WALLACE & GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT

WALLACE & GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT (vt THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT). Steve Box and Nick Park, dir. Box, Park, Bob Baker, and Mark Burton, script. UK: Aardman Animations and DreamWorks Animatin (prod.) / DreamWorks and UIP (dist.), 2005. 85 min. Claymation comedy parodying Horror, significant here for its Rube-Goldberg devices vs. a rifle and a very old blunderbuss (more or less); images of the superimposition of the technological upon Plasticine representations of the human, vegetable, anthropomorphized canine—and upon rabbits; and cinematic allusions (and maybe some SF variations on a horror theme). Wallace's house and car (enclosing W&G) give us comic hypertrophied technology in a manner appropriate to a town caught in the 1940s or 1950s, and a little behind the times even then. W&G's humane (anti)rabbit protection service, as personalized by their customers, keeps huge vegetables inside green houses and/or electro-mechanical systems designed to keep off rabbits, or, that failing, aiding in capturing rabbits (or, in the case of Gromit's melon, keeping a vegetable warm: he uses an electric blanket). Wallace's latest invention vacuums up the rabbits for disposal (i.e., commitment to well-fed captivity in Wallace's basement). Opposed to Wallace is Victor Quartermaine as Great White Hunter/Adventurer in the Allan Quartermaine tradition—as brought to a comic low in provincial England. Films alluded to include the James Whale 1931 FRANKENSTEIN and Hammer horror films generally, plus significant allusions to METROPOLIS and possibly LOGAN'S RUN (q.v.). Wallace attempts to brainwash rabbits into abstaining from vegetables and in the process exchanges part of his personality with one of the rabbits, making Wallace—spoiler here—the "Were-Rabbit" of the title. The SpFx for the transfer are very close to those F. Lang uses for the «soul transfer» between Maria and the robot. The rabbits floating around in the tank after being vacuumed up may look like participants in the ritual of "Carousel" in LOGAN'S RUN (or not; we won't push the point). Note also priest's suggestion that the Were-Rabbit has come in punishment for the hubris of using high-technique, if not necessarily high-tech to raise huge vegetables, and his supplying the golden bullets used to kill were-rabbits. Cf. and contrast Park and Peter Lord's CHICKEN RUN.