With Aardman’s newest feature – Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom – still fast approaching, the next film in the re-release line-up takes us all the way back to 2005 for a second look at The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
There might be something spooky afoot on the farm in Shaun and the gang’s future, but the studio’s first ‘horror’ outing came some twenty years ago.
After the runaway success of the original Wallace and Gromit shorts, it made perfect sense to take a stab at a full-on feature. Now backed by juggernauts like Universal and Dreamworks, Nick Park had his work cut out for him when it came to wrangling the American studios’ influence and expectations. Luckily, he managed to stick the landing and bring The Curse of the Were-Rabbit to cinemas across the world as another authentically Lancastrian slice of cheese with a side helping of crackers that even Gromit would be hard pressed not to partake in.
‘Burrowing bounders! They must be breeding like, well…rabbits!’
As with any Wallace and Gromit adventure, this 85-minute burst of classic stop-motion ‘mation sees the beloved pair making an honest living off of another wacky business venture. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and in a town where everyone who’s anyone aspires to win the Tottington Hall Prize for Giant Vegetables, he who can wrangle the hordes of hungry rabbits stands to make a solid mint. Enter Anti-Pesto, the lads’ uber-popular garden protection business, caging customer’s veggies and catching their vermin to be stored humanely in the (seemingly cavernous) depths of their cellar.
With alarms on every doorstep ready to summon the team at any hour, it seems like a perfect system, but after another fine job at the country estate of Lady Torrington (Totty to her friends), played by Helena Bonham Carter, Wallace wonders whether there might be a way to solve their overcrowding problem and win his muse’s heart in the process. Like a great many scientists before him, he’s so preoccupied with whether or not he could to consider whether he really should, and before long he’s whipped out a lunar-powered, mind-warping machine in the name of ‘rabbit rehabilitation’, with disastrous consequences.
‘It’s alive! It’s aliiiivee!’ and, more importantly, it’s roaming free every night to eat as it pleases – a giant, vegetarian Were-Rabbit straight out of an old Hammer horror. Naturally, it’s up to our Modern Prometheus and his canine companion to try and catch the beast before the whole competition (and any shot at a date with Totty) is well and truly done for. Malfunctioning inventions, a caper to be had and Wallace’s love life hanging in the balance, not to mention the admiration of a changeable and bloodthirsty village mob.
As premises go, that’s just about all the elements you’d want from a big-screen outing for these two, surely?
I’ve always appreciated Wallace and Gromit as a cultural staple – something quintessentially British – and I was certainly a big fan growing up, but I think I’ve only recently realised quite how brilliant this series is. I feel like it’s easy sometimes to just think of them as the national icons they are and appreciate them, but it’s another thing entirely to properly revisit their escapades and be blown away by the sheer joy of each outing.
The shorts are their own beasts – we very recently had a double bill of them in cinemas as part of this ongoing promotion – but the idea of a bombastic, bumper-length cinema venture is a special proposition in and of itself. It could easily have fallen prey to its new producers across the pond, but Park and his team at Aardman somehow managed to cut the right deal wherein the budget went up and the quality continued to clear that high, high bar. It was A Close Shave, but they made it work in their favour. This film really does just feel like a distillation of everything we’d already loved about the previous instalments just splashed on a bigger, flashier canvas, and I say that as a major compliment.
The case of the Were-Rabbit (carrotus apetitus giganticus, to give it its Latin name) has a few twists and turns that did actually leave me feeling the fool, even as an adult, and Park makes great use of shadows against his sets, playing around with our perception of where exactly this great big beastie is. The fact that we don’t see it for half the film, too, just makes the whole thing feel more like a creature feature homage, even if the reveal is fittingly twee rather than terrifying. Long-time series composer Julian Nott returns to score the film here, with Hans Zimmer overseeing additions from other contributors, and the team offer an aptly mysterious main theme for the creature, alongside a triumphantly heroic motif for the Anti-Pesto boys and well-placed quotes from Holst (here called the Plant Suite).
As ever, similar sight gags and witty wordplay come thick and fast from beat one, which tells a full story with loss, fallout and forgiveness with just a few family photos on the wall. There really is far too much to catch in any one short to catch on a first viewing, and the same is true of a full feature from Aardman – doubly so. I went in wanting to love it having not seen Were-Rabbit in at least a decade (I’ve really been slacking on that front) and just couldn’t take my eyes off it. I laughed like crazy throughout, the time flew by and I left the screening just wanting to go right back in and see it again. For £2 a pop at Cineworld this week, it’s a complete no-brainer in my book, and I may well catch it again before it hops back into the Aardman vault this Thursday.
BBFC: Rated U for very mild bad language, comic scary scenes.
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is in cinemas now.
