Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl Ushers In A New Stop-Motion Golden Age
Wallace and Gromit are back, this time with “a lot more tension and drama.”
When I was six years old, my family only had a handful of VHS tapes I was allowed to watch: The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, The Lion King, and three of Aardman’s iconic stop-motion Wallace & Gromit shorts: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave. I was wary of watching A Grand Day Out and A Close Shave, but I flat-out refused to watch The Wrong Trousers for one reason: Feathers McGraw, the beady-eyed penguin who silently schemed to steal a diamond using Wallace and a pair of robotic legs.
Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who was terrified of him, because more than 30 years later, Aardman brings him back for revenge in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, now streaming on Netflix. But bringing back Feathers wasn’t where this story started. It all started with a simple concept: Wallace inventing a smart garden gnome to help Gromit out with his garden.
“That was a 30-minute TV [short], which seemed a lot of fun and enough to fill a whole 30 minutes,” co-director Nick Park tells Inverse. “But then this idea of bringing back Feathers came along as a solution for the story, and it suddenly gave this idea legs and a lot more tension and drama.”
Tension and drama are definitely the words to describe it. Though there is still plenty of the franchise’s patented coziness, the feature format allows the story to reach new heights, borrowing more from Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher than you’d ever think a movie like this could, all culminating in an epic train showdown — a spiritual successor to the model train chase in the first short.
The story begins with Norbot, a grinning smart gnome Wallace makes in order to pay off the bills. At first, it’s a massive success, but then Feathers turns the gnomes evil and uses them for his own unfinished business: stealing the diamond he attempted to pilfer back in The Wrong Trousers. Decades may have passed, but Feathers hasn’t changed: he’s still silent, conniving, and, aesthetically, not much more than a bowling pin with a beak... which makes communicating his plans a bit challenging.
“That has been one of the most challenging aspects really, of the whole movie, Park says. “At least Gromit has a brow he can move up. He can understand thoughts more clearly. It's all about the simplicity of how Feathers moves, the deliberate and small movements. A look here, a blink. Minimalism, really.”
Park’s co-director, Merlin Crossingham, used Feathers’ minimalist appearance as motivation to use different tools to express his evil intentions. “We use camera moves, the sound,” he tells Inverse. “He's a very cinematic character because we rely, as filmmakers, on all those tricks to make him the hero/villain that you see and love to hate.”
Making Feathers scary is a practice in minimalism since he doesn’t have eyebrows or even a mouth.
Even beyond the old grudges, Vengeance Most Fowl is breaking new ground. Feathers is able to manipulate an army of Norbots because of Wallace’s dabbling in artificial intelligence, evoking Black-Mirror-esque questions about how much we rely on technology, be that an iPhone or Wallace’s tea-and-toast making contraption. “I do think we do love our technology and it is very important to Wallace as well as a character,” Crossingham says. “It's asking, what's the relationship we have? And we're asking that through Wallace.”
Vengeance Most Fowl is the first Wallace & Gromit feature since 2005’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and it comes at an auspicious time for stop-motion animation. In a time where artificial intelligence like Norbot is raising questions around art, we’re entering a new golden age of stop-motion: Aardman is now joined by multiple other stop-motion studios, and there’s even a stop-motion DC superhero movie in the works.
“Back when Toy Story first came out in the '90s, a studio like us, we’re thinking, ‘Oh, boy, how long do we have left?’” Park says. “But we kept going. As long as you're telling good stories, compelling stories with compelling characters, then it's just the technique really.”
