Word: parkes
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There's oodles of action in Nick Park and Steve Box's Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, about the attempts of a daffy English inventor and his stoic, smarter dog to rid their home village of a vegetable-ravaging monster. Wallace, the man, scoops up rabbits by the hundreds in his mighty Bun-Vac 6000 ("It blows and sucks"). Gromit, the pooch, gets involved in some World War I--style aerial combat with another canine--a real dogfight. At film's end, the heroine, Lady Tottington, and the dread Were-Rabbit have a housetop confrontation worthy...
...second a day. That's about as much of this stop-motion animation epic as any one of the film's 30 animators at Aardman Studios in Bristol, England, could produce. Stop motion, as used in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and Park's 2000 hit Chicken Run, is essentially a series of still photographs (running through the movie projector at 24 frames a second), and each tableau, which may contain dozens of Plasticine characters, must be posed and shot before the next one is begun. The animator's job is to get the humor and humanity in each shot...
...Wallace and Gromit shorts were intimate affairs: the man, the dog and one or two other characters. Were-Rabbit creates a panorama of rural England: dozens of humans with the standard Nick Park facial expression (dazed) and eccentricities (too much mouth and not enough teeth). Aardman's feature films are sponsored by the Hollywood studio DreamWorks, but their tone and humor are totally, defiantly, blitheringly English, in a manner reminiscent of the classic Ealing comedies. Were-Rabbit is admirably old-fashioned in another way: while the rest of the animation world has gone to computer-generated (CG) features...
...Like Park, who has fiddled with modeling clay and stop motion since he was a kid in Lancashire 40 years ago, the animators seem to be channeling their inner child, the boy (or girl) genius who loved to play with clay. And they know they are part of a glorious anachronism, an ancient craft. "I love The Incredibles," Box, a co-director, says of Pixar Animation Studios' CG hit, "but that's like a Ferrari. Wallace & Gromit is a massive antique tractor. We want that thumby, handmade, handcrafted look...
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