| CABBAGE PATCH DOLLS : Park & Box's 'Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit' [7/10] |
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| Sunday, 16 October 2005 | |
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Ealing comedy meets Hammer horror as Park's much-loved Plasticine creations make their eagerly-awaited full-length debut. Previously seen in a trilogy of 30-minute shorts - A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1992) and A Close Shave (1995) - Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) is a crackpot, very British inventor whose bacon is repeatedly saved by his silent, world-weary, uber-savvy pooch Gromit. Their latest surreal adventure sees them hired to protect their village's prized vegetable crop in the run-up to an annual competition - and the produce coming under threat from a mysterious, outsize nocturnal predator. The title rather gives the game away (unlike the project's original label, The Great Vegetable Plot) - W&G thus joining a very small but rather illustrious band of giant rabbit pictures, alongside the whimsical 1940s comedy Harvey (in which the rabbit never actually appeared) and cult early-seventies straight-faced eco-shocker Night of the Lepus, in which Janet Leigh and DeForrest Kelley came under unlikely attack from mutant bunnies.  But the latter is only one of the dozens of horror pictures referenced in a screenplay credited to Park and three other writers - the big plot twist (which is visible a mile off) hinges on a gizmo straight out of David Cronenberg's The Fly, while the full-moon transformation sequences wittily nod to the long lycanthrope tradition of cinema, including 1961's Hammer variant The Curse of the Werewolf which featured Sallis himself in the minor role of Don Enrique. Four decades on, Sallis is very much one of the stars of the show here - even though his face is, of course, never seen. He does sterling double-duty, voicing not only Wallace but also one of the main rabbit characters, a hapless fellow named (in one of the script's countless examples of cutesy wordplay) Hutch. Indeed, October is proving a bumper month for octogenarian voice-talent - Wallace and Gromit arrive in British multiplexes this week, and next week it's the turn of Tim Burton's Corpse Bride which showcases the vocal skills of 87-year-old Michael Gough and Christopher Lee, a comparative stripling at 82. It's early days, of course, but Burton and Park are seen as front-runners - ahead of Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle - for the next Animated Feature Oscar. This would be an incredible fourth Academy Award for Preston-born animator Park, and perhaps fair reward for five years of painstaking effort which have now translated into near-uniform critical raves and bumper box-office on both sides of the Atlantic. But let's not get too carried away here: W+G isn't the masterpiece many have been so eager to acclaim. If nothing else, the film-makers really should have spent a little longer getting the script sorted out - as in Park's previous feature Chicken Run, there's the distinct feeling that the story, and its implications, haven't been fully thought through, and the ending is a bit of a fizzle. Minor cavils, perhaps - this is a very skilful, rollickingly enjoyable kids' picture: no more, and no less. Neil Young 16th October, 2005 WALLACE & GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT : [7/10] : UK (UK-US) 2005 : Nick PARK & Steve BOX : 85 mins seen at Cineworld cinema, Sunderland (UK), 14th October 2005 - public show |
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