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Wallace & Gromit film proves feet of clay hilarious
By CRAIG OUTHIER
Get Out

Britain's most beloved lumps of colored clay make the jump to feature-length animation in “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” and their madcap adventures will quite literally leave you howling with delight.

Naturally, creator Nick Park loses a bit of the short-form snappiness that distinguished his previous outings — including “Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers” (1993) and “Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave” (1995) — but the new movie hardly labors under the expanded format. If anything, it proves that Park's zany vision of a cheese-obsessed inventor and his mute canine companion is just as inspired as ever.

Set in Park's usual small-town England milieu, “Were-Rabbit” finds Wallace and Gromit operating a thriving pest-removal business called Anti-Pesto, in which they capture garden-chomping hares and humanely deposit them in a kennel back at headquarters. It's a valued and vital service, especially with the town's Giant Vegetable Competition looming in a few days.

After a mishap involving one of Wallace's brilliant if disaster-prone inventions (yep, that old saw), the town finds itself terrorized by a hulking, 30-foot rabbitoid beast that eats not townsfolk but the townsfolk's aforementioned giant vegetables, which they treasure like retirement accounts.

Hair-raising (or is it hare-raising?) chase scenes follow, along with crafty allusions to grade-B horror films, the skyscraper scene in “King Kong” and Charles M. Schulz's Red Baron. Park and co-director Steve Box — one of his veteran clay-mators at Aardman Animations (“Chicken Run”) — also have the good sense to include plenty of hidden cheek that will crack up nonadolescents but leave little kids blessedly befuddled.

To fill narrative space, there's a romantic subplot involving Wallace's clumsy courtship of a horse-faced lady vegetarian (Helena Bonham Carter) and the villainous plotting of her jealous, gold-digging boyfriend (Ralph Fiennes). In one scene, Gromit literally has to extinguish his master's newfound lust for vegetables with a cold shower.

And that's always the way, isn't it? Wallace, the bumbling visionary, gets into a fix; Gromit, the dutiful sidekick, somberly comes to the rescue. Sometimes, one suspects that the world itself is composed of Wallaces and Gromits.

‘Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit'
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Peter Sallis
Rating: G (all audiences)
Running time: 89 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday in Valley theaters
Grade: A-