Cheese, Gromit!

On Sunday, Paul and I went to see “Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” We’ve been fans of Nick Park’s short films for years, and had been looking forward to the first feature-length film starring the cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his intrepid dog Gromit.

Happily, the movie is playing at Seattle’s Cinerama, our favorite movie theater. I bought tickets online, and, expecting a line, we arrived forty minutes early. There was a line, but it was all of one couple ’til we joined it. By the time the doors opened, there may have been 75 people in line. The theater seats 808. It hadn’t occurred to us that this movie might not attract nearly the crowds as did the final episodes of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings trilogies, the last couple of movies we’d seen at the Cinerama. And while it’s fun to see any film on a huge screen, this one would not have suffered from a reduction in scale.

One of the perks of being at the front of the line is that you get seats anywhere you want; for us, in the middle of the second row of the balcony. Why the second row, when we could’ve had seats in the first? Because the first row seats are odd. They must have been salvaged from another theater, and installed when the Cinerama was renovated. They are clearly not intended for use in a theater balcony; the backs are at the wrong angle, and the seat tilts farther back when you sit in one, so that rather than looking at the screen, you’re gazing at the twinkle-lights on the ceiling. While waiting for the movie to start, we got to see a number of people discover this for themselves, then move to seats behind us.

After a half-dozen G-rated trailers (oh, right! this is a G-rated movie), and a cute short featuring the penguins from Madagascar, Wallace and Gromit took the big screen. We’d wondered whether Park and crew could pull off a feature-length movie with the same wit and charm of the shorts. They can, and they have. As in the previous films, we see the man’s-best-friend relationship between the loyal, hard-working Gromit and the thoughtlessly optimistic Wallace through Gromit’s oh-so-expressive eyes. (How do they make a mute plasticine dog so expressive? Have you ever played with plasticine? It’s the clay in the board game Cranium, and I’m lucky if I can sculpt something recognizable with it.) From the throwaway (a jam jar labelled “Middle-Aged Spread” on the kitchen counter) to the exaggerated (poking fun at the British obsession with gardening, and, as Park usually does, at technology gone astray), the jokes just keep coming. As usual, Gromit saves the day, this time with the help of a nice piece of cheese.