Psycho's Movie Reviews #234: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit (2005)

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a 2005 stop-motion clay-animated supernatural comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and Aardman Animations. United International Pictures distributed the film in the United Kingdom, and it was the last DreamWorks Animation film to be distributed by DreamWorks Pictures in the United States. It was directed by Nick Park and Steve Box (in Box's feature directorial debut) as the second feature-length film by Aardman, after Chicken Run (2000). The film premiered in Sydney, Australia on September 4, 2005, before being released in cinemas in the United States on 7 October 2005 and in the United Kingdom a week later on October 14, 2005.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a parody of classic monster movies and Hammer Horror flicks and also serves as part of the Wallace and Gromit series, created by Park. The film centres on good-natured yet eccentric cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his intelligent quiet dog, Gromit, in their latest venture as pest control agents, as they come to the rescue of their town plagued by rabbits before the annual Giant Vegetable Competition. However, the duo soon find themselves against a giant rabbit consuming the town's crops.

The film features an expanded cast of characters relative to the previous Wallace and Gromit shorts, with a voice cast including Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes. While the film was considered a box-office disappointment in the US by DreamWorks Animation, it was more commercially successful internationally. It also received critical acclaim and won a number of film awards including the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, making it the second film from DreamWorks Animation to win that award, as well as both the second non-American animated film and second non computer-animated film to have achieved this (after Spirited Away). In January 2022, a stand-alone sequel feature film was announced, which is due to release in 2024 on Netflix worldwide, except for the UK, where it will premiere first on the BBC before also coming to Netflix at a later date.

Plot

As Tottington Hall's annual giant vegetable competition approaches, cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his intelligent beagle Gromit provide a humane pest control business known as "Anti-Pesto," protecting the townspeople's vegetables from rabbits. One evening after capturing rabbits found in Lady Tottington's garden, Wallace uses two of his latest inventions, the "Bun-Vac 6000" and "Mind Manipulation-O-Matic," to brainwash them into hating vegetables. All goes well until Wallace accidentally sets the Bun-Vac to "BLOW," and his brain is fused with a rabbit's, forcing Gromit to destroy the Mind-O-Matic. The transfer appears to have worked, as the rabbit shows no interest in vegetables. They name the rabbit Hutch and place him in a cage.

That night, a giant "Were-Rabbit" devours many of the town's vegetables and the duo fail to respond. During a town meeting the next day, the hunter Lord Victor Quartermaine offers to shoot the creature, but Tottington persuades the townsfolk to give Anti-Pesto a second chance. Wallace and Gromit attempt to catch it with a giant, stuffed female rabbit attached to their van, which breaks off after they go through a tunnel. Wallace goes to retrieve it, but fails to return when the Were-Rabbit shows up, forcing Gromit to take action himself. After a wild pursuit towards the creature, Wallace suspects that Hutch may be the rabbit and has Gromit lock him in a high-security cage. Gromit then finds a bunch of giant muddy rabbit tracks leading up to Wallace's room. There, he finds a giant pile of half-eaten vegetables on Wallace's bed, revealing that it is in fact Wallace who is the rabbit. Victor, who seeks to woo Tottington, corners Wallace in the forest, but Wallace transforms into a Were-Rabbit under the light of the full moon and flees. Now seeing the perfect chance to eliminate his rival, Victor obtains three "24-carrot" gold bullets from the town's vicar, Reverend Clement Hedges, to use against rabbit Wallace.

On the day of the vegetable competition, Gromit reveals to Wallace that he is indeed a Were-Rabbit, whereas the experiment has swapped his and Hutch's personalities; The latter is now carrying his human traits and is the only one who can fix the Mind-O-Matic to undo the curse. Tottington, who has developed feelings for Wallace, visits and tells him about Victor's plan while offering him a chance to remain friends. As the moon rises, Wallace begins to transform into a Were-Rabbit and hastily forces Tottington to leave, to which she is distraught and leaves in tears. Victor arrives and attempts to shoot Wallace with the golden bullets. Gromit creates a distraction using the female rabbit costume to allow Wallace to escape, and Victor gives chase to the competition. Gromit begins working with Hutch, and plans to sacrifice the giant marrow he has grown for the competition as bait to lure Wallace to safety.

