What Is That In Your Hare?

And so yesterday, to critical acclaim (96% positive reviews according to Rotten Tomatoes), Aardman's Oscar-winning clay-animated "Wallace & Gromit" shorts made their first ever surfacing to a major motion picture release, "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit", already being heralded by creator Nick Park as "the first vegetarian horror movie ever.", created almost entirely by painstaking frame stop-motion film jujitsu, which five years to finish, including an 18-month shooting schedule, an epic task for an 85-minute film.



The movie centers around the plot of Oscar-glorified heroes Wallace and Gromit, who have revved up a company called Anti-Pesto, working to keep rabbits from pillaging gardens of all those excited about winning the 517th annual Giant Vegetable Competition. By request of Lady Tottington, an ecologically-minded local who wants the rabbits removed in a humane manner, Wallace and Gromit get to work lickety-split, getting gearloose with inventions like the Bun-Vac 6000 (they use it to suck them up and bring them home as pets) and the Min-O-Matic to keep the rabbits from ruining the festival while not leaving one scratch on their furry manes!



So, when the rabbits can’t fight the moonlight, they mutate into monstrous were-rabbits with hatchet teeth and hollow ears. Time to get to work...except there’s one small, tiny, yea big, lilliputian obstacle standing in their way for nonviolent response to these scary hares; Lady Tottington’s suitor, Victor Quartermaine, looks the other way in terms of conflict resolution, vowing to attack anything that Kingdom Comes under his oath of fortune hunter.



What makes the film particularly intriguing is how they sugarcoat it with your quintessential horror movie tropes; spoofing all your favorites, especially "The Wolf Man", and all the usual characters and suspects tnat keep the rising conflict coming and denouement delayed, including the spurning policeman and the mad horror geek! Awwwwww, we do take those characters for granted ever so much, don’t we? So here’s to the other characters who keep classic horror movie cliches in line!



Yep, everything is jjjjjjjuuusssttttt in vogue, isn’t it? Whaaaaaaa......no......I guess over the Atlantic in Dorset, in the communties of Portland and Weymouth, the collywobbles are in fashion!



Over on that island off the southwest coast of the U.K, posters there are not featuring the word "rabbit" because of a 100-year old local superstition that rabbit burrows often caused land slips and, on one occasion, killed a crane operator because the ground beneath him collapsed. Since those incidents, local residents will not even say the word rabbit, instead referring to "furry things" or "underground mutton", convinced that the floppy eared, fuzzy, pink-eyed munchkins will bring them bad luck. And so, they’re settling with the tagline, "Something bunny is going on" instead. We’ll have none of that R-word swearing now, ya hear?



Hey, Fiver, tell me it isn’t true, tell me that Watership Down isn’t just another underground warren conspiracy endeavor! (giggles)



"I waaaaarrrrrnnnned you, but did you listen to me? Oh, no, you knnnnneeewww, didn't you? Oh, it's just a harmless little bbbbbbunny, isn't it?"

(giggles) No, we’re cool, Hazel! Whether you do have a vicious strike a mile wide is beyond me, lil fuzzy-wuzzie! Peace!

Love,
Noah Eaton
(Mistletoe Angel)
(Emmanuel Endorphin)