Clan Hutchins went out to our favorite movie theater (the Muvico Egyptian at Arundel Mills) yesterday evening to see the new Wallace and Gromit film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Half of Clan Hutchins viewed this outing with the purest anticipation, the other half with an air of weary trepidation. All four of us are huge Nick Park fans, mind you. We could sit through back-to-back family viewings of the three-volume Wallace and Gromit opus every day for a month, had we the leisure. But the senior Hutchinses are schooled in the disappointing ways of the real world, and we've seen Dreamworks screw up a great many promising properties.
They screwed it up, and it's not very good.
How do I know it was Dreamworks that screwed it up, and not just Nick Park off his game for once? Because it was bad in exactly the way Dreamworks productions always are bad. They take charming, innocent, quirkily endearing characters from children's literature and make them more "modern" and "relevant" and "hip"— which is just another way of saying coarse, trashy, and, vulgar.
This Katzenbergification was evident in all the trailers as well. I can't claim Dreamworks has a monopoly on the drecking down of family fare — the first trailer, for the new Curious George animation, was from Universal. I mentally filed it as the biggest waste of high-status voice talent (Drew Barrymore, Will Farrell, Eugene Levy, etc, etc) ever proposed — until they played the trailer for Over the Hedge, which had bigger names (Bruce Willis, and the biggest name of all — William Shatner!) and looked even lamer.
I appreciate that the custom of running an animated short before the feature is being revived. I do not appreciate that the custom is being used to get a half-baked retread from Madagascar into circulation. Following the lead of John Podhoretz, I christen it Madagascrap 2: These Penguins Still Aren't Funny.
So on to the feature film. Spoilers? Yes, I suppose, although you do realize if you're seeing a Wallace and Gromit film for the plot, you're a sad human being.
The plot bears similarities to the third of the great classic W&G shorts, A Close Shave, substituting rabbits for sheep and Lady Campanula Tottington for Wendolene Ramsbottom. A plague of cute furry bunnies are threatening the upcoming Giant Vegetable competition, so Wallace puts his inventing skills behind the Anti-Pesto Humane Pest Removal Service. The humane part consists of housing all the captured bunnies in his basement, where they cause all the varieties of trouble one would expect. Wallace attempts to brainwash the bunnies into hating veg with his new invention, a sort of combination Shop-Vac and brainwave exchanger, so that the bunnies can be set free with no danger to the village's giant vegetables. The experiment goes awry in Freaky Friday fashion, with one of the rabbits gaining Wallace's cheese-loving persona, and Wallace becoming, upon exposure to the moon, a giant greens-gobbling Were-Rabbit. Gromit and the Wallace-ized bunny must stop Wallace from ruining the Giant Veg Competition, and from running afoul of the rifle-brandishing Victor Quartermaine, suitor for the hand of Lady Tottington and a real bunny-hater (voiced in the most pedestrian phone-it-in fashion, I regret to say, by one of my favorite actors of all time, Ralph Fiennes).
OK, so the plot doesn't seem any thinner than any of the previous Wallace and Gromit outings. That's not the problem. What is missing is the charming, oddball details that you remember afterwards, that have little to do with the plot: the silly text in the morning newspapers, the penguin using a rubber glove as a disguise. Crime and Punishment by Dogstoevski.
What is substituted in their place, and seems so jarring and inappropriate, are slightly lewd verbal double-entendres: "Beware the moon!" bays the vicar as someone's pants have fallen down. Wallace comes up pantless himself, and covers his embarrassment in front of Lady Tottington with a cardboard box labelled: Cheese. May Contain Nuts.The one that got the biggest laugh from the mostly 20-something audience is also the one that I bet my husband would have the Andrew Sullivan Freak-Out Advisory topping out at red by Monday afternoon: The violet-eyelidded Quartermaine, having through a series of mishaps replaced his toupee with a stack of pink cotton candy, is repelled in Lady Tottington's conservatory by a blast from a can of "Pansy Spray." The fact that absolutely anything in a Wallace and Gromit movie makes me think of Andrew Sullivan encapsulates the problem quite neatly, I think.