Count me overjoyed, elated, and ecstatic that the early word on the Wallace and Gromit movie is positive:
“Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” has forced me to ponder the deepest mysteries of cinema. Why, for instance, do certain faces haunt and move us as they do?
I am thinking of Gromit, the mute and loyal animated dog whose selflessness and intelligence can be counted on, when things get really crazy, to save the day. Gromit has no mouth, and yet his face is one of the most expressive ever committed to the screen. In particular, his brow–a protuberance overhanging his spherical, googly eyes–is an almost unmatched register of emotion. Resignation, worry, tenderness and disgust all come alive in that plasticine nub. To keep matters within the DreamWorks menagerie, you might compare Gromit to Shrek, who has the genetic advantages of Mike Myers’s Scots burr, a bevy of celebrity-voiced sidekicks and rivals, and state-of-the-art computer-animation technology. Good for him. But Gromit, made by hand and animated by a painstaking stop-motion process, has something Shrek will never acquire in a hundred sequels: a soul.
I had a good feeling about this, and not only on the basis of “The Wrong Trousers” and the other delightful shorts. When I somewhat unaccountably went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory over the summer, the high point of the screening was, by a very wide margin, the trailer for Were-Rabbit.