Photo By Dreamworks

Better than live actors: Wallace and Lady Tottington lead the excellent comedy Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

The belly laugh comedy Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit might claim a Plasticine cast and miniature sets, but its sweeping camera movements, attention to detail and rich atmosphere are equal to anything found in live-action comedies or computer-generated animation family films. Clay has never before been put to such funny use.

There hasn't been a new Wallace & Gromit short film for 10 years. (The three previous shorts -- A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave -- add up to 83 minutes of fun.) But Curse of the Were-Rabbit, an 84-minute adventure, compensates for the long absence of Wallace (voice of veteran British actor Peter Sallis), an English inventor with a wide smile and an obsession for cheese, and his trusty dog Gromit, who expresses more with his eyebrows than most people do speaking.

Nick Park, creator of Wallace & Gromit, and co-director Steve Box mix a kid-friendly take on classic movie monsters with adult-savvy wit and cleverness. Imagine Ray Harryhausen stop-motion effects paired with Terry Gilliam-like wonderment and the good-natured fizz of a classic Ealing Studios comedy, and you'll grasp the magic of a Wallace and Gromit adventure. This is as good as a family comedy can get.

From their tranquil English village, Wallace and Gromit battle a beast that's devouring the village vegetables. The beast's identity might lack surprise, but the payoff is laugh-out-loud funny.

Sallis brings goofball charm to the nerdy Wallis, a man too obsessed about crackers and cheese for his own good. Helena Bonham Carter provides a perfectly eccentric voice for Lady Tottington, a ditzy blueblood and sponsor for the Giant Vegetable Competition in Wallace's hometown.

Bonham Carter does the impossible: She creates the hearty vocal match for a woman with a wide red mouth, bushy eyebrows and orange hair that sits atop her head like a two-by-four.

Ralph Fiennes, the quintessential British gentleman, brings pomp and ego to the voice of his boorish character Victor Quartermaine, an aristocrat desperate for Lady Tottington's hand in marriage.

Radically different from the other stop-motion family film in theaters, the funny, creepy ghost tale Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit has plenty of visual flair and comic gags, but there's also character development and feeling in its storytelling.

Park's debut feature film, Chicken Run (a re-telling of the Great Escape with chickens), was a worldwide hit, but Wallace & Gromit provides more laughs and a welcome feeling of old friends returning for an extended visit.

Park might boast of the three Academy Awards for the Wallace and Gromit shorts, but Curse of the Were-Rabbit is his clay masterpiece. Deft storytelling brings the clay to life, and the characters give performances better than most live actors.

The Cameron Diaz I want to see is the pretty blonde clown who makes every movie comedy lucky enough to claim her better than the competition. Unfortunately, the Diaz who appears in filmmaker Curtis Hanson's loyal adaptation of Jennifer Weiner's popular sister novel, In Her Shoes, jettisons laughs for melodrama.

Diaz looks stunning as Maggie, the pretty and wayward younger sister who has accomplished little in life due to her dyslexia. It's small compensation for a weepy performance that never generates the heartache needed for the film to matter.

Veteran character actress Toni Collette outshines her more famous co-star as older sister Rose, a Princeton grad and lawyer at a top Philadelphia firm who tosses Maggie out after she beds her boyfriend. Collette is saddled with the cliché role of the dowdy career woman, but she understands the complex dilemma of a smart and successful woman incapable of getting past body weight issues.

The most one can ask from someone as talented as Collette is to make the material better than it is -- and that's exactly what she does.

Shirley MacLaine, more often cast as an overly eccentric dowager, stays grounded and straightforward as Ella, the long-absent grandmother who helps bring her squabbling granddaughters together.

Hanson collaborates with screenwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) to prove how easy it is to do melodrama badly. Their saving grace, as far as some audiences are concerned, is that bad melodramas can still generate tears. It's a knee-jerk reaction -- bickering sisters reuniting at a long-awaited wedding is bound to make someone bawl.

After following up the extraordinary adult dramas L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys with the melodramas 8 Mile and In Her Shoes, the best Hanson can show for his recent efforts is a knack for diversity.

Every time Diaz tries her hand at drama and squelches her natural comic skills, it reveals her crippling desire for on-screen variety. To her credit, she was competent in period garb in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. Her willingness to go unrecognizable as John Cusack's dowdy wife in the existential comedy Being John Malkovich was brilliant clowning.

In Her Shoes, despite the funny flirting and drunken shenanigans, belongs on the pile with other Diaz missteps such as the surreal caper drama A Life Less Ordinary, the bleak buddy thriller Very Bad Things and her forgettable role as a ruthless football team owner in Any Given Sunday.

In the past when actresses had contracts and studios chose their roles based on what audiences liked best, I imagine Diaz would have enjoyed a great comic career. The best one can hope is that her artistic grasps at drama are interspersed with the physical comedies she does so well. Wallace & Gromit grade: A; In Her Shoes grade: D+