If you’ve got a heart…

twee /twi:/ adj. Brit. baby-talk alliteration for sweet, as in toothachingly precious or cutesy. syn. Wallace & Gromit.

In a very British Claymation town, the locals putter about in their gardens preparing for the late-October Largest Vega-table Contest hosted every year by the snaggle-toothed daughter of aristocracy (Helena Bonham-Carter). Unfortunately, they are kept on edge by an influx of dastardly rabbits that are being kept at bay by the proprietors of Anti-Pesto, a pest control service run by Wallace and Gromit; a pasty-faced gent with a Dr. Sardonicus grin and his Silent Bob dog who is actually the brains of the outfit. Double unfortunately, Wallace has been experimenting with a mind-transfusion device in an attempt to wean the bunnies from their innate taste in sustenance, an experiment that goes horribly awry and unleashes the titular beastie (the were-rabbit, not the doofuses) on the countryside.

In addition to the were-rabbit, every other cliché you can imagine is unleashed, as the flick indulges in cheeky sendups of all sorts of genre tropes. In a quite twee sort of way, pip pip. Seeing as Claymation is an art where one sits alone in a flat moving plasticine models about inch by painstaking inch for hours upon days upon weeks and months, it’s obvious that creator Nick Park doesn’t get out much. For a toddler, this is great stuff, but anyone with a cynical bone in their body will leave the theater feeling as if they have an advanced case of methmouth. My left eye still aches at the memory.

If you’re planning to take your young’un to see this, be warned that despite the G-rating there are still a few off-colour jokes (which most likely go right over their little heads, but still…) and that when it comes out on DVD this will be the soundtrack to your life for the next few years.