Hal Kitchen
Being British, I’m not sure how far the knowledge of Wallace & Gromit franchise has spread west of the Atlantic. The iconic duo are such a prototypically British confection, and yet so much of their humor relies on Hollywood movie parodies and inspired dumbshow that it’s hard to gauge how well their antics would travel. The duo broke through at the end of the ’80s with Nick Park’s handmade stop motion short A Grand Day Out, a 20 minute masterpiece of animation which was soon followed by A Close Shave and most relevantly today, The Wrong Trousers. These latter two expanded the world and the scope of the shorts, making them more ambitious, faster paced and established their style of comedy in elaborate genre parodies with comically airheaded inventor Wallace and his long suffering hound finding themselves battling robot dogs and diabolical jewel thieves. The latter of these, Feathers McGraw, introduced in The Wrong Trousers, has since become the connoisseur’s answer whenever the most sinister movie villains are discussed. The aura coming off this mute little penguin is menace personified.
Since the mid-’90s, though, Wallace & Gromit have been on the back burner while Aardman studios has diversified, with spin-off series Shaun the Sheep and breaking into animated features like Chicken Run. The duo got their triumphant second wind however when DreamWorks picked them up for their Oscar-nominated feature debut The Curse of the Were Rabbit, followed up a few years later by another TV short, A Matter of Loaf and Death, this one quite easily the weakest of the bunch, it’s jokes coming off cruder and its plot was slightly deficient in the category of the inspired creativity for which the duo had become known. The future of the franchise was also cast in doubt due to the loss of veteran comic actor Peter Sallis, who passed away in 2017, leaving Wallace voiceless as Gromit.
Recently however, Netflix have taken an interest in reviving the old Aardman properties, last year giving us Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget—a modestly entertaining affair without the simplicity of premise and execution the original had—and now comes Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, with Ben Whitehead stepping into Sallis’s slippers and doing a pretty uncanny job of it. Replacing another voice actor isn’t just about getting the voice right, it’s about getting the performance right—just try watching as much recent Rick & Morty as you can bare and you’ll hear what I mean—and Whitehead does a fairly excellent job of it, proving that with sufficient care, recasting is always a better solution than A.I.
Billed as the big return of Feathers McGraw, Vengeance Most Fowl is a direct sequel to The Wrong Trousers, as Feathers returns to stage an elaborate jailbreak, steal back the diamond, and frame his nemeses for the job. The formula for a Wallace & Gromit story is quite well established now: Wallace becomes enamored with something, a new invention or a new partner or enterprise—in this case his new robotic gardening assistant Norbot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith)—-but Gromit instinctively mistrusts it, does some detective work and uncovers a conspiracy to drop Wallace in it, cue a high-stakes action scene, Gromit saves the day, Tah-dahh, home for cheese and crackers. It’s a winning recipe, but it’s not just the return of Feathers McGraw that makes Vengeance Most Fowl feel like they’re just playing the hits.
Part of what was so impressive about Curse of the Were-Rabbit was that it was able to maintain the pacing and homespun charm of the shorts while expanding the premise to feature length and upping the spectacle proportionately. It didn’t feel like a TV show on the big screen, it felt like a big screen animated adventure with the pacing and atmosphere of a grand old monster movie parody. The Wrong Trousers was so impressive because it managed to condense a whole heist plot into just 30 minutes without sacrificing atmosphere, character drama, tension, action or comedy. Vengeance Most Fowl is feature length (a trim 79 minutes still makes it the second longest Wallace & Gromit by a considerable margin), but it is not a theatrical endeavor, it’s still a small screen experience for a BBC and Netflix release.
So although it has a Curse of the Were-Rabbit sized canvas, it’s still painting on a TV scale. Despite Were-Rabbit introducing a whole cast of new characters to the Lancashire village where the duo reside, only one, Chief Inspector MacKintosh (Peter Kay) actually returns here and with a far more prominent role. The cast does feature some other new voices, besides Shearsmith, who is excellent as the maniacal Norbot. Diane Morgan and Lauren Patel play prominent parts, but the world of Vengeance Most Fowl is still unmistakably smaller than that of Were-Rabbit. That needn’t necessarily be a problem, the scope of Were-Rabbit was an innovation and the originals weren’t noticeably hampered by their intimacy, far from it. That’s sort of the problem though, the original intimacy isn’t really there anymore, but nor is the scope. It feels overstretched and unfocused in a way Wallace & Gromit never really have before. It’s not a major problem, but it is there.
It feels more like a short premise concerning Norbot has been expanded into a feature to accommodate the return of Feathers. I think the stuff with Norbot feels a lot more like classic Wallace & Gromit fare, while the main plot with Feathers feels like a self-conscious attempt to recapture past glory. Gromit getting sick of Wallace’s elaborate and unnecessary inventions is a natural piece of virgin territory for the series and sequences like Norbot destroying Gromit’s prized flower garden by transforming it into a trendy minimalist lawn feature are funny and create exactly the kind of conflict between the oblivious Wallace and the long-suffering beagle that the series thrives on.
Feathers worked so well because he was given the attention and focus he needed. We didn’t hate him because he roped Wallace into a heist, we hated him because he was a bad house guest who stole Gromit’s room and blasted music all night. Here he’s treated more like Wallace’s nemesis than Gromit’s, with the pooch principally preoccupied with the Norbot subplot. These aren’t treated as separate subplots, they are causally linked, but not very elegantly. As funny as Feathers hacking Norbot and changing his setting from “good” to “evil” is, I think it would play better if Norbot was genuinely a bad actor in the story with an organic rivalry with Gromit, which they already do a very good job of setting up. As it is, it undermines a potentially very strong anti-A.I. theme, which would be appropriate given the Dead Reckoning homages.
The funny set pieces do keep coming but they’re interspersed with longer sequences focused on secondary characters than we’ve ever had before in the series, following the eager rookie PC Mukherjee (Patel) and pompous oaf MacKintosh. For as many side characters as Were-Rabbit introduced, it never felt like it was any less Wallace and Gromit’s story and the comedy here feels a lot more like standard BBC sitcom fare than anything to do with the distinctively insular and hare-brained world Nick Park created.
It really can’t be overstated just how slickly contrived the climaxes of films like The Wrong Trousers and Were-Rabbit are. Editing a action climax, especially in an action comedy, with multiple characters involved is like spinning plates, everyone needs to be doing something, working towards a specific goal, overcoming momentary perils along the way. You could use the train set sequence in Wrong Trousers as a textbook case in doing this, it’s a masterclass in escalating absurd problems met by absurd solutions. The climax to Were-Rabbit is a lot busier but still has the same balance of elements with each character given sufficient focus. By comparison, the climax to Vengeance Most Fowl feels like it has one too many moving parts and it can’t quite balance them. It feels over-reliant on convenience and feels just a bit too wacky for its own good.
I’ve leaned into the negative on this review, partly because I think a lot of people’s affection towards the duo has led some to overlook the flaws I’ve pointed out, but mainly because such a high bar has been set. Vengeance Most Fowl is a thoroughly entertaining romp for the whole family with some really good jokes peppered throughout. But at their best, Wallace & Gromit were more than that. They’ve provided us with some of the most genuinely magical, hilarious and inspired moments of British television. They set the benchmark for what could be achieved with stop-motion animation and gave us four back to back classics, and although this is better than A Matter of Loaf and Death, I can’t quite call it a return to form for the duo. I love Wallace & Gromit, and I’m very glad Nick Park is still finding new adventures for them and wish them many more in the future. I just hope the next one feels a bit newer than this.
