Wallace and Gromit: the Curse of the Were Rabbit

Wallace and Gromit are out to capture rabbits in their new movie.

(Herald rating: * * * * )

When your eyes aren't shut from laughter you can actually see the reason why the first full-length Wallace and Gromit movie works so well.

It might be more technically sophisticated than its half-hour claymation predecessors and have some famous faces behind the voices, but when W&G is magnified on the big screen you can see the fingerprints of its animators on some of the plasticine characters, especially Gromit's face.

In an age when screen animation has been defined by Pixar's mix of gigabyte power and sophisticated wit, those marks serve as an endearing reminder of the painstaking patience and affection behind Nick Park's consistently hilarious creations. It's literally animation with a human touch.

That warmth helps make Curse of the Were Rabbit as jolly a jape as its shorter forerunners. Like the previous Aardman incarnations, often the best gags are the ones incidental to the high-action slapstick - and this one comes with a swathe of double entendres, groan-inducing puns, and enough visual gags to ensure you'll want to watch it again some day to see what you missed.

Oh, and its finale takes the mickey out of King Kong so neatly it's going to be hard to see the Peter Jackson's ape take on New York without giggling about a permanently startled-looking dog in a fairground biplane.

It starts, however, with W&G having set themselves up as a pest control operation for the good folk of Tottington, whose prize vegetables are under threat from the local bunny population. The pair's efforts to humanely capture the creatures is going swimmingly until they find themselves swamped with cottontail inmates. Wallace happens on an idea involving a giant bunny brainwashing machine to ween them off the greens.

But that just results in a giant rabbit who's soon doing a Godzilla to the local glasshouses and threatening the annual vegetable show at the estate of the carrot-headed Lady Tottington (Bonham Carter). Meanwhile, her fellow toff, the gun-happy bounder Lord Victor Quartermaine (Fiennes) has his own fiendish plans to get rid of the monster and see Wallace - who has struck up a friendship with Lady T - off the estate.

Despite Aardman's connections to Hollywood's Dreamworks, it remains acutely English in its sensibility, whether's it's sending up ye olde Hammer Horrors or giving the local vicar a curious resemblance to Prince Charles.

But as with its earlier incarnations, that tea'n'slippers quaintness is offset against some wildly imaginative high-action visual gags. There's two or three eye-poppers, sequences that risk not only splitting your sides also but inducing a headache while calculating just low long it must have taken to execute.

VOICES OF: Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes
DIRECTOR: Nick Park
RATING: PG
RUNNING TIME: 94 mins
SCREENING: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley Cinemas