Box and Nick Park's "Wallace and Gromit in
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" features a few CGI fog effects and a
passel of digitized bunnies--but even when they're bytes and pieces
of computerized graphics care is taken to make them look plasticine:
fingerprints are carefully imbedded on surfaces, and the ripple
characteristic of stop-motion animation is added round the joints.
In other words, though Park could not entirely avoid the curse of
digital animation, it's been more or less put in its proper place--
sitting in the furthest corner of the room, with the promise to be
on its best and humblest behavior.

As for the film itself--Wallace (Peter Sallis) is an unattached
bachelor who lives with his loyal dog Gromit, inventing gadgets and
doing the odd job (this time capturing garden-raiding rabbits) to
keep him alive; when he comes up with the not-so-brilliant idea of
attaching his latest invention the Mind-o-Matic to the recalcitrant
mammals in the hope of brainwashing them of their love of
vegetables, his plan backfires and the Were-rabbit, a monster with
an unholy appetite for fresh produce, is unleashed.

That's all you need to know, really; that and the fact that you'll
be hard-pressed to find a more delightful mainstream film this year.
Where Disney and Dreamworks both trail Pixar in the quest to create
the next computer-animated hit, stuffed full of amusement park rides
doubling as chase sequences and animals or robots or superheroes
with the psychology of superficially troubled adolescents, Park has
gone his own stubborn way and turned out a leisurely six films in
sixteen years, only two of them (this one included) features, four
of them with the eponymous pair. His hero Wallace boasts of no magic
or mechanical powers of any kind, and has no issues with mother,
father, son, daughter or best friend--has no issues with anyone or
anything except what he can cook up on his own. Instead of character-
-which can be tedious, especially when Disney or Dreamworks (with
their leaden notions of what character is all about) is involved--
Park has formula (Wallace gets into all kinds of trouble which ever-
faithful, ever-resourceful Gromit gets him out of); the pleasure is
in watching Park ring endless variations on just how deeply and
thoroughly Wallace can get into trouble, and the lengths to which
Gromit will go to get him out of it.

The duo's latest adventure "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" is, as is
all of Park's works, a celebration of the oddity of being English,
the Englishness of being odd; from the hand-cranked Austin A35 van
Wallace drives to "Stinking Bishop" (a cheese with a smell so vile
it can miraculously raise the apparent dead) to the incomprehensible
English habit of raising super-huge fruits and greens in their tiny
plots of land, not so much to eat (boiled beef and potatoes are the
preferred diet) as to display like monster trophies at their once-a-
year vegetable-growing competition (even Gromit is carefully nursing
a melon roughly the size of the space pods in "Invasion of the Body
Snatchers"). At the same time it lovingly spoofs old monster movies
from "The Wolf Man" to "Frankenstein" to "King Kong" to even "Mighty
Joe Young," succeeding at one point in evoking enough sympathy for
the monster to bring a tear--only one, more would have torn the
film's fragile tone--to the eye. Wallace's Rube Goldberg devices are
everywhere, and as delightfully complicated as ever--most in the
form of traps and cages and security and detection devices for the
barring and capture of the ubiquitous leaf-eating pests.

Park isn't immune to the lure of jokes large or small: at one point,
faced with the prospect of chasing over a hundred rabbits, Wallace
unveils his proudest invention--the Bun-Vac 6000, a vacuum machine
so powerful it can pull in every bunny for hundreds of yards around
and send them spinning (a lovely image, that) slowly, hypnotically,
in its giant glass jar; at another Gromit sits in their van, turns
on the radio, and hears Art Garfunkel singing "Bright Eyes" (the
gassy theme song of "Watership Down"--yet another British animated
feature infested with rabbits).

The film is rated "G," which doesn't stop Park from inserting a few
naughty bits: the Bun-Vac 6000 runs on two basic settings: "suck"
and blow;" love interest Lady Tottington (voice of Helena Bonham
Carter) stands before a pair of ripe melons held at chest level
(cheap, but I loved it); towards the end Wallace is forced to
maintain his modesty by donning a brown paper bag in lieu of pants--
the bag's front printed the words "nuts inside."

Ralph Fiennes is--yes, again--in fine form as Victor Quatermaine, a
rabbit-hunting cad with an Elvis pouf who courts Lady Tottington and
considers Wallace his romantic rival; with this and his more serious
turn in Fernando Meirelles' "The Constant Gardener" earlier this
year, you might say Fiennes is displaying impressive range. Helena
Bonham-Carter's resume may not be as varied--she was also the voice
of Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride"--but she's a tottering delight as the
carrot-haired Tottington. Sallis has been the voice of Wallace from
the very beginning, and you can't think of that bald pate and those
bulbous eyes without hearing his irreducibly, unflappably comic
voice in your head. Despite Fiennes' good-sportsmanship, Bonham-
Carter's comic delicacy and Sallis' inimitable thick-headedness,
however, the film really belongs to Gromit--to be more precise, to
Gromit's brow. It's a prehensile brow, infinitely expressive, and
can suggest everything from bleary-eyed patience to dogged
determination to heartbroken love. It's Park, speaking to us
straight from his mind and heart; you can't help but love that
divine little bit of plasticine forehead.

With Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle," Tim Burton's "Corpse
Bride" and this opening a mere two weeks later, I think it's safe to
say that largely traditional animation is still fairly alive and
well, and doing better at telling tales than their entirely
digitized counterparts; long may it stay that way. Which leaves me
with only one question--where on earth can you get a bit of Stinking
Bishop?

(First published in Businessworld, 10/14/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)