These knowing puns and contemporary gags include the titles of a row of books that hide Wallace's secret cheese stash (like “East of Edam” and “Grated Expectations”.) Another big laugh comes when a snatch of the dreary Art Garfunkel ballad “Bright Eyes” the theme from 70s bunny-disaster cartoon Watership Down, appears on the soundtrack, cuing a perfectly judged stare to camera from a sighing Gromit, breaking the fourth wall in a joke more sophisticated than Park has attempted before. Wallace reads Aye-Up magazine, and fetches his milk from a fridge made by the Smug company. These rib-nudging jokes fit perfectly well in the hermetically sealed universe Park creates, with W&G retaining their own peculiar charm without being corrupted by DreamWorks desire to broaden their appeal as they extend the running-time. They also, thankfully, manage to extend the half-hour, episodic nature of the work into a three act feature, a challenge in itself. The boisterous script keeps things moving briskly from start to finish and displays all the wit we've come to expect. It is smart, snappy, pun laden, and intensely British, glorying in the world of the toolshed inventor, the giant marrow grower and the angry torchlit mob set on destroying the monster.
Clay Idols
It’s been ten years since the last proper Wallace and Gromit film, 1995’s A Close Shave but time seems to stand still in this most intricate world, with creator and director Nick Park having spent about half of the intervening decade manipulating his plasticine pals for their feature length debut.
Occupying a trim terraced house along a red-bricked backstreet of a small Northern English town, a place stuck somehow in a time loop between the present and the 1940s, this beautifully matched duo – the bumbling inventor Wallace and his surefooted pet, Gromit – represent an archetypal chalk-and-cheese double act; a Laurel & Hardy whose cosy familiarity and set routines are as much of a source of their appeal as their cute appearance and gentle humour.
Curse of the Were-Rabbit finds the pair, previously astronauts, crime-fighters and sheep-shearers, with a new business venture: Anti-Pesto, a humane pest-control company, which specialises in relocating rabbits whose thirst for greens would otherwise devastate their green-fingered neighbourhoods verdant garden plots. The hotly-contested annual giant vegetable competition is approaching, and Wallace and Gromit are kept busy extracting the plague of pests from the ground with their Bun-Vac 6000, a kind of barnyard Dyson. When Wallace, with his dog’s help, successfully removes the bunnies from the garden of pretty local aristocrat Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter, on her second animated outing this month after Corpse Bride), he gets a flutter of her animated eyelashes for his troubles.
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2 comments:
corpse bride is a wickedly gleeful banquet of morbid invention :)..
W&G was truly amazing. Loved it. Forgot it was out on DVD now and am going to pick it up on the way home!
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