This image released by Netflix shows
The characters Gromit, left, and Wallace, right, voiced by Ben Whitehead, right, with their robot knome, Norbot, voiced by Reece Shearsmith, in a scene from the film Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.The Associated Press
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Directed by Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham
Written by Nick Park and Mark Burton
Classification N/A; 79 minutes
Now playing at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto; streaming on Netflix starting Jan. 3
Critic’s Pick
In late 2023, a rumour circulated that Aardman Animations – the jolly purveyors of British stop-motion such as Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep – were running out of Lewis Newplast, the Plasticine-like modelling clay used for all of their productions to date. The Telegraph reported that they only had enough putty for one last project: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the second feature film about the cheese-loving inventor and his dependable beagle. This spurred a number of articles fact-checking the original report and assuring Aardman enthusiasts that the studio was not facing a cata-clay-sm.
Vengeance Most Fowl is a sequel to Nick Park’s 1993 short The Wrong Trousers, wherein Wallace creates an expensive pair of automated “techno-trousers” meant to take Gromit on walks solo and subsequently rents a room to Feathers McGraw, a criminal penguin on the lam (disguised with a red rubber glove on his head). In the end, Feathers, an apparent diamond thief, is caught and consigned to the city zoo as retribution. In this latest endeavour, the conniving bird is back and seeking revenge on the madcap inventor who turned him in.
Vengeance Most Fowl begins with Wallace inventing the “smart gnome” – a proxy for recent advancements in artificial intelligence – which makes every act of labour convenient. Gromit, forever overlooked in Wallace’s eyes, immediately senses the technology’s limitations; for one, the garden he was thoughtfully tending to is spliced into ugly uniform shrubs. When the still-imprisoned Feathers receives word of Wallace’s newfound success, he plots to hijack the smart gnomes to commit nefarious deeds. (This also lifts from the first instalment of the Wallace and Gromit characters, the 1989 short film A Grand Day Out, in which the pair fly to the moon and encounter a dubious, coin-operated robot.)
How does one explain our rapidly automating world to the children for whom this film is designed? WALL-E took this question to its bitter end in a doomier rendition in 2008, and practically every family flick nowadays involves an obnoxious degree of nu-tech. Vengeance Most Fowl presents a thoughtful representation of how AI factors into our everyday lives – it won’t radicalize your child, but it will compel them to look beyond their screens.
Even more meaningful, then, is that the film cannot hide its rigorous artistic labour; each second of stop-motion footage might take a full day to procure, and, at times, one can see the imprint of fingertips on the spirited figurines. Unlike Aardman’s previous sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023), which used a combination of stop-motion and CGI, Vengeance Most Fowl appears wholly handmade.
While the film cannot rival its predecessor – The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), a remarkably spooky project that felt more innovative than responsive – Vengeance Most Fowl is a cozy return to form that plaits together its own laboured conception and our mechanized conditions in order to enliven its signature duo among the youth of today.
Special to The Globe and Mail
