Reanimating stop-motion.(Preview)

Byline: DAVID GERMAIN Associated Press

BRISTOL, England - Inside a cavernous office-park building in this southwest English city, dozens of grown-ups are moving goofy clay figures around like kids playing with their Barbies or GI Joes.

A hundred miles away at a similar space in East London, more adults are doing the same with lanky, big-eyed puppets that speak in the voices of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.

It's not a mass epidemic of people relapsing to childhood. These are the movie sets for Hollywood's latest animated extravaganzas, "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," a big-screen version of the TV cartoons starring a cheese-obsessed Brit and his faithful dog, and "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride," about a jittery bridegroom yanked into the underworld to wed a decomposing babe.

Amid an onslaught of computer-generated films such as "Shrek" and "The Incredibles" that has virtually suffocated hand-drawn cartoon features, the makers of "Wallace & Gromit" and "Corpse Bride" have reverted to one of the oldest forms of movie …