Starring: Peter Sallis, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes

8 out of 10 stars

Beyond a few brief flickers of ill-advised humor, Wallace and Gromit fans can collectively breathe a deep sigh of relief; in their feature-length film debut, the animated hero and his faithful owner remain, as ever, the cheese-loving adventurers we already know and love. Nick Park, Steve Box and their team of animators have managed to maintain a careful balance between remaining true to the core characteristics of their characters, and adapting that same pairing to suit the big screen and a much wider, and ultimately less familiar audience.

As in The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, Curse of the Were-Rabbit centers around the creative endeavors of Wallace (voiced with loving enthusiam by Peter Sallis), an inventor whose latest creation, the punstatically named Anti-Pesto, is keeping him and his trusty canine sidekick Gromit very busy. Anti-Pesto, it seems, is in great demand in the days leading up to their village's annual Giant Vegetable Competition, and Wallace's combination of trip wires, mechanized garden gnomes and an elaborate vacuum removal system is doing its job of protecting vegetables from the growing rabbit problem by humanely capturing the fuzzy creatures for relocation into comfy hutches in Wallace's basement. When a hungier-than-normal pest attacks several gardens, Lady Tottington (voiced to stiff-upper-lip perfection by Helena Bonham Carter), whose family has hosted the competition at Tottington Hall for hundreds of years, calls on the Anti-Pesto team to catch the creature and save the contest. Wallace, more than a bit smitten, is quite happy to help her -- much to the jealous dismay of her snotty, gun-happy pseudo-fiance Victor Quartermaine (voiced with gleeful abandon by Ralph Fiennes). Wallace makes a few alterations to his invention that are meant to catch the amped-up pest and goes to work, but yes, you guessed it, his changes go awry, and it is up to Gromit to save the day.

The first hour or so of the film, which is spent establishing not only how Anti-Pesto works, but also showing us the daily rituals that Wallace and Gromit follow, seems to drag on a bit, and there are a few reasons that this is likely so. Tried and true fans already know the morning routine and all of the snazzy mechanisms with which Gromit awakens his master and gets him ready for the day ahead, and the detail paid to those rituals isn't exactly annoying, but it does create a sense of impatience to learn something new about the duo, in both parents and children alike. For those new to the Wallace and Gromit milieu, learning about these morning activities is essential to establishing the duo's dynamic and understanding what happens later in the film, but here it's a case of wondering why Wallace and Gromit are so great, when all they do is talk about and eat cheese, when they're not working on an invention. So, while the slow exposition at the beginning can be a bit exasperating, it is by no means boring, and it serves the essential purpose of settling the audience members, both new and old, into the particular pace of the Wallace and Gromit universe -- something which will make the comedy later in the film that much more effective.

And happily, the Wallace and Gromit universe stays almost entirely true to form, something that can't be said for many cartoons or shorts that make the jump to the hopefully greener pastures of the big screen. That said, there are a few moments that don't quite fit. Like the sometimes visible fingerprints found in the clay of the characters, left there by creator Nick Park and his fellow animators, there are a few moments where the big studio influence of DreamWorks leaves its own prints on the film as a whole. As a rule, the humor enveloping these characters has been innocent, endearing, and basically British in nature. Here, a few scenes (one involving melons grown in Lady Tottington's garden springs first to mind} are painfully out of place in the general cadence of the film, smelling suspiciously like a studio exec stepping in and telling them to punch up the humor, something which is completely unnecessary, and frankly, insults the emotional intelligence that the rest of the film both requires and engenders. It almost feels like someone shoehorned a few lines and visual cues lifted directly from an Austin Powers script, in hopes of giving the adults in the audience something to laugh at, when in reality, they needn't have worried. Adults already have more than enough to keep them busy in the form of the countless film homages to spot and the slightly sophisticated yet groanworthy puns that we have come to expect and even love.

Finally, a word about the heart of the film, the character who appeared to completely entrance almost every child (and many of the adults) in the audience: Gromit. Gromit is, even moreso than in the Aardman short films, a comedic masterpiece. The painstaking care that the animators must have taken to create such intricate emotions playing across that quiet little clay canine face are incomprehensible to anyone not in the studio with them, and surely awards of many sorts for their patient efforts must be imminent. Their work with Gromit is so thoughtful and faithful to his character that it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that he is not an actual living, breathing creature. Gromit is, simply put, the first great silent film star of the 21st century.

Aardman, DreamWorks and company should be commended for offering filmgoers an opportunity to be excited about returning to movie theaters. Their creation -- full of the cleverest of film homages, heart-pounding adventure sequences, inventions that both delight and spark the imagination, the deepest of belly laughs, and even a catchphrase (many of the kids leaving the theater were chanting "Cheeeeeeeese!" as they left) -- is one film actually worthy of shelling out the money for tickets and snacks, simply to enjoy the quickly disappearing experience of gazing at the screen in awe.