Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl Ushers In A New Stop-Motion Golden Age
Wallace and Gromit are back, this time with ¡°a lot more tension and drama.¡±

When I was six years old, my family only had a handful of VHS tapes I was allowed to watch: The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, The Lion King, and three of Aardman¡¯s iconic stop-motion Wallace & Gromit shorts: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave. I was wary of watching A Grand Day Out and A Close Shave, but I flat-out refused to watch The Wrong Trousers for one reason: Feathers McGraw, the beady-eyed penguin who silently schemed to steal a diamond using Wallace and a pair of robotic legs.
Clearly, I wasn¡¯t the only one who was terrified of him, because more than 30 years later, Aardman brings him back for revenge in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, now streaming on Netflix. But bringing back Feathers wasn¡¯t where this story started. It all started with a simple concept: Wallace inventing a smart garden gnome to help Gromit out with his garden.
¡°That was a 30-minute TV [short], which seemed a lot of fun and enough to fill a whole 30 minutes,¡± co-director Nick Park tells Inverse. ¡°But then this idea of bringing back Feathers came along as a solution for the story, and it suddenly gave this idea legs and a lot more tension and drama.¡±
Tension and drama are definitely the words to describe it. Though there is still plenty of the franchise¡¯s patented coziness, the feature format allows the story to reach new heights, borrowing more from Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher than you¡¯d ever think a movie like this could, all culminating in an epic train showdown ¡ª a spiritual successor to the model train chase in the first short.
The story begins with Norbot, a grinning smart gnome Wallace makes in order to pay off the bills. At first, it¡¯s a massive success, but then Feathers turns the gnomes evil and uses them for his own unfinished business: stealing the diamond he attempted to pilfer back in The Wrong Trousers. Decades may have passed, but Feathers hasn¡¯t changed: he¡¯s still silent, conniving, and, aesthetically, not much more than a bowling pin with a beak... which makes communicating his plans a bit challenging.
¡°That has been one of the most challenging aspects really, of the whole movie, Park says. ¡°At least Gromit has a brow he can move up. He can understand thoughts more clearly. It's all about the simplicity of how Feathers moves, the deliberate and small movements. A look here, a blink. Minimalism, really.¡±
Park¡¯s co-director, Merlin Crossingham, used Feathers¡¯ minimalist appearance as motivation to use different tools to express his evil intentions. ¡°We use camera moves, the sound,¡± he tells Inverse. ¡°He's a very cinematic character because we rely, as filmmakers, on all those tricks to make him the hero/villain that you see and love to hate.¡±
Making Feathers scary is a practice in minimalism since he doesn¡¯t have eyebrows or even a mouth.
Even beyond the old grudges, Vengeance Most Fowl is breaking new ground. Feathers is able to manipulate an army of Norbots because of Wallace¡¯s dabbling in artificial intelligence, evoking Black-Mirror-esque questions about how much we rely on technology, be that an iPhone or Wallace¡¯s tea-and-toast making contraption. ¡°I do think we do love our technology and it is very important to Wallace as well as a character,¡± Crossingham says. ¡°It's asking, what's the relationship we have? And we're asking that through Wallace.¡±
Vengeance Most Fowl is the first Wallace & Gromit feature since 2005¡¯s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and it comes at an auspicious time for stop-motion animation. In a time where artificial intelligence like Norbot is raising questions around art, we¡¯re entering a new golden age of stop-motion: Aardman is now joined by multiple other stop-motion studios, and there¡¯s even a stop-motion DC superhero movie in the works.
¡°Back when Toy Story first came out in the '90s, a studio like us, we¡¯re thinking, ¡®Oh, boy, how long do we have left?¡¯¡± Park says. ¡°But we kept going. As long as you're telling good stories, compelling stories with compelling characters, then it's just the technique really.¡±