[In Flight] Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

I've actually caught this on a Northwest flight enroute to Las Vegas, so this makes it my first review from those puny LCD screens at the back of an Airbus seat. But hey, given the time it gets to hit the screens here (end of the year?!) I might as well proceed with watching this from anywhere, yeah?

In one word: Excellent! I'm a sucker for stop-motion animation, and this movie takes the cake. For the uninitiated, Wallace & Gromit tells the tale of a wacky inventor and his faithful dog, who is a highly intelligent mutt that can walk on his hind legs and operate various contraptions.

In the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace & Gromit protect the town's annual vegetable growing contest by ridding the town's rabbit problem (oh, so cute, you wanna give them a carrot to chew on). However, their humane techniques of capturing these critters, especially the loads from Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter, straight from another stop motion pic The Corpse Bride), led them to a storage problem.

Wallace comes up with a hare-brained (pardon the pun) idea of brainwashing the rabbits into becoming non-vegetarians led to a mysterious appearance of a king-sized rabbit haunting the populace, and it's up to our favourite man-dog team to return things back to normal, while fending off the competition from a certain Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes), a poke at a certain Alan Quartermaine.

While the storyline's pretty straightforward, and the mystery of the Were-Rabbit would've been a non-event for most moviegoers, what makes this movie enjoyable is the intricate details of the plasticine used in making the characters and town come alive. What works is not pretending to tell a very intelligent story, but one that is simple, accessible and therefore, entertaining. And THE character that steals the show is Gromit, given quite a bit of screen time and involved in pretty much all the action sequences. Kudos too to the filmmakers for refusing to budge to recast the voice of Wallace.

You must watch this, and I'd give it thumbs up as the animation of the year contender!

P.S. attached to this picture is a short clip from the Penguins of Madagascar. I thought it was pretty hilarious too, and those dudes certainly deserve a picture of their own.