Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
★★★½ — Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
There's a moment in this film where Gromit, seated alone in a cinema, watches a nature documentary about rabbits while quietly weeping into his popcorn, and it is, without exaggeration, one of the most perfectly observed bits of comedy I've seen in an animated film. No dialogue. No fanfare. Just a dog, some popcorn, and an ocean of feeling. That's what Aardman does better than almost anyone: it trusts the image.
Nick Park and Steve Box's feature-length Wallace and Gromit adventure transplants our favourite cheese-obsessed inventor and his long-suffering canine companion into a full-blown Hammer horror pastiche. Misty moors, villagers clutching pitchforks, a lycanthropic menace terrorising the annual Giant Vegetable Competition. The setup is glorious. And if you've ever wanted to see what the classic creature-feature tradition looks like when it's been lovingly rebuilt from plasticine and sheer British bloody-mindedness, this is your film.
The stop-motion animation is exquisite in a way that's genuinely hard to articulate. Every woolly jumper, every leaf on every prize-winning cabbage, every expressive twitch of Gromit's brow feels handcrafted with obsessive care. You're aware, watching it, that real human hands shaped all of this, and that knowledge adds a warmth that even the most polished CGI rarely manages to replicate. It's tactile filmmaking in the most literal sense, and it's beautiful.
The gags land with clockwork precision. Visual, verbal, and gloriously, unashamedly silly in equal measure. Ralph Fiennes voices the villainous Lord Victor Quartermaine with such pompous, preening commitment that he's an absolute joy every time he opens his mouth. It might actually be my favourite performance of his, which is a sentence I didn't expect to write, but here we are. The supporting cast of eccentric villagers, each defined by their prized vegetable, is exactly the sort of deeply strange, deeply English comic invention that Aardman has always excelled at.
What keeps it from tipping into mere genre exercise is its heart. Beneath the monster-movie homage there's a gentle comedy about community, eccentricity, and the quiet heroism of loyalty, and that last quality belongs almost entirely to Gromit. Wallace bumbles, schemes, and inadvertently causes catastrophe. Gromit acts. He thinks, he plans, he worries, and he loves his hopeless owner anyway. Their chemistry is the franchise's bedrock, and the film is smart enough to know it. The real magic is never the spectacle: it's the silent glance between man and dog.
I've written about the shorter films elsewhere, and for sheer precision I still think The Wrong Trousers is the pinnacle of what this duo can do. Were-Rabbit earns its place just behind that in the canon. What the feature format costs it is the diamond-sharp focus of those half-hour outings, and you do feel the slightly baggier runtime in places. The pacing dips occasionally in the middle stretch in a way that a tighter cut might have fixed.
But that's a mild grumble about a very good film. If you want to understand what makes this particular strand of British comedy work, if you want to see how a monster movie can be both a loving tribute to the genre and a gentle satire of village life and English eccentricity all at once, this is essential viewing. And if you're curious how the franchise has aged since, I had plenty to say about Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) too.
Funnier, warmer, and more visually inventive than almost anything else in its genre. A triumph of craft, comedy, and character. Three and a half stars.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2005 | Watched: 2026-03-31
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Nick Park: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) · A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) · A Grand Day Out (1989) · A Close Shave (1995)
More with Peter Sallis: A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) · A Grand Day Out (1989) · A Close Shave (1995) · The Wrong Trousers (1993)
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
