The second feature-length film from Bristol-based animation house Aardman (after 2000’s Chicken Run) helping writer/director Nick Park to bring his irrepressible duo Wallace and Gromit to the big screen in co-production with DreamWorks. The Curse of the Were-rabbit followed on the heels of after a trio of excellent short films – A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995) – and as you’d expect, it’s a bigger, more expansive film but it’s no less wonderful for that. It retains the wit, wild invention and deft combination of wild anarchy and gentle whimsy familiar from the originals.

Where Chicken Run had been a spoof of prisoner of war films, particularly The Great Escape (1963), The Curse of the Were-rabbit takes aim at science fiction and horror. Its first target is Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds (1965-1966), referenced in a brilliant opening sequence wherein Wallace (the voice of Peter Sallis), ever the over-reaching and insanely ambitious inventor, and the hapless Gromit are carried from bedroom to kitchen via a launch sequence taken straight from International Rescue’s island base. Wallace and Gromit are now running Anti-Pesto, a pest control company in a northern village obsessed with growing overs-sized vegetables. Wallace’s ludicrously over-complicated contraptions are pout to use ridding the village of the scourge of a plague of rabbits. But when Wallace decides to experiment with his “Mind Manipulation-O-Matic” device to see if he can brainwash rabbits into disliking vegetables, it backfires on him. His mind fuses with that of one of the sheep – it takes on Wallace-like characteristics while he becomes a were-rabbit, transforming into a giant rabbit monster by the light of the dull moon. As the annual village fair at the vast country estate of Lady Campanula “Totty” Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter) approaches, Wallace has to battle the beast within as well as Totty’s jealous suitor Lord Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) leading to a final dramatic showdown on the night of the fair and its accompanying vegetable growing competition.

Technically brilliant, wonderfully directed by Park and Steve Box, The Curse of the Were-rabbit is gloriously silly and beautifully animated, and the script – by Park, Steve Box, Mark Burton and Bob Baker, co-creator of Doctor Who’s (1963-1989) K-9 – deftly juggles the needs of the surprisingly involving plot with the impulse to fire of gags in all directions.

One would have been excused for wondering if Wallace and Gromit had enough in them for a fourth adventure, particularly one at full length. Those fears are dispelled almost immediately. Full of puns and nifty one-liners, it runs the comedy gamut from Pythonesque surrealism to wild slapstick, from Buster Keaton-inspired set-pieces to family friendly horror with just a dash of science fiction thrown in for good measure. The horror scenes are played for laughs but tip their hats to the classics of the genre, leaving plenty of “easter eggs” for the cognoscenti to spot – the transformation scene’s nod towards An American Werewolf in London (1981) is one, as is the more obvious King Kong (1933) pastiche at the climax.

The visual gags come so thick and fast that a second or even third viewing may be needed to spot them all (not that there’s any hardship in that) and listing them all here is a huge temptation but that would rob you of the simple joy of spotting them for yourselves. Every frame of The Curse of the Were-rabbit is packed with pleasing and inventive details, with plenty of visual gags to match the one-liners and some surprisingly risqué gags clearly aimed at the adult viewers – Totty’s “produce” gag for example. Pay close attention to the backgrounds and edges of frame where all manner of daft jokes lie waiting for you to find them.

From the boring morning routine re-imagined by Gerry Anderson to the climactic monster movie mayhem at the village fair, The Curse of the Were-rabbit is brimming over with set pieces as exciting as they are absurd, and every bit the equal of anything in the Bond or Indiana Jones films. Gromit pursuing the Were-rabbit around the town in a gadget-festooned van and being dragged underground as the creature attempts to escape by burrowing, for example, or a dogfight aboard fairground ride aircraft are fantastically intricate sequences animated, paced and edited to perfection.

The characters are little gems of design as you’d expect and are bought to life by fantastic performances from all involved. Peter Sallis returns to the role of Wallace and is matched beat for comedic beat by a hilarious Bonham Carter and by Fiennes, an actor not previously known for his comedic roles. Along with Peter Kay, Nicholas Smith, Liz Smith and Geraldine McEwan (who returned for a subsequent Wallace and Gromit television short, A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008)) are having a ball with their oddball characters but as always, the real star of the show is Gromit. With no words and only a few facial expressions, many of them degrees of exasperation and weary resignation, he remains of the most eloquent of animated characters.

Wallace and Gromit have been absent since A Matter of Loaf and Death (the most watched British television programme of its year) and with the death of Peter Sallis in 2010 it looked like time may have been called on the duo’s misadventures. But in 2019, Park announced that further projects were in the planning, the first of which was augmented reality computer game, The Big Fix Up, released in January 2021. Shaun the Sheep, the woolly co-star of A Close Shave, and his family have gone on to enjoy parallel careers on both television (Shaun the Sheep (2007-), Timmy Time (2009-2012), Shaun the Sheep 3D (2012), Shaun the Sheep Championsheeps (2012)) and in film (Timmy Time: Timmy’s Christmas Surprise (2011), Timmy Time: Timmy’s Seaside Rescue (2012), Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015), A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019), Shaun the Sheep: The Farmer’s Llamas (2015)).