Wallace & Grommit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Don't read this if you intend to watch the film unless spoilers don't bother you...

Vengeance Most Fowl isn't just a further adventure of Wallace & Gromit. The occasional films about one eccentric inventor and his dog is many things: a perfect festival of visual jokes and film references;  a gloriously multicultural production, without wearing that on its sleeve. And a repudiation of technology for its own sake, especially where it inadvertently crushes humanity.

And that’s very cool because obviously Aardman Animation’s main method is painstakingly hand-animated plasticine. You can see the fingerprints in the clay, There is little or no CGI and it must take ages, and that makes me feel so happy because the content has to be as close to perfect because you can’t lose confidence in a joke or a routine and quickly redo it.

And as before the friendship between the mad scientist Wallace and the single-minded and practical dog Grommit is the heart of it. As before Wallace is trying to make life easy for him and his dog, but it always goes wrong. In VMT Grommit’s position in the house is sidelined by Wallace’s invention of the Nifty Odd-Jobbing Robot. These are a significant upgrade to the wrong trousers, certainly, but of course they can be hacked because we live in that sort of world now: anything that’s designed with best intentions can be subverted by the opposite kind of villain.

Feathers McGraw returns as the criminally minded penguin, remanded at the end of The Wrong Trousers to a beautifully rendered zoo that’s also a prison. McGraw masquerades as a chicken by putting a rubber glove on his head. Clearly McGraw resents his incarceration and when the opportunity for revenge presents itself, he’s in. The writers have also cleverly continued the plot of The Wrong Trousers, with the stolen diamond that Wallace was feted for when he helped to recover it. Additionally a preening Detective Inspector is preparing for the exhibition to open. At the same time the Norbot in Wallace and Grommit’s house has basically taken over and Grommit is deeply frustrated. Of course things start to go wrong.

The background characters are incredible, from that Inspector Albert Mackintosh (Peter Kay) who only cares about image, and his foil the young PC Mukherjee (Lauren Patel). She does the police work which ultimately exonerates Wallace—who has been identified as the villain by the View Up North TV team Anton Deck and Onya Doorstep.

The heart of the story is the relationship between the title characters. Also the rivalry between the equally mute but very expressive Grommit and Feathers McGraw: Grommit observes what the villain does, and outsmarts him with very little fuss.

The design of the Norbot is particularly good. The relentless calm determination of a technology that’s up to no good suggests HAL from 2001; and the smiling face of a hostile entity recalls scary clowns and other horror tropes. What’s especially fun about Norbot is that, like a lot of things, it needs to be charged up and the charging mechanism is tedious. And the defeat of the robot, or rather its rehabilitation, is done by resetting it: switching it off and on again, more or less. Wallace and Grommit are like a family unit and it’s Grommit who has to rescue Wallace from his own naive joy at the world of invention that exists inside his mind. Visual comic references are part of the delight but there’s a deep-seated optimism about the human spirit. The Norbot was quick and efficient but its most benign achievements look somehow artless and manufactured. And at the most basic level, there’s a comfort to a proper cup of tea in a pot as opposed to one that’s been made by a contraption. And by extension there’s nothing better than friendship, loyalty and dogs.