Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit



Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a 2005 British stop-motion animated comedy film. The film was produced by Aardman Animations in partnership with DreamWorks Animation, and was the last DreamWorks animated film to be distributed by DreamWorks Pictures. It was directed by Nick Park and Steve Box as the second feature-length film by Aardman after Chicken Run (2000).

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is based on the Wallace and Gromit short film series, created by Park. The film follows eccentric inventor Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) and his mute and intelligent dog, Gromit, as they come to the rescue of the residents of a village which is being plagued by a mutant rabbit before an annual vegetable competition.

The film introduces a number of new characters, and features a voice cast including Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes. It was a critical and commercial success, and won a number of film awards including the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, making it the second film from DreamWorks Animation to win (after Shrek), as well as both the second non-American animated film and second non-computer animated film to have received this achievement (after Spirited Away). It is also the only stop-motion film to win the award.

Plot
Tottington Hall's annual Giant Vegetable Competition is approaching. The winner of the competition will win the coveted Golden Carrot Award. All are eager to protect their vegetables from damage and thievery by rabbits until the contest, and Wallace and Gromit are cashing in by running a vegetable security and humane pest control business, "Anti-Pesto".

As the event draws close, Wallace finds themselves running out of space to cage the rabbits. He is inspired to create the Mind Manipulation-O-Matic machine to brainwash the rabbits and remove their appetite for vegetables. On his first attempt, a rabbit is stuck to Wallace's head as he uses the machine's headpieces, and Gromit destroys the machine to protect Wallace. The machine appears to have worked as the rabbit shows no interest in vegetables though appears to have gained some intelligence. They name the rabbit Hutch while Wallace begins rebuilding the device.

Over the night, several townsfolk report a giant Were-rabbit tried to eat their vegetables. Wallace suspects that Hutch may be the Were-rabbit and keeps him caged up. Lady Tottington holds an emergency town meeting, in which the hunter Lord Victor Quartermaine offers to shoot the Were-rabbit. However, Lady Tottington persuades the rest of the town to continue with Anti-Pesto's services. Victor, who really seeks to woo Lady Tottington, becomes jealous of Wallace, and later corners him in the forest. But to Victor and his dog Philip's shock, Wallace transforms into the Were-rabbit under the light of the full moon and bounds away. Gromit, who also witnessed the transformation, lures Wallace back home to protect him. Victor obtains three "24-carrot" gold bullets from the town's reverend to use against Wallace the next evening.

The celebration begins the next day. Gromit convinces Wallace that he is the Were-rabbit, and Wallace hides himself away. Lady Tottington, who has come to like Wallace, comes to visit and tells him about Victor's plan. But when the moon rises, Wallace, beginning to change into a Were-rabbit, shoos Lady Tottington away to avoid seeing him. As she leaves, Victor arrives and attempts to fire on Wallace with the golden bullets. Gromit creates a distraction to allow Wallace, as the Were-rabbit, to escape; the hunter gives chase to Wallace as he heads for the competition. Gromit, with the help of Hutch, plans to sacrifice the giant marrow he had been growing as bait to lure Wallace back to safety.

Wallace, as the Were-rabbit, creates chaos at the fair, and Victor eventually runs out of bullets. Desperate, he grabs the Golden Carrot trophy to use as ammo for his blunderbuss. Wallace grabs Lady Tottington and climbs onto one of the towers of Tottington Hall, where she discovers Wallace's connection to the Were-rabbit. Victor gives chase, revealing that he only wants to impress Lady Tottington for her money. When Gromit arrives, Philip attempts to prevent him from interfering, leading to the two into a dogfight using aeroplanes taken from a fairground attraction. Gromit gets the upper hand, sending Philip's plane to the ground, then steers his plane into Victor's line of fire just as he is about to shoot the Golden Carrot at Wallace. The plane takes the hit and starts to go down, whereupon Wallace jumps off the tower, grabs Gromit and sacrifices himself to cushion their fall into a cheese tent. Victor gloats about his victory, but Lady Tottington hits him with her giant carrot, knocking him off into the cheese tent as well, and goes to check on Wallace herself. As the townspeople begin to form a mob to learn the Were-rabbit's identity, Gromit quickly disguises Victor as the Were-rabbit, who is subsequently chased away by the mob.