Wallace creates chaos at the fair. Using up all his gold bullets, Victor takes the Golden Carrot trophy to use as ammunition. Wallace carries Tottington atop Tottington Hall, where she discovers that the Were-Rabbit is really Wallace. Victor gives chase, revealing that he only wants to impress Lady Tottington for her fortune. Victor's dog, Philip, engages Gromit in a dogfight in aeroplanes taken from a fairground attraction. After defeating Philip, Gromit then steers his plane into Victor's line of fire as he takes aim at Wallace, causing the bullet to hit the plane instead. The damaged plane falls and Wallace jumps to grab Gromit, sacrificing himself to break his fall into a cheese tent.

Victor gloats about his apparent victory, but Tottington knocks him out by smacking him in the head with her giant carrot and he falls into the tent as well. To protect Wallace from the angry townspeople, Gromit quickly disguises Victor as the Were-Rabbit in the female rabbit costume and Philip and the townspeople chase him out of town. Wallace transforms back to his human self and appears dead, but Gromit uses some Stinking Bishop cheese to revive him, undoing the curse of the Were-Rabbit. Tottington awards Gromit the dented Golden Carrot and converts the grounds of Tottington Hall into a nature reserve for Hutch and the other rabbits.

Production

In March 2000, it was officially announced that Wallace and Gromit were to star in their own feature film. It would have been Aardman's next film after The Tortoise and the Hare, which was subsequently abandoned by the studio in July 2001, owing to script issues.

The directors, Nick Park and Steve Box, have often referred to the film as the world's "first vegetarian horror film". Peter Sallis (the voice of Wallace) is joined in the film by Ralph Fiennes (as Lord Victor Quartermaine), Helena Bonham Carter (as Lady Campanula Tottington), Peter Kay (as PC Mackintosh), Nicholas Smith (as Rev. Clement Hedges), and Liz Smith (as Mrs. Mulch). As established in the preceding short films, Gromit is a silent character, communicating purely via body language.

The film was originally going to be called Wallace & Gromit: The Great Vegetable Plot, but the title was changed, as the market research disliked it. The first reported release date for The Great Vegetable Plot was November 2004. Production officially began in September 2003, and the film was then set for release on 30 September 2005. In July 2003, Entertainment Weekly referred the film as Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Park told an interviewer that after separate test screenings with British and American audiences, along with their children, the film was altered to "tone down some of the British accents and make them speak more clearly so the American audiences could understand it all better." Park was often sent notes from DreamWorks, which irritated him. He recalled one note that Wallace's car should be trendier, which he disagreed with because he felt making things look old-fashioned made it look more ironic.

The vehicle Wallace drives in the film is an Austin A35 van. In collaboration with Aardman in the spring of 2005, a road going replica of the model was created by brothers Mark and David Armé, founders of the International Austin A30/A35 Register, for promotional purposes. In a 500-man-hour customisation, an original 1964 van received a full body restoration, before being dented and distressed to perfectly replicate the model van used in the film. The official colour of the van is Preston Green, named in honour of Nick Park's home town. The name was chosen by the art director and Mark Armé.

Release/Reception/Box Office

The film had its worldwide premiere on September 4, 2005, in Sydney, Australia. It was theatrically released in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the United States on October 14, 2005. The DVD edition of the film was released on February 7, 2006 (United States) and February 20, 2006 (United Kingdom).

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 95% based on 184 reviews, with an average rating of 8.09/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a subtly touching and wonderfully eccentric adventure featuring Wallace and Gromit." On Metacritic, the film received a weighted average score of 87 out of 100, based on 38 critics, indicating "universal acclaim." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.

In 2016, Empire magazine ranked it 51st on their list of the 100 best British films, with their entry stating, "The sparkling Curse Of The Were-Rabbit positively brims with ideas and energy, dazzling movie fans with sly references to everything from Hammer horrors and The Incredible Hulk to King Kong and Top Gun, and bounds along like a hound in a hurry. The plot pitches the famously taciturn Dogwarts' alumnus and his Wensleydale-chomping owner (Sallis) against the dastardly Victor Quartermaine (Fiennes), taking mutating bunnies, prize-winning marrows and the posh-as-biscuits Lady Tottington (Bonham Carter) along for the ride. In short, it's the most marvellously English animation there is."

