10 / 10
Official trailer
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is Nick Park’s first feature-length Wallace and Gromit film and the rare animation that justifies its long form. Park directed with Steve Box. Peter Sallis returned as the voice of Wallace, the cheese-obsessed inventor. Gromit, the silent dog, was animated by hand as he had been since A Grand Day Out in 1989. Ralph Fiennes voiced Victor Quartermaine, the rival hunter. Helena Bonham Carter voiced Lady Tottington.
The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2006 and is the only Wallace and Gromit production to have done so at feature length. I adore this film. Every frame looks like somebody’s hands were on it five minutes ago, the jokes are packed so tightly that plenty slip past on a first viewing, and Gromit gives the best performance in it without saying a word. It’s a 10 because I can’t find a thing I’d change.
Aardman Animations produced the film. Every frame was shot on stop-motion sets with hand-built models. The production took five years. The full-length runtime contains approximately ninety thousand individual frames, each of which required the team to physically move the puppets, props, and lighting between exposures. The labor involved is approximately the same labor required to build a small village.
The Plot
Wallace and Gromit are running Anti-Pesto, a humane pest control company specializing in vegetable garden protection in their village.
The annual giant vegetable competition is approaching. The village has been overrun by rabbits. Wallace’s invention to brainwash the rabbits into not liking vegetables goes wrong. A monstrous were-rabbit emerges and begins terrorizing gardens at night. Wallace himself is suspiciously absent during these attacks.
The script is structured like a 1940s monster movie, complete with torch-bearing villagers, a noble huntsman with a rifle, and a beautiful aristocrat whose vegetable garden becomes the site of the climax. The film respects the conventions of the source genre while filling them with Wallace and Gromit’s specific brand of polite British absurdity. It takes the monster-movie business dead seriously. The torch-bearing villagers and the huntsman with his rifle are played dead straight, and that commitment is exactly what makes me laugh.
For Writers
Comedy from genre fidelity is more interesting than comedy from genre parody. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit treats its monster-movie structure with affection instead of mockery. The torch-bearing villagers are funny because they’re exactly what 1940s torch-bearing villagers would be, only in a Lancashire village arguing about vegetables. The lesson is that the funniest version of a genre is often the most committed one. Parody requires distance. Real comedy can come from getting closer.
The Animation
The puppet work is the film’s foundation. Wallace’s mouth moves through eight different expressions per syllable. Gromit’s eyebrows do the talking the dog can’t. The vegetable garden sequences include hundreds of individual practical vegetables, each of which had to be repositioned between frames. The third-act giant rabbit transformation requires the animation team to age, mutate, and revert puppets across long sequences without breaking continuity.
The visible craft is part of the appeal.
The audience can see fingerprints on the clay. The faces of background characters are imperfect. The sets are clearly hand-built. None of this is hidden. Aardman has never tried to make their stop-motion look smooth. The texture of the production is part of what makes it warmer than CGI animation of the same period.
The fingerprints are my favorite part. I like knowing a person pressed every one of those faces into shape, and it gives the film a warmth that no amount of polish could fake.
For Writers
Visible craft can be more inviting than polished production. The audience can tell when something has been made by hand. The Aardman aesthetic preserves the evidence of human labor in every frame. The lesson is that perfection isn’t always the most engaging quality in production. Sometimes the seams of construction tell the audience that real people cared. Show the craft when the work benefits from being shown to be work.
Gromit
Gromit is one of the great silent characters in animation.
He’s no voice. The dog communicates entirely through facial expression and small physical movements. The audience knows exactly what he’s thinking at all times. Park and his team build Gromit’s expressions from a small library of carefully designed brow positions, eye angles, and mouth shapes, but the combinations produce a character with more apparent interiority than most voiced characters in animation.
The decision to never give him a voice has paid off for thirty-five years. A voiced Gromit would have been a different and lesser character. The silence is the foundation of who he is. He’s the smart one. Wallace’s verbal output gives Gromit’s reactions something to react to.
Gromit alone would justify the rating. One lift of that brow does more than most animated sidekicks manage with a page of dialogue, and I think he’s the finest silent performance in animation.
For Writers
A character without dialogue can be the most fully realized character in a story if the visual storytelling is rigorous. Gromit’s expressions tell the audience what he’s thinking in detail dialogue couldn’t match. The lesson is that some characters work better without speech. If you find a character whose silence is more communicative than their dialogue would be, accept the silence. The reader will hear them anyway.
Craft Note
Nick Park and Steve Box co-directed. Park wrote with Bob Baker and Mark Burton. Peter Sallis voiced Wallace. Ralph Fiennes voiced Victor Quartermaine. Helena Bonham Carter voiced Lady Tottington. Aardman Animations produced. Five-year production timeline. Released October 2005. Approximately thirty million pound budget. One hundred and ninety-two million dollar worldwide gross. Won Best Animated Feature at the 2006 Academy Awards.
Is Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit as good as people say?
10/10, and I wouldn’t touch a frame of it. Aardman is at the peak of its powers, the film won the Oscar, and this is that rare case where moving to feature length kept everything that made the shorts work. Aardman plays the monster-movie plot with real love, the handmade clay shows every fingerprint, and Gromit holds the film together with his eyebrows. Watch it.
