PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 10/5/05)

The wait is over, and boy, has it been worth it. Stop-motion clay animator Nick Park’s most iconic creations, the cheese-loving, strictly-analog-age inventor Wallace and his loyal albeit beleaguered eye-rolling dog Gromit have finally made the leap to a feature-length adventure after a series of breathtaking, increasingly elaborate short films beginning in the late ‘80s with A Grand Day Out and continuing with the cheekily thrilling The Wrong Trousers and the absurd sci-fi noir of A Close Shave. I’ve heard even reasonably loyal fans of the duo express concerns as to whether the two charmers could support a feature-length story line.

No worries. With its immediately hilarious storyline concerning an English village’s giant vegetable contest and W&G’s latest self-reinvention as “Anti-Pesto,” offering a humane solution to the problem of rabbit encroachment in local gardens, Curse begins at just the right pitch of genial absurdism and ramps up beautifully. After an ill-fated Wallace experiment with lapine mind-control, the titular Were-Rabbit provides the team with its most formidable challenge ever. One way Park and co-director Steve Box spice up the usual W&G formula is by keeping one member of the team offscreen a good deal of the time, for reasons we won’t reveal here. Among the new and uproarious characters here are aristocrats voiced by Bonham-Carter and Fiennes, with Peter Sallis’ Wallace establishing the third point in an unusual romantic triangle.

Simultaneously paying homage to and sending up Jaws, Hammer horror pictures, Ealing Comedies, and much more, the movie does so without ever seeming hermetic or fussy—gags of all sort flow like running water, and they all work, as do the lovably exasperating characters and the incredibly inventive set pieces. This is more than just the best animated comedy of the year—it’s the best comedy of the year, period.—Glenn Kenny