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New Wallace & Gromit Film is Perfectly Cracking

The Wrong Trousers is probably the best of those original Wallace & Gromit short films that Aardman Animation made its name on in the early 1990s. It’s got some of the more famous imagery associated with the little British claymation brand, including those horrifying titular mechanical trousers and the silent blank-faced penguin supervillain Feathers McGraw. Aardman, being in a bit of a weird place right now where their former ubiquity has all but vanished and they are partnered with Netflix for projects that will never play in a theatre, it makes sense that they are incentivized to return to familiar territory. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a direct sequel to The Wrong Trousers, which does limit the scope and accessibility of this second feature film significantly more than the first -the entirely standalone Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit from 2005. But still, there is an irresistible charm to Aardman’s style and humour that blunts even the movie’s most mediocre instincts.
Nick Park being at the helm certainly counts for a lot. More than any of the other projects he has made for Aardman over the years, Wallace & Gromit is his particular baby -he knows the ins and outs of their personalities and world better than anyone, and reintroduces both effectively here with a conventional intro showcasing the assortment of elaborate gadgets that make up Wallace’s morning routine and involve absolutely no exertion on his own part -though certainly a little on Gromit’s. And that’s an underlying theme of the film. As Wallace has become more and more dependent and excited about technology, he has turned one of their old gnomes into a robot to assist Gromit in his beloved gardening. His name is Norbot and he is immediately a nuisance to Gromit. At the same time, Feathers McGraw, serving a custodial sentence at a zoo, sees an opportunity with a re-unveiling of the Blue Diamond he had failed to steal many years earlier, finds a means of remotely accessing and re-programming Norbot to serve his evil plans.
Aardman’s defining attractive feature has always been its animation -that particular Nick Park style of hand-crafted stop-motion filmmaking with intricate details, and often even residue of fingerprints in the Plasticine clay that the characters are made from. There’s evidentiary craftsmanship on a level even other stop-motion productions cannot match, and makes the animation on screen more interesting as a result. While that remains true generally of Vengeance Most Fowl, it does also feel a bit less palpable than prior Aardman productions. I think a big reason for this is owing to some of the materials used for the set-pieces being more conventional-looking -technical components that feel a touch less attached to the world’s reality, especially in some of the robot accessories. But the filmmaking itself also seems to incorporate more special effects outside of the hand-crafted material purview. A high-speed lawn-mowing from Norbot at a fast frame-rate for instance, or later on an elaborate chase sequence involving multiple vehicles and shots that suggest aspects of more typical computer animation. And Aardman is under no obligation to be purist to the form (they’ve made a couple CG-animated movies including the exceptional Arthur Christmas), but there is an aesthetic effect that comes with the movie losing a little bit of that method that makes it appealing.
Fortunately, it does retain the same level of humour and charm in the characters -particularly with regards to Wallace, Gromit, and Feathers -though Norbot has his share of great moments too. Gromit, ever the hero, remains an eminently likeable protagonist, still stupendously expressive even with no visible mouth. And Wallace, though he feels a bit diminished compared to in other films (and has a new voice actor to boot -Ben Whitehead, taking over for the late great Peter Sallis), maintains that goofy balance of brilliance and naivety; and in fact his technological dependence has only aged better. The nature of his contraptions may be dated, but his unrestricted embrace of new devices and breakthroughs over their old counterparts regardless of any actual merit, feels very at home in the age of mindless innovation and tech moguls trying to convince you (as Wallace does to Gromit) that A.I. is important. Of course unlike those figures, Wallace has empathy and a basic soul, blind as he may be to it for much of the film. The only soulless figure is Feathers McGraw, devious and still subtly creepy in his complete lack of readability, as he plots and virtually without fail executes his latest grand scheme.
In both plotting and visuals, there isn't the ambition of the last Wallace & Gromit feature outing, which included several new supporting characters and intrepid set-pieces. And it does feel like it is a budgetary restriction rather than a creative one that makes this new film feel so much smaller in scale -as well as the fact it was designed for the passive platform of Netflix rather than the big screen. But there is merit in its back-to-basics approach and limited scope to the world -it feels much more akin to those early shorts than its predecessor movie did. However it retains a feature-length runtime and the story doesn’t really rise to its justification. Much of a subplot involving police chief Mackintosh (voiced by Peter Kay) and his apprentice PC Mukherjee (Lauren Patel) feels like padding, with their investigation barring a couple scenes largely inconsequential and their rapport not particularly funny. The film might have looked into the community a little more beyond them given how involved in tending to (and eventually causing chaos within) the village Norbot is. Still, they are party to some of the movie’s better moments of silliness, and one good misdirect involving the blue diamond.
Wallace, Gromit, and Feathers though carry the movie through its bits of lacklustre pacing, as whimsical comic creations as ever for the former two, as suspiciously disquieting as ever for the latter. For the aspects of it that could be tighter, it is true to spirit of the original shorts, and is often enough amusing and inventive -in perfect Wallace fashion. I especially like how the climax directly mirrors that of The Wrong Trousers, as though it is the fulfillment of an ambition Nick Park wasn’t quite able to attain in 1993. And it kind of makes you realize these characters were missed. Honestly it might be a rare positive to Netflix’s deal with a studio if it resulted in a few more Wallace & Gromit, short or feature-length films. Because while Vengeance Most Fowl isn’t quite a sensational comeback for these characters and their intricate format, it is a perfectly nice and welcome one.

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