Review by C.J. Bunce
Get ready for your next grand day out with Aardman Animations’ new hit Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, featuring the return of the dastardly Feathers McGraw, now streaming on Netflix. Four decades since creator Nick Park first penned his ideas for these characters, Aardman’s mastery of stop motion/Claymation continues with great storytelling, humor, and innovations with what was thought to be a dead medium. Now blended with digital animation, the result is exactly what fans have hoped for: a seamless–and happily longer–entry in the annals of England’s great duo of man and his best friend that began with the Academy-Award-winning creators’ tremendous trifecta of The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and A Grand Day Out. In fact this new entry is more of everything.
In Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, it’s another confrontation with Feathers McGraw, the dastardly penguin villain of Nick Park’s 1993 Academy Award-winning animated short film The Wrong Trousers–one of the greatest animations ever. But fans of these shows come back for Wallace, the happy ol’ British inventor hobbyist and connoisseur of cheese, and Gromit, his industrious and frequently eyebrow-raised loyal pooch. So this time look forward to more elaborate inventions–like a much longer and innovative Get-U-Up machine for Wallace.
As you’d guess, that means more work for Gromit, who must actually run the apparatus. And that translates to more angst for the audience, especially when Wallace makes the same mistake he made in The Wrong Trousers, which saw Wallace invent robot pants that could take Gromit for walksies, and ignore Gromit for his new “chicken” best pal, to the point of Gromit running away. You may be yelling at the screen at Wallace, because we all know Gromit just needs more together time with his pal. Can Wallace learn his lesson before he loses Gromit for good?
But beyond the bigger, better Get-U-Up is Wallace’s more aggravating new invention: the smart Gnome, which has the potential of doing anything. That play on “smart phone” is only the beginning as all the bits and baubles of modern technology get run through the ringer in good cautionary tale style. Terminator didn’t ward us off artificial intelligence–can Wallace & Gromit do the trick?
Ben Whitehead, who was a stand-in for the late former Wallace voice actor Peter Sallis in Curse of the Were-Rabbit, makes Wallace his own. And from that sequel film, Peter Kay is back in a key role as the voice of PC Mackintosh.
The best bit finds Feathers McGraw as a James Bond villain with all the extras, brilliantly sitting in a highbacked Midcentury Modern chair, petting a white seal. It’s the kind of in your face brilliance that would have gotten roars in a theater, all a play on Blofeld, antagonist of nine Bond movies, spouting villainy as he lovingly stroked his white Persian cat. The gloves are off!
Or glove, in this case, as chicken disguise.
Old friends, an old foe, new tech, good writing, a surprise mystery, and even a heist. Whether you love Wallace & Gromit already or are just in need of great humor and comedy, you can’t miss Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, now streaming on Netflix.
