Dreamworks #11: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit - 7.8/10

As I mentioned when I talked about Chicken Run, I’ve never exactly been familiar with Wallace and Gromit. I know for a fact I’ve seen one of the original shorts – I can never remember which one – but I’m no expert. I do know I like Aardman’s style, but I had no idea how much until I saw this.

This movie is, to put it simply, very funny. And yet, it’s not funny in the contemporary sense of telling lots of jokes and whatnot. For starters, it is absolutely saturated with puns (mostly vegetable-related), in-jokes and subtle visual gags. I’m sure if I watched it again I’d catch several dozen more I missed the first time. And yet, while Shark Tale failed abysmally when it employed a similar strategy, Aardman hits it out of the park here. Instead of being all in-your-face with “WHOO! FISH JOKES!”, most of the humor is of the blink-and-you’ll miss it variety. It goes back to that casual humor philosophy I’ve talked about that the Shrek movies did so well.

Wallace and Gromit live in a quaint little English village where vegetables are SERIOUS BUSINESS. They run a pest-control business that keeps everyone’s prize gardens safe from rabbits. Of course there are plenty of clever gadgets and Rube Goldberg shenanigans, and Peter Sallis absolutely inhabits the character of Wallace. Can you believe Dreamworks wanted to replace him with someone “American audiences would recognize”?

Where this film really shines in just how seriously it takes everything. The situations are all miles beyond absurd, but no one every treats it as such. It also piles on the melodrama, and it does so in exactly the way melodrama should be done: that is, it’s completely hammy and over-the-top to us, but as far as the characters are concerned, these issues are being treated with exactly the amount of gravity they should be.

There’s always a sort of charm to stop-motion that simply cannot be quantified or duplicated in any other medium. The folks at Aardman are masters of their craft and it says something that Gromit, who never speaks, is probably the most expressive and identifiable character in the entire movie. If you’ve been putting off seeing this for whatever reason, take my word that what at first glance might seem a somewhat plain offering is bursting with cheesy goodness just beneath the surface.