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Wallace is an inventor. Gromit is a dog, although the traditional human-dog relationship is reversed in that Gromit usually has to clean up Wallace's messes. No, not those kinds of messes. They're not that kind of movie. In three short subjects and now in their first feature, Wallace sails out bravely do to great but reckless deeds, and Gromit takes the role of adult guardian.

In "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," they face their greatest challenge. Lady Tottington is holding her family's 517th annual Giant Vegetable Fete, and all the gardeners for miles around are lovingly caressing their gigantic melons and zucchinis and carrots and such, and Wallace and Gromit are responsible for security, which means keeping rabbits out of the garden patches.

Their company is named Anti-Pesto. Their methods are humane. They do not shoot or poison the bunnies. Instead, Wallace has devised another of his ingenious inventions, the Bun-Vac, which sucks the rabbits out of their holes and into a giant holding tube, so that they can be housed in comfort at Anti-Pesto headquarters, and feast on medium and small vegetables. Their tactics perfectly suit Lady Tottington's humane convictions.

They have a rival, the sniveling barbarian Lord Victor Quartermaine, a gun nut with a toupee heaped on his head like a mess of the sort Gromit never has to clean up. Lord Victor dreams of marrying Lady Tottington and treating himself to the luxuries of her ancestral wealth, and that involves discrediting and sabotaging Anti-Pesto and all that it stands for. Thus is launched the affair of the Were-Rabbit, a gigantic beast (with a red polka dot tie) that terrorizes the neighborhood and inspires the Reverend Hedges to cry out, "For our sins a hideous creature has been sent to punish us."

I dare not reveal various secrets involving the Were-Rabbit, so I will skip ahead, or sideways, to consider Wallace's new invention, the Mind-o-Matic, which is intended to brainwash rabbits and convince them they do not like vegetables. That this device malfunctions goes without saying, and that Gromit has to fly to the rescue is a given.

Wallace and Gromit are the inventions of a British animator named Nick Park, who co-directs this time with Steve Box. In an era of high-tech CGI, Park uses the beloved traditional form of stop-motion animation. He constructs his characters and sets out of Plasticine, a brand of modeling clay, and makes minute adjustments to them between every frame, giving the impression not only of movement but of exuberant life and color bursting from every frame. (As a nod to technology, just a little CGI is incorporated for certain scenes that would be hard to do in Plasticine, as when the vacuumed bunnies are in free-fall).

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