If You Blink, You Miss A Laugh

tags:Entertainment

Wallace and Gromit the endearing dog-and-master duo, are crossing over from BBC to make it big time in Hollywood. With their first ‘veggie – horror’ flick, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The magic of Nick Park, the creator of the duo, is evident with his classic stop-motion animation.

The latest all-clay – or should we say mostly clay – kiddy comedy presentation comes five years after Park’s $172 million success Chicken Run.  Park introduced the scatterbrained British inventor and his faithful dog in a series of three unforgettable short films which achieved cult status and are very popular on DVD. Now, as Wallace and Gromit turn movie stars we can be sure they are going to live up to everything that comes with it, popularity and love been the first ones for them though. The brick bats (if any) go to the critics !

Nick who has been compared with the immaculate Chuck Jones for his precise comic timing. Nick has earned this respect and reputation with his three superb Wallace and Gromit shorts, his student thesis A Grand Day Out (1989), and the more polished, Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995) -- are masterpieces of drollery. Each strand of hair, patch of wallpaper and soap bubble are in their comically correct places.

 
In each of them Homage is a key element of Park's style (with nods to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells in A Grand Day Out and Alfred Hitchcock in The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave), and his latest is no exception, the movie playfully spoofs virtually every convention of classics like The Wolf Man and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

''We were exploring what area hadn't we gone with Wallace and Gromit in terms of movie references, and suddenly it was very apparent that we should try the Universal horror pictures of the 1930s,'' Park says. ``At the same time, we were thinking about bunnies stealing vegetables in Wallace and Gromit's garden, and the two just kind of came together. It was like a very obvious eureka moment.''

Wallace is a daffy inventor, 50-something bachelor, quite eccentric, who goes off on mad schemes often without much thought, inventing elaborate Heath Robinson-style contraptions. Gromit is his much more cautious sidekick of a dog. He's much more intelligent and often has to be quite heroic in getting Wallace out of his self-made scrapes. Though Gromit never says a word, he's ultimately the main character.

In their newest adventure the master and pooch are plopped in midst of a old-school horror movie -- only this time, the monster feeds exclusively on vegetables, not flesh. Wallace and Gromit are running Anti-Pesto, a pest-control company with some nifty gadgets: infrared garden gnomes, a teakettle-powered alarm system and a giant rodent vacuum, the Bun-Vac 6000. Wallace has become a hero in his town, having captured most of the ravenous bunnies that feast on his neighbors' vegetable gardens.

But then a mind-washing experiment, featuring one of Wallace's heretofore-untested inventions, goes awry, setting loose the King Kong of bunnies. This were-rabbit is destroying every garden in town; can Wallace and Gromit catch him before he spoils Lady Tottington's annual veggie-growing contest ?

As the movie’s veggie - horror quotient increases so does the funny element. Here’s hoping that the duo catch the mean Were-Rabbit before he does too much damage. Wonder what Bugs Bunny has to say about the Terrorism in his species now ?