I love the Wallace & Gromit films. If you haven't heard of them, Wallace is and inventor and Gromit is his very intelligent dog. They have been in several animated shorts, two of which ("The Wrong Trousers" and "A Close Shave") have won Academy Awards. They are done by Nick Park of Aardman Animation in painstaking claymation. Park also did Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" music video which you might have seen. Their first feature length film was Chicken Run and this is the first time Wallace and Gromit have been in a full length (85 minute) feature.
In this film, our duo run Anti-Pesto, a humane pest remover which the whole town seems to have hired to protect their prized vegetables from rabbits. There's an annual fair coming up and they all want to win. They of course have some wonderful devices to help them, including the Bun-Vac 6000 (which has two settings: Blow and Suck). While Anti-Pesto seems to be protecting the town efectively, soon a giant beast starts attacking and they have their work cut out for them. Their premire customer, Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter) also runs the fair and hopes to win. Her suitor is Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) who wants to pursue a less humane way to deal with the beast.
The animation is of course amazing, though I noticed some small special effects thrown in in a couple of places. In their first film, A Grand Day out, the flame on a match was clay, didn't look like it in this one. The plot moves pretty quickly and there are several good chase scenes and a lot of puns. However I did find it quite predictable. I couldn't guess to far ahead, but very often I knew what the next step was, and that's all you really need to blow any suspense. The other thing I was disappointed in was that there wasn't enough Gromit. The Wrong Trousers was very effective at making you feel sorry for Gromit and giving you a big emotional attachment to the film. A Close Shave couldn't quite match that. In this film, Gromit's seems mostly reduced to inaudibly groaning at Wallace's incompetence and of course saving the day. I enjoyed the film a lot and laughed out loud several times, but I liked the last two more.
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