FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

Everyone in town is gearing up for the annual vegetable growing competition where the locals bring out their biggest, brightest and best home garden veggies. In order to protect these potential prize winners, they hire Wallace & Gromit who run a business called Anti-Pesto. Through Wallace’s sophisticated alarm and quick response system, they’re able to neutralize the rodents before any destruction occurs. That is until a giant, mutant creature invades the town and wreaks all kinds of havoc on the vegetation. If the highly anticipated competition is going to take place, Wallace & Gromit must stop this menace, but they have to figure out how to find it first.

What an amazing movie. Not in the sense of an overwhelmingly great script, funny dialogue or amazing acting, but amazing in the animation. Nick Park’s Aardman Animations (the people who brought us the brilliant W&G shorts as well as “Chicken Run”) outdoes themselves once again. I know computers had to be used for some of the shots (I can’t imagine it would be possible to animate hundreds of bunnies floating around inside a giant vacuum), but computer graphics doesn’t even come close to this level of awe-inspiring technique.

With computers you can input the main character design and animate it freely from there. If something doesn’t work, send it to the trash icon and start again. With clay (actually Plasticine), you spend a whole day animating a couple seconds of film. Now you may ask, does more time spent really make for a better movie going experience? In the case of animation, yes it helps a great deal. Because the technique is so painstaking and mistakes are so costly, everything must be completely planned out. And if you’re going to invest so much time and effort into something, then you’re going to make sure what you’re working on is solid. One of the great appeals of traditional animation (three-dimensional or otherwise) is seeing the imperfections. Not mistakes, but imperfections. You can see where human hands have touched the material and molded it just right. You can see where someone hand painted each cel so that you can watch your cartoon seamlessly. The amount of care and love that gets put into the animation comes across on screen. And Aardman Studios is one of the best.

This film contains the most impressive three-dimensional animation display I’ve ever seen. Not only do the main characters get appropriate, recognizable emotional expressions, but so do all the extras. Every living thing that should be animated, is. The ability of keeping track of the immense amount of people, animals and moving machinery within the scene, giving them all a unique personality, and keeping it all completely fluid is mind boggling. When you add to this the very dynamic camera movements and the intricate lighting elements, and well…like I said, it’s simply incredible.

Aside from the animation, the movie is pretty good. I wanted it to be funnier, but it will hit all the right spots for most people and especially with the kids. It’s a great story that actually somewhat shies away from conventional family film wisdom. I thought the acting was a tad bit cartoony, even taking into consideration the look of the characters. But the movie is still a whole lot of fun that the whole family will love, and animation fans can’t miss this one.

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