Fantasy land

Hollywood’s two biggest animated features of the month both take place in England, or ‘England’ — in the case of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Victorian London; in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a bucolic northern mill town. The latter defers to the reality of contemporary Britain in certain respects (laser security alarms) but is otherwise unchanged from the Fifties. Both films confine any kind of social commentary to the subject of class and both feature the voice of Helena Bonham Carter as lead piece of posh totty — indeed, she plays a lady called Lady Tottington in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, while as the eponymous Corpse Bride she’s less frizzy-haired and more decomposed. Her Lady Tottington voice is a broad stately-home caricature; her Corpse Bride one is closer to that sad, flat quality it’s had over the years — upscale but downbeat. Around the lovely Helena swirl a myriad of other stellar Brit vowels — Ralph Fiennes as the wicked toff suitor in Were-Rabbit, Richard E.