- Starring
- Ben Whitehead, Peter Kay, Lauren Patel
- Writer
- Mark Burton,
- Directors
- Merlin Crossingham, Nick Park
- Rating
- PG (United States)
- Running TIme
- 79 minutes
- Release Date
- December 18th, 2024 (limited)
- Release Date
- January 3rd, 2025 (Netflix)
Overall Score
Rating Summary
Aardman Animations has something of a slight sequel problem. Not unlike their American counterparts Pixar and DreamWorks, the British stop-motion house has shown in recent years, with their desire to return to some of their successful pre-existing material, that the magic isn’t always found under the same lump of clay. In any case, even if films like A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget don’t quite stack up to their predecessors, the studio can always take pride in the fact that their tireless efforts have never manifested in anything as shamelessly useless as a sequel to Cars or Inside Out.
Regardless of Aardman’s past inability to live up to the standards of their franchises before they became franchises, though, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a different story altogether. In a way, it had to be; the cheeky West Wallaby Street inventor and his beloved pooch are Nick Park’s babies, the studio’s mascots and, in a sense, the modern day embodiments of the last bastion of classic claymation. It’s also, thankfully, a different story in that Wallace & Gromit, itself a longstanding series, has been built upon a serialized pattern of one-off shorts (and, prior to now, only one feature film), making Vengeance Most Fowl merely another go-around with Park and his new co-director Merlin Crossingham into this iconic clump of Lancashire.
All that said, Vengeance Most Fowl is, in its own right, something of a divergence for the series (and more in line with the worrisome trend of underwhelming Aardman sequels) in that this is a direct follow-up to one of the duo’s previous adventures. Some might say, the duo’s most iconic previous adventure: The Wrong Trousers. Those unfamiliar with Feathers McGraw, the diamond-thieving penguin foiled by the titular team in his plot and imprisoned 31 years ago need not worry, for directors Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham offer a brief summation of where things went immediately after the events of the Oscar-winning short.
In brief, McGraw went to the prison-like penguin exhibit of the local zoo, and Wallace (Whitehead) and Gromit went back to their usual ways; now, Wallace, ever the tinkerer, has reached a tipping-point for pointless inventions made to streamline even the most basic of tasks—he can’t even be bothered to pat his loving dog on the head without the aid of a mechanized “Pat-O-Matic.” His proclivity for innovation for innovation’s sake leads him to invent Norbot, a robotic lawn gnome programmed to overtake the sort of “tedious” garden maintenance that Gromit finds so enjoyable on his own terms. Norbot, though, is a hit, and soon his popularity in town catches the attention of one imprisoned waddler who sees this new innovation as his ticket out of the slammer.
Unlike the previous Wallace & Gromit feature, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, this latest venture seems less like a feature-length structural reworking of the classic episodic nature of the old shorts and more like a prolonged version of one of them—in a sense, a fitting move for a film functioning as a direct sequel to such a short. In that sense, Vengeance Most Fowl may seem somewhat slight to some in its relentless pacing, but Park and Crossingham use the still-brief 79-minute runtime to jam-pack the film with as many delightfully droll gags as possible. True, the puns aren’t as diverse as usual, but the few they do offer demonstrate a good deal of mileage; Wallace’s gnome-based service is called “Gnome Improvements”; as Norbot becomes famous, he’s a “household gnome”; how else does Wallace keep track of him and his later cohorts, but with a “gnoming beacon?” Like most of the best British offerings, the gags are elegant and charming in their rugged simplicity.
However, the driving force behind the appeal of any Wallace & Gromit outing, as is the case with all Aardman works, as always, is the love and affection clearly poured into the painstaking stop-motion animation. Once again, Park and co. have done well to avoid erasing fingerprints from their clay models, as it adds to the tangibility of their efforts and truly places these characters into a sense of belonging sorely lacking in most CG models, as if these characters have been sitting by your side your entire life waiting to enjoy a cup of tea together. For some of us, Wallace & Gromit literally has been there our entire lives, and to see them and their world fitting so snugly into an increasingly distant world makes every moment spent with these figures all the more precious.
The way Vengeance Most Fowl finds its webbed footing in that modern era is another dimension in its favour; the film’s wariness towards programmable intelligence and advancements without genuine progress not only gives the film a meta-textual dimension pertaining to its staunch old-school approach to its visuals, but also feels like a culmination of every harebrained scheme Wallace has ever cooked up from which Gromit has been forced to dig them out. (That Netflix is the one distributing the film adds a layer of irony in that respect undoubtedly lost on the corporate suits, but one that also enables the film’s boundless sight gags to benefit from the repeat viewing streaming allows.) Is it a particularly subtle message? No, but also… this is an animated film for families; we can take our victory in the fact that the film isn’t so ballistic in its finger-wagging as to dismiss technology altogether, while at the same time bestowing children (and, let’s be honest, clueless and lazy adults) with a progressively necessary awareness of the dangers of unchecked AI development.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl certainly packs quite a bit into its intimate package—even the major players, compared to Curse of the Were-Rabbit, seem largely condensed to a small handful (and only one delightful new addition in Patel’s PC Mukherjee), as was the case with the older shorts. And yet, by the time its meagre runtime reaches its end, Park and Crossingham make a fine case for not a single moment being unused or overworked. With a steady stream of hardy chuckles, Aardman’s latest makes the case that, after 35 years of antics, the wily cheese-lover and his best silent chum have as much joy as ever to provide in their largely cloistered misadventures. Wallace & Gromit never really made a habit out of revisiting old territory, but Vengeance Most Fowl proves that there can be value, with the same amount of care as the first time, in taking a closer look at that mysterious chicken on the wanted poster.
still courtesy of Netflix
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