In Review: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham resurrect an old villain to combat modernity in their delightful return to feature film

Writing about Wallace—the suburban English inventor and cheese-lover extraordinaire—and Gromit—Wallace’s canine sidekick and street-wise co-scientist and chief gladiator—is a bit like writing a best man speech. How do you write platonically about a beloved childhood friend? It’s something of an impossible task, especially when those old friends of yours are entering a new chapter; just as Wallace and Gromit have with their newest movie, Vengeance Most Fowl.

Wallace and Gromit are inventions of the writer/director Nick Park, who has already won three Oscars with his little clay muses (plus a fourth Oscar for his short film Creature Comforts). This is actually only the second feature film for the quaint English inventor duo, having previously dealt with the advent of a werewolf-esque rabbit creature that’s decimating the backyard gardens of suburban England on the cusp of the town’s annual Giant Vegetable Competition (in which Gromit is a competitor, of course) in the 2005 film Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Vengeance Most Fowl finds us with some time having passed, but in the world of animation, that amount of time is left uncertain and meaningless. Time has passed, but that’s about all there is to know; and we’re all the better for it.

Claymation is, of all the forms of animation in film, by far the biggest labor of love. While some styles may be more intensive (there are a handful of films made by making entire paintings—ie Loving Vincent—but these are experimental efforts, not commercial ones), claymation is still significantly more laborious than modern animation in a hands-on capacity. While all animated films were, traditionally, hand drawn cels, the advent of computer animation and its affordability has made claymation the last hand-made animation style that will still be widely released. Whether it’s 2022’s Pinocchio adaptation or 2021’s fever-dream by legendary VFX artist Phil Tippett Mad God, stop-motion animation has endured through its flexibility in adapting its textures and tones into multiple genres. The pleasantness of Wallace and Gromit indelibly lies within the clay that shapes them, but that same roughness that makes them feel cute and charming makes Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio feel brutal and nightmarish.

Vengeance Most Fowl is a continuation of one of Wallace and Gromit’s earlier movies, the Oscar-winning short film The Wrong Trousers. In the film, Wallace takes on a lodger to help pay some debts. Inventing, as is the case in Vengeance Most Fowl as well, is not the most sustainable way to keep up with the bills. That renter ends up being the nefarious villain Feathers McGraw, a cunning penguin who aims to steal a diamond from the city’s museum. His plan is to use one of Wallace’s inventions against him: his brand-new Techno-Trousers.

This latest effort shares a somewhat similar construction. This time, we meet Feathers not as a boarder, but as a prisoner in, where else, the penguin exhibit at a zoo. He needs a new scheme to get out and get back his beloved diamond, which has been locked away from public view ever since the attempted theft. Fortunately, the ever-tinkering Wallace has a new invention he’s whipped up to help make Gromit’s life easier and to try to make some money to help pay off their debts: a robotic garden gnome named Norbot.

Wallace’s hyper-streamlined life has been a source of visual delight: a world of deliciously thrilling machines that sputter and whir to perform the kind of everyday actions that could so much more readily be done without the sweat and labor gone in to assembling these contraptions. Everything from putting on pants to brushing teeth has been mechanized. One would think it would be freeing for the mind if Wallace wasn’t already so charmingly mindless.

His latest few inventions further his roboticized lifestyle by automating the petting of Gromit and the yardwork maintenance in Gromit’s garden. Both of these clearly chafe Gromit as they are exemplars of human touch; one literal and one metaphorical. Gardens are meant to have character and personalization, not uniformity in a display of efficiency. These inventions irk Gromit and clearly show in his disappointed, squishy face. As the silent counterpart, Gromit can’t tell us how he’s feeling. But in traditional vaudevillian slapstick fashion, he doesn’t need to. Wallace’s world seems as though it’s coming to replace every ounce of corporeality he encounters, which may soon include him.