Wallace transforms back to his human self and appears dead, but Gromit uses some Stinking Bishop cheese to bring Wallace around. Lady Tottington awards Gromit the Golden Carrot for his sacrifice of the giant marrow, and later converts the grounds of Tottington Hall into a safe habitat for Hutch and the other captured rabbits.

Cast

 * Peter Sallis as Wallace, an eccentric and clumsy inventor with an obsession with cheese.
 * Gromit is Wallace's silent, brave and highly intelligent dog, who saves his master whenever something goes wrong.
 * Ralph Fiennes as Lord Victor Quartermaine, an arrogant, cruel, upper class bounder who is fond of hunting; he is rarely seen without his rifle and his hunting dog Philip. He wears a toupee and despises Anti-Pesto. His hunting rifle is apparently a high calibre bolt-action model. It soon becomes clear in the film that Victor's only interest in Lady Tottington is her vast fortune which he is eager to get his hands on. After Lady Tottington discovers that Victor knew that the were-rabbit was Wallace all along, he reveals that all he wants is her money. His surname is similar to Allan Quatermain, the British novelist's H. Rider Haggard's big-game hunter character.
 * Philip is Victor's vicious but cowardly hunting dog who resembles a Bull Terrier. He and his master will do anything to stop the Were-Rabbit, although Philip is bright enough to know that the Were-Rabbit is beyond his hunting skills, and that Gromit, closer to his own size, is a better prospect as the target of premeditated violence.
 * Helena Bonham Carter as Lady Campanula "Totty" Tottington, a wealthy aristocratic spinster with a keen interest in both vegetable-growing and 'fluffy' animals. For 517 years, her family has hosted an annual vegetable competition. Lady Tottington asks Wallace to call her "Totty" (which is a British term for attractive women) and develops a romantic interest in him. Her forename, Campanula, the scientific name of a bellflower, and her surname is taken from the Lancashire village of Tottington.
 * Peter Kay as Police Constable Albert Mackintosh, the local village constable who judges the Giant Vegetable Contest, although, because of the havoc it creates every year, he would rather it did not happen at all.
 * Nicholas Smith as Reverend Clement Hedges, the local vicar and the first person in the village to witness the Were-Rabbit. He describes the full horror of his encounter with the beast, but Victor refuses to believe him. However, when Victor discovers the true identity of the beast, he turns to the vicar for advice on how to kill it. Reverend Hedges appears to have a wide range of knowledge on the habits and the slayings of supernatural animals, and has a whole cupboard filled with the weapons to defeat them. Although his name appears in the credits, it is never mentioned in the film.
 * Dicken Ashworth and Liz Smith as Mr. and Mrs. Mulch, clients of Wallace and Gromit's Anti-Pesto. Mrs. Mulch is a prominent woman that has a fixation on her gigantic pumpkin. Mr. Mulch speaks little and has a pair of dentures, which he briefly used to knock out a thieving rabbit.
 * Edward Kelsey as Mr. Growbag, an elderly resident of Wallace and Gromit's neighbourhood and a founding member of the town's veg grower's council. He constantly recalls memories of incidents from previous Vegetable Competitions – comparing them to what may happen to the forthcoming one. Two of the "disasters" he mentions are The Great Slug Riot of '32, "when there were slugs the size of pigs", and the Great Duck Plague of '53.
 * Peter Sallis (with a sped-up voice) as Hutch, originally just another captive rabbit, but receives special treatment and a name, after an attempt to brainwash him and his fellows goes wrong. He was the first to be suspected of being the Were-Rabbit. Everything that Hutch says is a quotation from Wallace (though, surprisingly, some of the lines were originally spoken by Wallace after the incident with the Mind-Manipulation-O-Matic). Hutch wears clothes like Wallace's, including his slippers and tank top.

