Ho John Lee’s Weblog

It seems I only see kids movies in movie theaters for the past few years. Most of my personal movie watching happens on trans-pacific flights, which leads to occasional surprises when I get the DVD later to see what United Airlines sanitized away. (Singapore Airlines leaves the movies intact, though.)

This weekend we went to see Wallace & Gromit - Curse of the Were-Rabbit at the local Century Theaters megaplex.

Although I enjoyed the movie, I think it was upstaged by the short feature before the film, which was a Christmas-themed adventure featuring the four penguins from Madagascar. The smallest penguin, Private, heads off to the city to look for a Christmas gift when he sees that the polar bear is lonely on Christmas eve while the rest of the zoo animals are having festive parties. He ends up on his way to becoming a chew toy for a ferocious lap dog, and is rescued by the rest of the penguin squad. Rico, the incomprehensible one, eventually gets to put his dynamite to good use.

In Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace and Gromit spend most of their time running their “humane pest control service”, Anti-Pesto, which specializes in protecting vegetable gardens from voracious rabbits. Their primary tool is a large rabbit vacuum cleaner which sucks the rabbits from their tunnels and deposits them unharmed in a large container. Wallace and Gromit are generally successful, which leads to a problem of where to keep the growing number of rabbits. In the days leading up to a prize vegetable-growing contest, the town villagers are plagued by visits from a giant Were-Rabbit.

Wallace & Gromit is produced using a clay animation technique which gives the film a very different, more organic visual feel. Unlike 3-d computer graphics, there are irregularities and tooling marks in the surfaces which move around and change as the clay is flexed. As kids movies go, it was OK, but I was reflecting to myself during the movie that I would probably be just as interested in seeing a film about the production process as the actual movie.

Complicating the future creation of such a film, Aardman Studios recently suffered a warehouse fire, which destroyed many of their sets and props.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Books, Movies, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.