Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!.
I love Wallace & Gromit, and I have for years. I was first introduced to them by a friend who gave us a VHS of the short The Wrong Trousers more than 25 years ago, and I’ve been a fan ever since. There’s a lot of good animation out there, and a lot of good stop-motion, but Aardman is the king of stop-motion work. It’s been too long since we’ve had a new W&G film. Curse of the Wererabbit is from 2005 and the short A Matter of Loaf and Death came out in 2008. It’s been 16 years since Wallace & Gromit have been in a new adventure, so when I learned about Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, it moved to the top of the list quickly.
This is a film where it genuinely helps to have some knowledge of the Wallace & Gromit canon. The second W&G short, The Wrong Trousers, which is the highpoint in my opinion, is going to be important as backstory. If you haven’t seen it, the 30 minutes it takes to watch is highly recommended; you can find it on Prime as well as free on DailyMotion, and in terms of plotting, animation, and story, you’re not going to find much that beats it.
Anyway, in The Wrong Trousers, cheese-loving inventor Wallace (Ben Whitehead) and his intelligent dog Gromit (who never speaks) are caught up in a heist perpetrated by a penguin named Feathers McGraw (who also never speaks). All comes out in the end; Feathers is captured, Wallace and Gromit are heroes, and the blue diamond that was the goal of the heist is returned safely to the museum from whence it was snatched.
One of the realities of the W&G universe is that Wallace is always strapped for cash and he turns to an invention to solve the cashflow problem. In Vengeance Most Fowl, he opts to create Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), an AI-controlled garden gnome who trims hedges, mows the lawn and cleans up the garden. Norbot becomes a minor sensation in the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Feathers McGraw is languishing in penguin jail, also called the zoo. He sees the story on Wallace and decides not only to get out but to get revenge on the man who put him in prison. This involves hacking into the mainframe that controls Norbot (the password is “cheese”) and turning his programming to EVIL. And soon enough, Norbot is stealing from the neighbors and helping Feathers McGraw build a submarine to help him escape the zoo.
There are a number of reasons to watch Wallace & Gromit movies. They are fun, entertainingly paced, often very funny, filled with cute puns and visual jokes, and contain the best stop-motion work in the business. This is certainly going to hold true for Vengeance Most Fowl. The animation is so smooth in places that it legitimately looks computer designed and produced. It’s not; the Aardman team is dedicated to actual models moved painstakingly by hand. They’ve simply gotten so good at this that it’s hard to believe it’s been done that way.
The biggest issue that I have with Vengeance Most Fowl is the length. This is incredibly short, running a mere 82 minutes, which includes the extensive credits and the several minutes of NetFlix credits for the voice actors in various languages. I’d love to have this be longer. That’s true in general for me with Aardman work, though. The only Aardman movie I can find that runs more than 90 minutes is the Chicken Run sequel, which I think is their worst film. In fact, for what it’s worth, Pirates: Band of Misfits is their second longest movie that I’ve seen, and probably the one I like second-least. That being the case, keeping it short might have been a better choice. (Worth noting that evidently they worked on Arthur Christmas, which runs 97 minutes, but I haven’t seen that one.)
It’s also worth noting that there isn’t really a great set piece in this one. Many of the other W&G movies have “a” scene that really shows the skill of the producers; The Wrong Trousers has the train chase, for instance. There’s a boat chase in this one, and while it’s good, it lacks the visceral excitement of the earlier film. In a sense, this feels a little toned down.
But I’m happy to have more Wallace & Gromit in any sense. I’d love to see Aardman focusing here, on their best characters, in the future. Wallace & Gromit are the Aardman sweet spot; the other properties (Shaun the Sheep, for instance—who started in a Wallace & Gromit short) are good, but stick with the money. Sixteen years is too long to wait.
Why to watch Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl: Seriously? It’s Wallace & Gromit.
Why not to watch: It needs to be 20 minutes longer.
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