Oh, SPLENDID. It’s been a long time between bites of toast for the dynamic duo, but it’s been well worth the wait; apparently Nick Park found the experience of making Curse of the Were-Rabbit with Dreamworks so enervating he was in no rush to repeat the experience (Netflix seem to have been more accommodating, which I find hard to believe for some reason). So here we are, sixteen years since the last W&G short; Wallace is still inventing things—this time round it’s a robot garden gnome, Norbot, who frankly has a kind of weirdly alarming vibe to him even before he gets reprogrammed for evil—and Gromit is still kind of despairing of him, while the local police chief is more interested in his impending retirement than the impending return of a former foe from long ago. It’s just beautiful. I applauded so many bits of this film. Most notably, I don’t think I noticed that Wallace is no longer voiced by Peter Sallis, who retired after the previous short and then also died; Ben Whitehead, who’s previously been Wallace’s voice in video games, steps up for his first screen performance, and apart from an initial shock at realising just how much he sounds like Sallis, I actually quickly forgot it wasn’t the latter. It was Wallace’s voice. I think the only thing I seriously have against the film is that, though it’s obviously made in Aardman’s classic claymation method, it’s been shot digitally, and it didn’t feel like it had the same sort of “handmade” vibe of the older films. Maybe it was just me, I don’t know. But whatever, it was great; somehow this claymation thing felt more actually thrilling than a lot of live action films I’ve seen, especially ones with preposterous CGI effects… of which there obviously are some in this one, but the heart of it is the physicality of the clay modelling and the fact that they’re real objects, even if I couldn’t quite see the fingerprints in the way I could before. Terrific.
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