Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit arrives from 2005, a year in which a plasticine dog could still carry a feature film without a mission statement attached. Nick Park and Steve Box have built a gentle monster-movie parody set in a Yorkshire village where the chief civic anxiety is the annual giant vegetable competition. The craft is meticulous, the jokes are silent and visual, and the film asks nothing of its audience beyond attention.

There is a faint tremor of class satire here, and we should be honest about its size. Lord Victor Quartermaine, voiced by Ralph Fiennes with a toupee and a sneer, courts Lady Tottington for her fortune, and the film treats his venality as a joke about the gentry that British comedy has been telling since the music hall. That is the whole of the film's economic argument. Lady Tottington herself, a wealthy spinster with a genuine interest in horticulture, is positioned as a prize to be won between two suitors, which leaves the film with no feminist case to make and no apparent desire to make one.

The humane pest control premise and the closing conversion of Tottington Hall into a nature reserve gesture at animal welfare without ever becoming an environmental sermon. Wallace's wish to lose weight is slapstick, not a body-positive statement. His eccentricity is comic invention, not a diagnosis. The cast is a uniformly white ensemble of British character actors, and nobody involved seems to have given the matter a thought. The result is a charming film with no agenda whatsoever, a curio from a moment before every children's cartoon was expected to arrive with a lesson attached.