Production
The directors, Nick Park and Steve Box, have often referred to the film as the world's "first vegetarian horror film". Peter Sallis (the voice of Wallace) is joined in the film by Ralph Fiennes (as Lord Victor Quartermaine), Helena Bonham Carter (as Lady Campanula Tottington), Peter Kay (as PC Mackintosh), Nicholas Smith (as Rev. Clement Hedges), and Liz Smith (as Mrs. Mulch). Keeping with the tradition of the original short films, Gromit remains silent, communicating only through body language.

Park told an interviewer that after separate test screenings with British and American children, the film was altered to "tone down some of the British accents and make them speak more clearly so the American audiences could understand it all better." Park was often sent notes from DreamWorks, which irritated him. He recalled one note that Wallace's car should be trendier, which he disagreed with because he felt making things look old-fashioned made it look more ironic.

The vehicle Wallace drives in the film is an Austin A35 van. In collaboration with Aardman in the spring of 2005, a road-going replica of the model was created by brothers Mark and David Armé, founders of the International Austin A30/A35 Register, for promotional purposes. In a 500-man-hour customisation, an original 1964 van received a full body restoration before being dented and distressed to perfectly replicate the model van used in the film. The official colour of the van is Preston Green, named in honour of Nick Park's home town. The name was chosen by the Art Director and Mark Armé.

For the US edition of the film, the dialogue was changed to refer to Gromit's prize marrow as a "melon". Because the word "marrow" is not well known in the US, Jeffrey Katzenberg insisted it be changed. Park explained "Because it's the only appropriate word we could find that would fit with the mouth shape for 'marrow'. Melon apparently works over there. So we have Wallace saying, 'How's your prize melon?'". The US version is also heard in the UK bootleg DVD release and when viewed on Netflix in the UK.

Release
The film had its worldwide premiere on 4 September 2005, in Sydney, Australia. It was theatrically released in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the United States on 14 October 2005. The DVD edition of the film was released on 7 February 2006 (USA) and 20 February 2006 (UK).

Home media
In Region 2, the film was released in a two-disc special including Cracking Contraptions, plus a number of other extras. In Region 1, the film was released on DVD in Widescreen and Fullscreen versions and VHS on 7 February 2006. Wal-Mart stores carried a special version with an additional DVD, "Gromit's Tail-Waggin' DVD" which included the test shorts made for this production.

A companion game, also titled Curse of the Were-Rabbit, had a coinciding release with the film. A novelisation, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: The Movie Novelization by Penny Worms (ISBN 0-8431-1667-6), was also produced.

It was the last DreamWorks Animation movie to be released on VHS. It was re-released on DVD on 13 May 2014, as part of a triple film set, along with DreamWorks Animation's Chicken Run and Flushed Away.

Box office
Wallace & Gromit grossed US$192,610,372 at the box office, of which US$56,110,897 was from the US, where it opened in 3,645 cinemas and had an opening weekend gross of US$16,025,987, putting it at number one for that weekend. During its second weekend it came in at number two, US$200,000 behind The Fog. It remained number one worldwide for three weeks in a row. As of 2016, it is the second highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time.

Critical response
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit received a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 176 reviews, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a subtly touching and wonderfully eccentric adventure featuring Wallace and Gromit." The film also received a score of 87 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 38 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim."

Legacy
After the box office failure of Flushed Away resulted in a major write-down for DreamWorks, it was reported on 3 October 2006 and confirmed on 30 January 2007 that DreamWorks had terminated their partnership with Aardman. In revealing the losses related to Flushed Away, DreamWorks also revealed they had taken a $29 million write-down over Wallace & Gromit as well, and the film under-performed expectations. Following the split, Aardman retained complete ownership of the film, while DreamWorks Animation retained worldwide distribution rights in perpetuity, excluding some United Kingdom television rights and ancillary markets. Soon after the end of the agreement, Aardman announced they were proceeding with another Wallace & Gromit project, later revealed to be a return to their earlier short films with A Matter of Loaf and Death with the BBC.

During production of the short, Park remarked publicly on difficulties with working with DreamWorks during the production of Wererabbit, such as the constant production notes and demands to alter the material to appeal more to American children.

In 2014, Nick Park commented that the film series is likely over with due to the declining health of Peter Sallis, ending any possibilities of another feature film.