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit opened in 3,645 cinemas and had an opening weekend gross of $16 million, putting it at number one for that weekend. During its second weekend it came in at number two, just $200,000 behind The Fog. It remained number one worldwide for three weeks in a row. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit grossed $192.6 million at the box office, of which $56.1 million was from the United States. As of January 2022, it is the second-highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time behind Aardman’s first film, Chicken Run.

Budget $30 million

Box office $192.6 million

My Review

Wallace and Gromit have spotted a niche in the market so, in a vegetable-mad village, they now run Anti-Pesto, a humane pest control company. Using all manner of high tech devices, they capture the rabbits and keep them in pens in their basement. With storage problems building up and a new client requiring a great number of rabbits cleared from her property, Wallace tries a brain-washing device that he hopes will rob the rabbits of their vegetable cravings. It goes wrong of course and neither Wallace nor Gromit think any more of it until, that is, the village suddenly faces a larger, faster rabbit that threatens to destroy the whole vegetable contest.

I think the thing that is most pleasing about this film is just how very British it is; W&G may have hit the big screen but they have certainly not gone Hollywood or lost any of the quaint charm that made them famous as they became as much a Christmas institution as the Queen's Speech (which they followed for several years). So here we have a typically silly little plot around the village adventures of the pair and it manages to be consistently charming and enjoyable. The story is strong and does not need long noises to constantly stimulate – instead it is just a good yarn. Meanwhile the animation is impressive, again providing a real warm feel to it and giving a feeling of depth and atmosphere that the CGI cartoons just don't muster. The jokes are not aimed at children nor at adults (although there are a few that are specifically targeted at those sectors) but rather the majority of it is just a good family film with stuff that everyone will laugh at, rather than having to do physical pratfalls for the kids and lots of cynical adult jokes for the adults to get.

To me this is a strength but to some it will mean that there isn't going to be a big belly laugh every 30 seconds and the fact that some of the kids started getting shiftless was testimony to that. I personally don't think this is the films problem so much as it is the problem of kids who need bright moving objects to constantly stimulate them but it is something that adults should bare in mind. Likewise adults used to constantly laughing at snide adult gags in cartoons might be disappointed to find that there are only a couple (although they are marvellously British). This is best seen in the movie references – in some Pixar films they come thick and fast and are a means to an end; in W&G they are there but are used to compliment the plot rather than for a quick laugh. However like I said, I didn't find these to be problems and I actually preferred the fact that effects, gags and pratfalls had not been placed before a good solid story. The animation matches this professional, careful approach and it has a real good feel to it with the atmosphere of the werewolf movies and village horror.

The cast are great although it is to the animators' credit that the most enjoyable character works entirely on expression: Gromit is as good as ever. Sallis is great fun as Wallis and has remained the fun character we have grown to love. The support cast is very good with good turns from Fiennes, Carter, Kay, Smith, Thomson and others all providing good voice work while still knowing that Wallace & Gromit are the stars and not to try and overshadow them.

Overall a very enjoyable family film. Viewers used to the quickfire laughs, adult material and hi-tech animation of Pixar will maybe find that they and their kids get a bit bored by it at times but the majority of viewers will find this to be a lovingly crafted story that sacrifices some of the highs in return for consistent quality from start to finish.

The film starts with a very funny short featuring the Madagascar penguins. Curse of the Were Rabbit isn't as good as the three classic shorts, and the recent Matter of Loaf and Death, but the visual jokes and the memorable characters delight. I particularly loved the one about stinking cheese, and when Victor Quartermine puts the rabbit on his head by mistake. The plot is inspired, about a were rabbit who eats all the vegetables, and Wallace and Gromit try to stop him. The voice talents are superb, with Peter Sallis a standout with his vocal characterisation of Wallace, as does Ralph Fiennes as Victor. Helena Bonham Carter also does well, but the highlight was Gromit, with his facial expressions. The script sparkled with wit, imagination and inspiration, and the ending had some poignancy. Technically, the film is faultless with superb claymation. Overall, I award Curse of the Were Rabbit 10/10!!!