Academy Award nominated animated feature “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” marks the latest adventure from Aardman’s beloved inventor and loyal pooch, who first appeared in Oscar nominated 1991 short “A Grand Day Out.” The globally beloved duo have also appeared in a string of stories including Oscar winning shorts “A Close Shave” and “The Wrong Trouser” and feature “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” and also has been the focus of impactful initiatives such as Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Appeal children’s charity, which has raised more than $25 million since it’s formation.
The characters’ soft-spoken four-time Oscar winning creator Nick Park, who directed this latest adventure with Aardman vet Merlin Crossingham, humbly admits he has to pitch himself when he reflects on the journey. “I think their relationship resonates to many people on different levels, whether it’s people who have dogs and talk to their dogs like they’re a human, or just people working in a partnership together, where there’s a sort of a healthy little love, hate, friction, and all and everything in between.
“The relationship between them – the comedy, the tension as well – [stems from] Wallace, the hapless, insensitive, cheese loving inventor, but his dog [a Chaplin-esque non-speaking character] being the sensitive one, the more human one, with all the nuanced human expressions,” he continues.
“Vengeance Most Fowl” introduces Wallace’s latest invention, a smart gnome named Norbot, and marks the return of the franchise’s most infamous villain, the penguin Feathers McGraw, who first appeared in “The Wrong Trousers.” In the story, Feathers hacks Norbot, changing his program from Wallace’s smart garden assistant to Feathers’ evil henchman.
For Parks, a new adventure always starts with the idea. “It has to be led by an idea that really feels inspired and on every level – comedy, and also, for a feature film, it has to have the legs, as they say, to become a bigger story.” The new movie, he says, came from an idea he had a long time ago – the notion of Wallace inventing a smart gnome to help with garden chores. “It’s a well meaning invention,” he says, noting though that it’s a insensitive one as it makes Gromit feel sidelined and neglected. “It had lots of potential for comedy, but there was always something missing. What’s motivating the gnomes to do what they do? And is it just about gnomes going wrong?”
Then came the idea to bring back the popular Feathers McGraw, who was captured by Wallace and Gromit in “The Wrong Trousers.” “He’s been languishing in prison for 30 years,” Park says, describing Feathers as a sinister force with a personal motivation to seek vengeance on the pair. “We developed a story from there. It was going to be a half-hour short for TV, and then suddenly became much bigger.”
Stop-motion movies take years to make, but this script became all the more topical as Hollywood and the world delved into the potential impact of AI. “In a very light comedic way, it comments on our love affair with technology,” says Park. “There’s always that danger [with new technology]. Is it enhancing our human experience or it is somehow taking away? … Wallace thinks it can fix everything in life, from even human relationships, when actually that’s the thing that’s causing the problem.”
Crossingham cites how Norbot creates a wedge in Wallace and Gromit’s relationship with a touching example. “Gromit wants a loving pat the on head, and in the beginning [of the movie], he gets it from a machine. That really embodies the wrestle that they have in their relationship,” he says.
From this place, the adventure begins as they are forced to face their sinister foe, Feathers, a non-speaking villain who was given a minimalist look and uneasy stillness. “It took finding the right animators,” says Crossingham of their stop-motion filmmaking process. “Asking an animator not to animate is a really tricky thing. But his power does come from his stillness.” His character animation involved careful attention to cinematic methods such as camera movement, noir lighting and music. Of their technique, Crossingham says, “the human touch is supremely important.”
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