REVIEWED - THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT: Wallace and Gromit's feature-length debut is a hilarious stew of kitchen-sink whimsy, writes Donald Clarke
IT IS worth noting the extent to which Wallace and Gromit - here triumphantly confirmed as one of the greatest of comic double acts - occupy a world characterised by low-level misery.
The terraced houses of the grim north, within which penguins lurk diabolically and untrustworthy matrons dream of massacring sheep, speak of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and other films in which young men learn the worthlessness of hope. Unlikely life-partners manacled together by force of habit, our two heroes are pathologically unsuited to one another's company. Wallace, at least, has his insensitivity to protect him from the wretchedness of their situation. Gromit, immeasurably smarter and, therefore, sadder, seems painfully aware how doomed we all are.
In The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Nick Park and his co-director Steve Box introduce references to previously unacknowledged English miseries. Whereas The Wrong Trousers paid tribute to early Hitchcock, the new picture is layered with references to the horror films of Hammer Studios and its competitors.
A great vegetable show is looming, and Wallace and Gromit have set up a security firm named Anti-Pesto to protect the locale's marrows and cucumbers from the attentions of rabbits. Their most distinguished client is one Lady Tottington - Totty for short, though never explicitly Posh Totty - voiced with wondrous toothiness by Helena Bonham Carter. Through circumstances too cute to explain, Wallace gets his molecules mixed up with one of the captured rabbits and finds himself transforming into the titular monstrosity. Victor Quartermain (Ralph Fiennes, hilarious), a great white hunter with more vanity than hair, decides to eliminate the beast. As usual, the fatalistic hound has to save the day.
Of course, as in the original Hammer films, the horror in Were-Rabbit is of the cosy kind. Far more worrying is the inappropriate affection Gromit shows for his - we assume doomed - vegetable marrow. Nothing this sat-upon hero loves so much can last very long.
To add to the mounting sense of desperation, Nick Park's thumbprints, still visible about the characters' concerned faces, remind us that the entire enterprise is the work of an obsessed hobbyist. (Let's not start on this week's fire at Aardman Animation, the Bristol-based studio behind the clay-mation films, which destroyed so much of Wallace and Gromit's heritage.) Yet all this casual grimness fuels our love for the tank-topped inventor and his mutt.
Though Pixar's films are shot through with poignancy, they will always offer their characters opportunities for development. By contrast, Wallace and Gromit, like the protagonists of Morrissey's songs, Alan Bennett's monologues and Harold Pinter's plays, are destined to remain tragically the same forever. You don't meet unsentimental realism like that in Shark Tale.
Fittingly, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit looks and feels exactly like its three predecessors. What sane person would find this a problem? One might as well complain that Stan and Ollie never developed as characters, or that Shakespeare never found a way to write sonnets with more than 14 lines. The plot is, perhaps, a tiny bit thin for a feature and the puns sometimes strive too hard for their groans, but Were-Rabbit remains a delightful exercise in kitchen-sink whimsy, which could draw a smile from a boulder.
All together now: Dum dum dee dum, dum dee dum-dum!
