Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Steve Box co-directed this with Nick Park; it is the first feature length outing for Wallace and Gromit. The unit ran 33 separate miniature sets at once on the floor of Aardman’s studio at Aztec West in Bristol, and Aardman’s own site states that 40 new characters were built and 30 animators worked under Loyd Price. The surface is handmade; the finish is not. The Moving Picture Company delivered more than 750 visual effects shots. Part of the fog is digital, the rabbits swirling inside Wallace’s vacuum contraption were generated in a computer, and smoke was filmed separately and composited on top. The subtitle started out as The Great Vegetable Plot and was changed after market research. On 10 October 2005, three days after the American opening, a Bristol warehouse Aardman used for storage burned down and three decades of stored sets, models and puppets were lost. The Academy gave it the animated feature award, and BAFTA did not judge it as animation at all: it took Outstanding British Film, against that year’s live action releases. A good fit if you know most of the gags sit in background signage and props rather than in the lines. Not for anyone who wants every frame to be hand moved clay, or who expects the chase sequences to run fast.