Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: review Dir: Nick Park. Starring: Peter Sallis, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes, Peter Kay There are magicians of animation from Hollywood (step forward, Pixar's John Lasseter) to Japan (take a bow, Ghibli Studios" Hayao Miyazaki), but no one lavishes more affection and painstaking care on his celluloid creations than Britain's master of stop-motion, Nick Park. And The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, featuring his heroic man-and-dog duo, Wallace and Gromit, is Park at his sublimely silly best. The technique of stop-motion is infinitely time consuming, but Park (who co-directed Were-Rabbit with Steve Box) puts just as much effort into the charming characters and the beautifully detailed sets. Gromit's expressions (flabbergasted to flummoxed to grittily determined) are priceless, despite his having no mouth, and scene after scene is crammed with little visual gags (the volumes on cheese-addict Wallace's bookshelf include Brighton Roquefort, Brief Encounter and East of Edam). The plot in Wallace and Gromit's's first full-length adventure, which won the Oscar for best animated film in 2006, is as daft as its participants.Ahead of a local giant-vegetable competition, Wallace, proprietor of the vermin-control business Anti-Pesto, is summoned by Lady Tottington to deal with an infestation of rabbits at her stately home. Once he has hoovered them out of the ground with his Bun Vac 6000, Wallace devises another contraption, the Mind Manipulation-O-Matic, which is supposed to put the creatures off eating vegetables. "It extracts unwanted thoughts and desires," he explains. I haven't tested it yet, but it should be perfectly safe. Just a bit of harmless brain alteration, that's all. Alas, by melding his own mind with that of a rabbit he is transformed into a big-eared, buck-toothed giant who goes on the rampage as soon as the moon rises. It is up to the redoubtable, ever resourceful Gromit to save the day. Peter Sallis brings strong echoes of Clegg, his Last of the Summer Wine character, to the role of Wallace. Meanwhile, Helena Bonham Carter is terrific as posh-totty Lady Tottington, and Ralph Fiennes voices the dastardly villain, Victor, with fruity relish as he pursues the monstrous, hopping-mad Wallace with a shotgun and magic "24-carrot" golden bullets. IN PICTURES: Aardman Animations