Reel Life and Real Life: Curse of the Were-Rabbit

We turn this morning to the arts.

SWNID and Daughter of SWNID attended a free screening of Wallace and Grommit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit last week. We give the claymation spectacular two enthusiastic thumbs up and five stars each (that's a total of twelve objects of endorsement). It retains the charm, outrageous humor and thorough Englishness of the original shorts. Grommit is the most expressive silent character since Chaplin's little tramp.

While mostly a family-friendly movie, the film does have a couple of mild but not-so-subtle double entendres developed out of its pervasive vegetable theme, one involving melons and another nuts. These gags, hardly the most creative elements of the film, appear in the tradition of the English pantomime.

For our gentle readers of the colonial persuasion, in the sense used here a pantomime is not an annoying silent performance by a man in white makeup, a horizontally striped shirt and tight, black trousers but a holiday season stage performance of some souped-up fairy-tale script, staged with an older man in drag and a younger woman in trousers, intended to allow English children to emerge from their hiding places and attend the theater with their parents while consuming pounds of chocs. Pantos have loose plots filled with slapstick, bad jokes, sentimental songs, and, to keep the parents interested while they stuff the little monsters with sweets, a few double entendre gags.

The expectation is that the parents will laugh while the kids miss the whole point and remain uncorrupted. And indeed, that's what the producers of W&G certainly expected with their sly produce references.

But it seems that today's young audience comes to the cinema pre-corrupted. At the screening attended by the aforementioned SWNID and Daughter of SWNID, much juvenile laughter ensued after each obvious anatomical joke.

Innocence has been lost. Nothing goes over the heads of today's pre-teen, who can quote every catchphrase from the ouvre of Adam Sandler.

But to the item in the news: Aardman Animations, producers of W&G, burned to the ground yesterday. All the figures and props used to produce their stop-action wonders were destroyed.

So we live in a world where moth and rust corrupt, both material possessions and senses of humor. Sigh!