We are treated to sight gags broad and subtle and the menacing presence of Feathers McGraw contrasted with the clueless Wallace and the resourceful Gromit.
On January 3, Netflix released Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, following its release in Britain on Christmas. It’s a worthy revival of the Wallace & Gromit series, its first installment in 16 years since 2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death.
For the uninitiated, Wallace & Gromit is a Claymation series begun with the 1989 short film A Grand Day Out. Wallace is that classic English archetype, an eccentric middle-aged bachelor who fills his house and his time with his hobbies, in his case an array of inventions that include Rube Goldberg–style contraptions to do everything from deposit him from his bed into his bathtub to spreading jam on his toast to using a mechanical hand to pat his dog, Gromit.
The expressive-faced beagle Gromit, for his part, wordlessly supplies a lot of the practical smarts missing while his master is focused on his tinkering and his love for cheese. Set in quaint suburbia in Lancashire in the north of England (where filmmaker Nick Park grew up), the pair have starred in four short films and two feature films. Setbacks along the way included a 2005 fire that destroyed most of the original sets and models and the death in 2017 of the original voice actor for Wallace.
Wallace & Gromit’s most memorable adventure to date came in 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, in which they faced off against an all-time great film villain: Feathers McGraw. Feathers, a penguin and jewel thief, is beady-eyed, unspeaking, usually expressionless, and “disguises” himself as a chicken by wearing a rubber glove on his head. What makes Feathers such a great villain, aside from his diabolically clever plots, is his combination of utter remorselessness and his blank expression. He’s pure malice with flippers. The Wrong Trousers is much beloved both for Feathers and for its classic concluding chase sequence.
After 31 years, Park has brought Feathers back for an encore. The jailbird wants another run at the Blue Diamond and will stop at nothing. Wallace, meanwhile, is taken with his new invention: Norbot, a gardening and housekeeping robot in the form of a garden gnome for whom — as Norbot tells us relentlessly — “no job is too small!” I won’t spoil what follows, but we are treated yet again to sight gags both broad and subtle, the menacing presence of Feathers contrasted with the clueless Wallace and the resourceful Gromit, and a hilarious chase scene. But this time, there’s more afoot. Vengeance Most Fowl is also a surprisingly pointed satire of smart homes, AI, and overdependence on technology — a lesson ultimately not lost even on the technophilic Wallace, who had no such reflection on the downsides of his charming gadgets in the heady days of the early 1990s.