That idea seems to be furthered by Norbot’s presence, which brings Wallace a sense of joy that it seems like Gromit once did. Norbot represents Wallace’s ambition for efficiency and a path forward to financial stability, neither of which are Gromit’s MO. Ironically, Gromit is instrumental in both of those initiatives, but they may have become overlooked by Wallace as of late.

Wallace has always been hoisted by the petard of his inventions. The Techno-Trousers in The Wrong Trousers and the Mind-O-Matic in Curse of the Were-Rabbit are both turned against him through some farcical twist of luck in the ever-raging battle of man-vs-machine with Wallace as the god of his hapless firmament. These follies, though they have social implications to their potential for destruction, tend to be relatively contained in how exploitable they are. The Knit-O-Matic of A Close Shave is rather limited in its destructive potential, and while Wallace is taken for a ride in his Techno-Trousers, he is the only one directly put in harm’s way. Even the were-rabbit only saw truly harmful potential to Wallace and didn’t have the ability to sprawl out in some kind of cataclysmic fashion.

Norbot, however, is different. After Feathers McGraw makes his escape, he weaponizes not just Norbot, but creates an army of Norbots to carry out his latest scheme. In our modern AI-age in which every advancement in technology is not only theorized for its potential weaponization, but actually being used for harm due to better technological availability for both education and manipulation, it’s interesting to see Wallace and Gromit—a staple for DIY tinkering beyond the confines of safety—have to grapple with the idea that their inventions could not only fall into the wrong hands, but that it could become a kind of disease deployed and multiplied by a bad actor.

Norbot is the ignorance of intention without considering the perversion of abuse. Wallace’s imagination is too pure for this world, as has always been shown by his constant surprise when his creations go haywire of get abused. It’s fitting that in The Wrong Trousers Wallace gets literally taken for a ride by his own pants and becomes an unwitting accessory to a theft. Here, again, Wallace’s invention is getting used for a theft. Vengeance Most Fowl is, for the most part, a complete retread of The Wrong Trousers, but built out a bit more with a larger cast and lots more jokes. The return to such familiar material, though, is interesting.

The metaphor at the center of the film is not subtle in the slightest; which is a good thing! These are meant to be fun little romps, and director Nick Park is fantastic at capturing that feeling. There are still some more nuanced elements of the story and the choice to retread old ground. Park is playing with old toys in a high-tech world. The animation environment he came up in is long-gone and he’s now the old man doing things the old way. To that end, seeing Vengeance Most Fowl as another ‘can’t we all just get along?’ story between man and the technology which is rapidly encroaching upon him is plenty fair, but I also see it as a work of someone who notes how powerfully the old ways are able to stick around. Man justifies his own existence, much as the creation of this claymation film justifies the need to have claymation films at all.

Unlike the end of The Wrong Trousers (and most other Wallace & Gromit movies), the invention at the center of the film stays with the group. One gets the sense that, should there be another feature in the future, Norbot may stay with the group as their newest full-time addition. It’s a quiet nod to the way that technology cannot replace, but it can augment.

Most Wallace and Gromit movies feel like B-movie plots whittled down and softened, honed into their campy elements and made into children’s entertainment. Much of their canon is comprised of a greatest hits of sci-fi schlock of the early 20^th century and whittled into these easy-going escapades. Vengeance Most Fowl is a stretched-out short, really, but that’s fine because it’s fun. The padding of the film is in its little jokes and time spent with the quirky characters of the town. The police trainee who carries on under the curmudgeonly tutelage of a superior with an inferior sense of policework is sweet and presented in a sweetly British way that just can’t help but enamor. It’s a winning movie and the kind of throwback that we never see anymore. If every ‘legacy sequel’ (which this kind of is) were styled in this way and modelled more closely off of its originator, the culture around movies today would be in a much different place. If anything, this is a 79-minute hang with some old friends stuck in their ordinary trappings, but there’s so much magic still lingering in the clay that shapes itself into the characters who’ve brought us so much joy over the last 35 years. Uncomplicated storytelling at its best, Vengeance Most Fowl handles the issues of modernity with a simplicity so pure, it warms the heart without ever feeling the heavy hand of its messaging.