Feathers McGraw

Film: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
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.

24 Carrot Gold

Film: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I’ve loved Wallace & Gromit for years. More than a decade and a half ago, a friend gave my wife and me a copy of The Wrong Trousers for Christmas. There’s a lot to love with most of the Aardman films. First, the Claymation is fantastically good, using everything from the stop-motion catalog created by Ray Harryhausen and adding a number of impressive tricks of their own. Second, and just as important, Aardman films tend to be astonishingly clever, filled with jokes for the entire audience as well as references that only the adults will get. I’d seen Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit before tonight, but I was in a mood for it. My sister and I get together and watch horror movies every few months. Today, I had her watch Dog Soldiers, so I guess I’m in a lycanthropic mood.

Our heroes are Wallace (Peter Sallis), a cheese-loving inventor and in this film pest-control specialist and his dog Gromit, who never makes a noise. As with the Wallace & Gromit shorts, it’s soon evident that Wallace’s inventions are (pardon the pun) hare-brained and that Gromit is both the real brains of the operation and the only one with any common sense. In this film, our heroes are running a pest control business (called Anti-Pesto) that specializes in the humane control and capture of vegetable stealing rabbits. This is important, as the town’s main yearly event, a vegetable growing competition, is in danger due to a surge in the rabbit population.