A Dog And His Man

By RICHARD CORLISS

There's oodles of action in Nick Park and Steve Box's Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, about the attempts of a daffy English inventor and his stoic, smarter dog to rid their home village of a vegetable-ravaging monster. Wallace, the man, scoops up rabbits by the hundreds in his mighty Bun-Vac 6000 ("It blows and sucks"). Gromit, the pooch, gets involved in some World War I--style aerial combat with another canine--a real dogfight. At film's end, the heroine, Lady Tottington, and the dread Were-Rabbit have a housetop confrontation worthy of (i.e., stolen from) King Kong. The whole rollicking adventure zips along a mile a minute.

And a second a day. That's about as much of this stop-motion animation epic as any one of the film's 30 animators at Aardman Studios in Bristol, England, could produce. Stop motion, as used in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and Park's 2000 hit Chicken Run, is essentially a series of still photographs (running through the movie projector at 24 frames a second), and each tableau, which may contain dozens of Plasticine characters, must be posed and shot before the next one is begun. The animator's job is to get the humor and humanity in each shot. "Sometimes it's just the way Gromit moves his head," says Park. "There's a million ways he can look up, and [you're in trouble] if it's not just right and doesn't capture what you're after." The 85-min. Were-Rabbit has 122,400 shots, which explains why this mini-masterpiece took five years to make.

The final work justifies every meticulous, monastic, masochistic effort. For longtime Gromit groupies and Wallace-y wonks, who know the pair from their early films A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave (the last two won Oscars for Best Animated Short), the new film proves that this endearingly odd couple can carry a feature-length film with easy poise. Newcomers will be charmed by the characters, then drawn into the suspense as a man is transformed into a killer bunny in a scene scarier--and even funnier--than Oliver Reed's hirsute metamorphoses in the old Hammer Studios' horror movie The Curse of the Werewolf. And the kids will giggle with pride as they spot the furtive gags, like the magazine hidden by the town's vicar (Pro Nun Wrestling) or the name of the author of a book on animal wounds (Claude Savagely).

The earlier films established Wallace (voiced by veteran Brit character actor Peter Sallis) as a vague, cheerful bachelor, whose obsession for dreaming up elaborate contraptions almost equals his fondness for cheese. (Wallace's bookshelf, as seen in Were-Rabbit, contains such volumes as East of Edam, Brie Encounter and Fromage to Eternity.) Gromit, his master's fretful servant and savior, is mute. He conveys his always justified anxiety via minute twitches of the most eloquent movie eyebrows since Groucho's. At the climax of each film, Wallace's handyman hubris has put the duo in an awful dilemma that can be resolved only with a thrilling chase. Domesticity restored!

The new movie, already a hit at the Toronto Film Festival, honors and expands the old formula. The townsfolk are preparing for the Giant Vegetable Competition held each year by Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter). To allay the villagers' fears that their supersize tomatoes and zucchini may be ravaged by rabbits, Wallace invents a gizmo that captures the critters without hurting them--much to the disapproval of Lady T.'s slimy suitor, Victor Quartermaine (a perfectly pompous Ralph Fiennes), who would rather blast the bunnies to bits. Soon the locals have a larger, more vicious threat: the mysterious, vegemaniacal Were-Rabbit.

The Wallace and Gromit shorts were intimate affairs: the man, the dog and one or two other characters. Were-Rabbit creates a panorama of rural England: dozens of humans with the standard Nick Park facial expression (dazed) and eccentricities (too much mouth and not enough teeth). Aardman's feature films are sponsored by the Hollywood studio DreamWorks, but their tone and humor are totally, defiantly, blitheringly English, in a manner reminiscent of the classic Ealing comedies. Were-Rabbit is admirably old-fashioned in another way: while the rest of the animation world has gone to computer-generated (CG) features, 95% of this film is handmade.

Or, rather, thumbmade, since the animators are encouraged to leave their personal imprints, literally, on the characters. "Wallace and Gromit are designed to be animated with your hands and your fingers as much as possible," says Teresa Drilling, an American who joined Aardman for Chicken Run. "They've got just the right sort of nooks for your thumbs, so that gives it a very specific organic feel--thumby but funny."

Drilling was one of the animators working earlier this year as the shooting of Were-Rabbit raced to its close in the Aardman sound stage, a huge warren of 30 curtained sets, some that could fit on an office desk, some about the size of the model-train layout in your loner uncle's basement. Following each of the 24,000 hand-sketched storyboards that illustrate the scenes, the animator dresses the set, puts in props (tomatoes made of wax, teddy-bear fur painted green for grass), gives each character the subtlest facial makeover and takes the picture. Animators must also be actors. Often they record themselves performing the action they are about to execute, then consult the video as they adjust a figure's lips or brow.

This is microsurgery in a dollhouse, eight hours a day, with plenty of pressure; there are stress-relief posters in the hallway. But the mood is eerily calm. "Sometimes you knock something over and lose a lot of work," says Fabrice Joubert, who earlier worked on five DreamWorks cartoons, "but you have to be very Zen."

Like Park, who has fiddled with modeling clay and stop motion since he was a kid in Lancashire 40 years ago, the animators seem to be channeling their inner child, the boy (or girl) genius who loved to play with clay. And they know they are part of a glorious anachronism, an ancient craft. "I love The Incredibles," Box, a co-director, says of Pixar Animation Studios' CG hit, "but that's like a Ferrari. Wallace & Gromit is a massive antique tractor. We want that thumby, handmade, handcrafted look."

All that arduous artisanship may matter little to the vast audience awaiting Were-Rabbit. They'll just fall in love with the man who imperils the world and with the dog that saves it. And they'll never realize the amount of sweat it took to give them such an effortlessly funny night at the movies. --Reported by Josh Tyrangiel/Bristol

With reporting by Josh Tyrangiel/Bristol