Call me Totty

On Sunday afternoon we went to the delightful Waiheke Island Cinema - all comfy couches and none of the premium prices - to watch Wallace & Gromit's latest adventure The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. A cinema full of kids, who were thankfully seated far away enough from us to enjoy the movie. The storyline could have been a bit tighter: the previous shortfilms, such as A Close Shave worked much better due to the mad comedy caper character of much of the fun.
We've been fans of W&G since their Grand Day Out ("Everybody knows the Moon is made of cheese") and The Wrong Trousers ("It's the wrong trousers, Gromit, and they've gone wrong!")

Our good friends at Dove gave it the thumbs up, as you would expect:
Content Description:
Sex: None
Language: A few mild sexual innuendos
Violence: Action cartoon violence
Drugs: Townsman smokes a pipe.
Nudity: Exposed (clay) butt cheeks by the villain.
Occult: None
Other: It should be noted that this film parodies many things including an Anglican Bishop.

I must say the Dove people missed the cabinet of strange stuff in the the vicar's office (not Anglican bishop, please) including a magazine of nuns doing definitely un-catholic stuff - maybe taking the piss out of Catholics is OK with Baptists but it has a whiff of hypocrisy about it.
It's also remarkable that in all W&G movies there are: no children, no cats, no-one under age 50-ish (apart from the dogs, the sheep, the rabbits and the vegetables).

And I must disagree with Aardman founder Nick Parks who commented on the October fire at Aardman:

"Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies [e.g. the Pakistan earthquake], today isn't a big deal."

It certainly is a big deal because it destroyed a marvellous part of art history, every bit as irreplaceable as the lives shattered by natural disasters.