A Dog And His Man

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The new movie, already a hit at the Toronto Film Festival, honors and expands the old formula. The townsfolk are preparing for the Giant Vegetable Competition held each year by Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter). To allay the villagers' fears that their supersize tomatoes and zucchini may be ravaged by rabbits, Wallace invents a gizmo that captures the critters without hurting them--much to the disapproval of Lady T.'s slimy suitor, Victor Quartermaine (a perfectly pompous Ralph Fiennes), who would rather blast the bunnies to bits. Soon the locals have a larger, more vicious threat: the mysterious, vegemaniacal Were-Rabbit.

The 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, 95% of this film is handmade.

Or, rather, thumbmade, since the animators are encouraged to leave their personal imprints, literally, on the characters. "Wallace and Gromit are designed to be animated with your hands and your fingers as much as possible," says Teresa Drilling, an American who joined Aardman for Chicken Run. "They've got just the right sort of nooks for your thumbs, so that gives it a very specific organic feel--thumby but funny."

Drilling was one of the animators working earlier this year as the shooting of Were-Rabbit raced to its close in the Aardman sound stage, a huge warren of 30 curtained sets, some that could fit on an office desk, some about the size of the model-train layout in your loner uncle's basement. Following each of the 24,000 hand-sketched storyboards that illustrate the scenes, the animator dresses the set, puts in props (tomatoes made of wax, teddy-bear fur painted green for grass), gives each character the subtlest facial makeover and takes the picture. Animators must also be actors. Often they record themselves performing the action they are about to execute, then consult the video as they adjust a figure's lips or brow.

This is microsurgery in a dollhouse, eight hours a day, with plenty of pressure; there are stress-relief posters in the hallway. But the mood is eerily calm. "Sometimes you knock something over and lose a lot of work," says Fabrice Joubert, who earlier worked on five DreamWorks cartoons, "but you have to be very Zen."

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."