The great Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones measured comic timing in fractions of seconds. He thought a single frame of film -- which passes faster than an eye blink -- could make the difference between funny and unfunny.
No animator since Jones has been quite as precise as Nick Park, the mad scientist of claymation. Park's three superb Wallace and Gromit shorts -- his student thesis A Grand Day Out (1989), and the more polished, Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995) -- are masterpieces of drollery. Each strand of hair, patch of wallpaper and soap bubble are in their comically correct places.
The same is true of Park's Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, in which the duo make the jump from British TV to American multiplexes.
Wallace, as you hopefully know by now, is a cheerful, somewhat inept British inventor. Gromit is his faithful pooch (and, evidence suggests, the brains behind their operation).
In Were-Rabbit, Wallace and Gromit are running Anti-Pesto, a pest-control company with some nifty gadgets: infrared garden gnomes, a teakettle-powered alarm system and a giant rodent vacuum, the Bun-Vac 6000. Wallace has become a hero in his town, having captured most of the ravenous bunnies that feast on his neighbors' vegetable gardens.
But then a mind-washing experiment, featuring one of Wallace's heretofore-untested inventions, goes awry, setting loose the King Kong of bunnies. This were-rabbit is destroying every garden in town; can Wallace and Gromit catch him before he spoils the town's annual veggie-growing contest?
Were-Rabbit's brand of comedy is much more broad and brash than in the Wallace and Gromit shorts. The non-stop jokes and silliness may be a bit jarring for those expecting the sly, relatively subtle satire of the short films.
But that's the difference between the BBC, the original home of Wallace and Gromit, and Hollywood (Dreamworks produced Were-Rabbit). And though he shifts tones, Park retains most of what's best about the Wallacegromitverse: Wallace's goofy charm, Gromit's expressive eyebrows, hugely inventive action scenes and the sweet, innocent, nostalgic vibe.
