Ray Pride

I caught up with "The Wrong Trousers," one of Nick Park's short stop-animation films starring dim inventor Wallace and clever, mute pooch Gromit, only a couple of months ago. It was funny. The company was good. It was small. It was painless and forgettable. It was appropriately... short. After years of fruitless convincing by DreamWorks Animation majordomo Jeffrey Katzenberg, owners Aardman Animations sank to the challenge of making a 75-minute Wallace and Gromit adventure. For those who love their work, I recommend it heartily. For most of the rest of the world, it's a repetitive plasticene assembly line of sub-Benny Hill gags for 7-year-olds, with three of four inspired gags but mostly an opportunity to watch out for whorls of fingerprints on the tiny figures, leaving more traces of personality there than in the jokes about big teeth, whinnying, breasts, large vegetables, vicars... It's all very English and about half as annoying as being trapped in a room filled with the self-satisfied laughter of doting adults who must adore this tedium. That said, I betcha there's a crowd for this, and please, have at it. The small bunnies floating in a glass enclosure have a certain loopy joy with which little or nothing is done. Oh yes: the voice work is like an army of small rakes being drawn against hard glass.

"Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" opens Friday.

(2005-10-04)

Also by Ray Pride

Oliver's Twist
Pert Barney Clark is the hopeful, battered wanderer of "Oliver Twist," and while this 11-year-old cherub-of-steel is not as wide-eyed as Adrien Brody in "The Pianist," his journey across a wretched, teeming nineteenth-century London bears similarities to that fearful adventure
(2005-09-27)

Tip of the Week
"Mirrormask" is a breathless, brightly colored singularity, with idiosyncratic ideas about pacing and composition that are fearsome at first but blossom into an engaging jape
(2005-09-27)

Tip of the Week
Winsome but wonderful, "Thumbsucker," Mike Mill's debut as a writer-director (from Walter Kirn's novel) after a diverse career in graphic arts and video, is a laidback tolerant suburban epic
(2005-09-20)

Family way
There is an instant, an exquisite, tingly fraction of an instant near the beginning of "Reel Paradise"--Steve James' documentary about a month at the end of a year spent running a movie theater at the edge of the world in Taveuni, Fiji by abrasive, larger- and skinnier-than-life onetime film projectionist and prototypical New Yorker, indie film icon John Pierson and his family--that seems to typify what a documentary filmmaker like James does so well
(2005-09-20)

Arms and the Man
(2005-09-13)

Tip of the Week
(2005-09-13)

Sympathy for the possessed
(2005-09-06)

Tip of the Week
(2005-09-06)

Fall Forward: Film
(2005-08-31)

Tip of the Week
(2005-08-30)

The Politics of Love
(2005-08-30)

Tip of the Week
(2005-08-23)

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