Oct. 26, 2005 - 6:38 pm
i'm trying to remember how many of the Wallace & Gromit films i've actually seen. i know in college i first watched The Wrong Trousers (1993) as part of a film class. i loved this movie because it has tons of references to Alfred Hitchcock and especially Rear Window (1954). anyway, so when Jill and i heard that there was a new one coming out, we had to go see it.
in this film, Wallace and Gromit are working as humane vegetable garden security guards. their company is called Antipesto. they specialize in protecting a small village that is having an upcoming huge vegetable competition. everyone in town is growing something or other for the big competition, and they're all worried about rabbits. after Wallace and Gromit have some successes in ridding the town of some rabbit problems, Wallace decides to try a couple of his inventions on the rabbits to try to into thinking they no longer love vegetables. unfortunately there is a side effect in the process and a huge were-rabbit starts plaguing the town and eating up all of the prized vegetables.
this movie was a lot of fun, but it didn't really have all of the film references in it that The Wrong Trousers had. that was my favorite part of the other movie...the fact that you had to be in the know to get a lot of the jokes. still, this one was very cute and i mean you have to love all of the cute bunnies literally floating all over the place.
one interesting thing i was reading about this movie is that a lot of cgi effects were used to produce the final product. most of it is still the normal claymation, but a little is cgi. Nick Park, the director, also apparently commissioned a team of animators to do the claymation this time around. i think he used to do it all himself, which i would think would give him a huge sense of pride...to complete years of work on a single project nearly entirely on your own and to have so many people praise you as a result. it must be a little difficult to hand that off to a team and to trust that they'll do your previous work justice. i guess as long as you're in the director's chair though, things should go your way.