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It’s FUNNY & Family-Friendly: New Wallace & Gromit Film for Everyone

By Matt Stringer

Wallace and Gromit race to save the day for a town feverish with veggie-mania over the Giant Vegetable Competition. But, they have to hurdle some obstacles: a maniacal male gold digger who hopes to wed the festival’s hostess, 100s of cute, hungry bunnies, and a mysterious, rampaging rabbit that ravages the town’s treasured vegetable gardens at night.

It’s a unique plot for a claymation film. What’s more, it’s family-friendly, and it’s coming to theatres Oct. 7. It’s Wallace & Gromit—The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Wallace, an inventor, loves cheese and this adoration is seen early in the film when he is woken up by an alarm clock that feeds him with his favorite food.

It’s his and his dog Gromit’s first full-length feature claymation movie.

Nick Park, the original creator of Wallace & Gromit, teamed up with Steve Box to direct the film. Park and Box worked together on the Oscar®-winning Wallace & Gromit shorts and on the film Chicken Run.

In the upcoming movie, Wallace and Gromit fight a mysterious beast that’s chomping down on the town’s annual festival. And Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham-Carter), the festival’s hostess, calls in the help of Anti-Pesto, the pair’s humane pest control business, to salvage the competition. But, Lady Tottington’s snobby suitor, Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes), wants to shoot the elusive, veg-ravaging rabbit so he can become a hero and Tottington’s husband.

But Wallace has some astounding new inventions that might just give him the edge: the Mind-Manipulation-O-Matic and the BunVac 6000.

Unlike Quartermaine, the pair doesn’t want to hurt any of the rabbits. They just want to keep them out of the town’s gardens. With nowhere to put them, they place them in their house. That leads to an entirely different problem since Gromit is left to care for both the animals and his partner.

“We think of them like an elderly couple. They know each other,” Park said.

Usually Wallace and Gromit are featured in short films. Two of those films, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, won Oscars in the category of Best Short Film, Animated in 1994 and 1996, respectively.

And in all the shorts and in this movie, an eccentric Wallace wields a new invention.

Wallace uses one of his inventions, the Mind-Manipulation-O-Matic, to brainwash the rabbits to behave. It doesn’t work. “He would never try to brainwash a rabbit again, but he would probably try a badger,” Park said.

And Park’s Wallace has some similarities to his own life. “After making the very first Wallace & Gromit, which is where Wallace builds a rocket and goes to the moon…I then realized how close to my father Wallace is. When I was a kid my dad was a bit of an inventor and a carpenter and he built a caravan from scraps really. My whole family went on holiday in it,” Park said.

They’re like superheroes in the movie, moving stealthily through the night to stop the animals from eating vegetables slated to be featured in the town’s upcoming festival.

It takes a lot of work to make all the clay pieces come to life: Just under a 1000 bunnies alone were created for the movie. All the main characters are made of clay and have a metal skeleton inside so the animators can pose them.

On a typical day, Park and Box review the previous day’s film, talk to the 20 to 30 animators individually, work through the action on the sets, rewrite the script to make it funnier, and select dialogue to perfectly match the action.

“Its just great to work with models. It’s just a pleasure to look at them. It’s like making a live-action movie, but it’s miniature. In a way it’s like being an inventor. You can draw something and it becomes real as if by magic,” Park said

Everything is meticulously looked over. “From a blade of glass to Lady Tottington’s stately home, every brick on that stately home has been talked about and made. It’s like creating your own world,” Box said.

It wasn’t an easy task coming up with the perfect script either. They watched tons of old horror films and movies involving villagers who’ve become the mob. They came up with something similar, but unique as well. “It’s the world’s first vegetarian horror movie,” Park said.

But Park and Box made the movie for all and hope everyone finds it humorous and funny. Box said anybody could enjoy it from 3 to 103.

“I really don’t like it myself when animated films actually have a lot of adult jokes in them. My children, I know, often they just feel left out, confused,” Box said.

The movie is an Aardman Animations production and is presented by DreamWorks Animation SKG and Aardman Features.

Matt Stringer is the editor of Curious Parents.