Nick Park's claymation creations -- the crackpot inventor who's "crackers about cheese" and his silent, watchful, wary, undyingly loyal yet healthily skeptical pet pooch -- take their first feature-length excursion, after a nine-year absence from the screen. The just shy of an hour-and-a-half running time is as long as their three previous outings put together. But because the pacing is as expert as ever, it flies by in what feels like maybe, oh, an hour flat, where the earlier half-hours -- A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave -- felt proportionately like twenty minutes tops. (The necessarily more elaborate or elongated plotline veers off into a horror-film pastiche that deftly stitches together a Frankensteinian composite of the Wolfman, the Fly, and King Kong.) The unprecedented contamination, unprecedented for Wallace and Gromit anyway, of traditional stop-motion animation with newfangled computer-generated imagery -- primarily for a multitude of rabbits and some "special effects" of fog, smoke, an explosion, and the like -- doubtless sullies the purism of their hermetically enclosed world. But this is more bothersome in principle than in actual spectacle. These distinct animation techniques in fact blend very well. And the human touch, in any event, still shows in the imperfect texture of the plasticine figures, in their limited movements, and in the overall illusion that you are watching a live-action film of three-dimensional space, of sets, camera angles, and lighting, of mise-en-scène. The illusion is not really an illusion at all. The space, the sets, the angles, the lighting, all exist in the real world, together with the race of foot-tall homunculi. More problematic, perhaps, is the spicing up of the traditional cozy, genteel, droll, understated British humor -- traditional British humor, that is, prior to the Goon Show and Monty Python -- with a peppering of the salty and the dirty. Though the spice may be mild by the standards of the contemporary marketplace, in specific the standards of the computer-animation marketplace, one can't help but feel that co-directors Nick Park and Steve Box have bent a little to peer pressure. What one would prefer to see instead is for them to exert some pressure on their peers (meaning their inferiors) in matters of timing, touch, and taste. With the voices of Peter Sallis, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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