Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl–Go behind the scenes of the coming Netflix movie

Review by C.J. Bunce

Happy New Year! Starting the year off on the best possible foot is a new movie from Aardman Animations: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, featuring the return of the dastardly Feathers McGraw. Four decades since creator Nick Park first penned his ideas for these characters, Titan Books is previewing the coming Netflix release with the book The Art of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the official art book of the movie, available today here at Amazon and at all good bookstores. A rare look inside the recently updated stop motion/Claymation blend with digital animation from the studio, it features never before published concept art, sketches, behind-the-scenes photography and interviews with Aardman’s production team.

In Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Wallace and his loyal hound Gromit face off again with Feathers McGraw, the dastardly villain of Nick Park’s 1993 Academy Award-winning animated short film The Wrong Trousers–one of the greatest animations ever.

With a foreword by Peter Kay, voice of PC Mackintosh, first seen in Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the book next takes a look back at the past four decades of Wallace & Gromit appearances, accompanied by concept art drawings and behind-the-scenes photographs. It tells a story of a small group of creative minds combining to make an unusual visual experience that has reaped the highest accolades from critics and an international fan following.

The big technical shift from past animation accounts is using digital compositing to cut the timeframe of the vintage stop-motion filming method, while continuing to use the clay characters as much as possible. Head of Puppets Anne King explains how silicon components allow for speeding up the production process without losing anything meaningful from the look and feel of the characters. 3D printing is a help, too.

The book mentions the replacement of the late beloved voice actor Peter Sallis with Ben Whitehead, who was a stand-in for Sallis back to Curse of the Were-Rabbit, so the shift should be seamless to audiences. Also, the film is much longer than the animated shorts of the past–it’s a full 90 minute movie. But most of the book is about updating the sets and key components of what fans of the films will be looking forward to, like Wallace’s new iteration of his Get-U-Up invention, the house, the props, and the set decoration. Nick Park’s own thumbnail storyboard sketches are everywhere in the book.

Head of Rigging Del Lawson explains the use of rotoscoping or cloning software to finish scenes–it’s clear the work between the animators and digital artists is a must to get the film right. New to this fantasy world is Norbot, Wallace’s “smart gnome.” You can tell via all the development work that poor Gromit as gardener will have much angst ahead from Wallace’s latest invention.

The storytelling, the prop and model building (like a new boat ket to the final act) and all the great–often full-color–hand-drawn and painted development illustrations are like a course in stop-motion animation. The author takes the reader through the production step by step. It’s fascinating and fun. If they don’t know this already, readers will walk away seeing Aardman Animations in an elite group of creative talent up there with Weta in New Zealand and Industrial Light & Magic in the States.

Whether you love Wallace & Gromit or are a fan or student of animation, you’ll want to pick up The Art of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the official art book of the movie, available today here at Amazon and at all good bookstores. The movie arrives on Netflix in two days: January 3, 2025. Here’s the trailer in case you missed it: