Directors – Merlin Crossingham & Nick Park, Screenplay – Mark Burton, Story – Mark Burton & Nick Park, Producer – Richard Beek, Photography – Dave Alex Riddett, Music – Lorne Balfe & Julian Nott, Visual Effects Supervisor – Howard Jones, Supervising Animator – Will Becher, Production Design – Matt Perry, Puppet Design – Anne King. Production Company – Aardman Productions.
Voices
Ben Whitehead (Wallace), Reece Shearsmith (Norbot), Peter Kay (Chief Inspector Mackintosh), Lauren Patel (P.C. Mukherjee), Diane Morgan (Onya Doorstep), Muzz Khan (Anton Deek)
Plot
Wallace surprises Gromit with a new invention – that of Norbot, a robot gnome to do the gardening. Gromit is not happy to see Norbot supplant his usefulness around the house. The Norbot is seen by other people who then clamour to employ its services. Meanwhile, their old nemesis the chicken Feathers McGraw, has been sentenced to the zoo. There he hatches an evil plan where he hacks into Wallace’s computer and changes the settings on Norbot from Good to Evil. Norbot then builds an army of other robot gnomes ostensibly to service the new demand for gardening robots. However, under Feathers’ direction, the other Norbots steal items to build a submarine to break Feathers out of confinement whereupon he sets out to procure the Blue Diamond once again.
Aardman Animation has been around since 1976, specialising in Claymation animation. Their greatest success came with the Wallace and Gromit short films A Grand Day Out (1992), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), as well as Cracking Contraptions (2002), a further series of ten 2½ minute shorts that have been variously broadcast or sold on DVD. All of these centre around a middle-aged man with a West Country accent and his sharp-witted dog companion Gromit. Aardman also spun the characters off in one previous feature film with Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). In addition, there have been a string of videogames, comic-books, even a stage play and a theme park ride. The characters have appeared in ads and were celebrated on British postage stamps. Vengeance Most Fowl was the second Wallace and Gromit full-length film.
Following the acclaim enjoyed by the Wallace and Gromit short, Aardman expanded out onto cinema screens beginning with Chicken Run (2000). Since then, Aardman’s cinematic ventures have been variable – abandoning Claymation for regular animation in the passable to okay Flushed Away (2006), Arthur Christmas (2011) and The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012). Their actual Claymation features have ranged between the fine The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) and others that have stayed in the passable-to-likeable midrange with Early Man (2018), Farmageddon (2019) and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023). These Shaun the Sheep films, Dawn of the Nugget and now Vengeance Most Fowl have shown a preference for staying in the safety lines with the familiarity of known properties. The surprise about Vengeance Most Fowl is that, despite featuring Aardman’s most popular creatures, it was released straight to tv and streaming – the BBC in the UK, Netflix everywhere else.
The appeal of Aardman and the Wallace and Gromit shorts when they first came out was their playfulness. On one level, they could be works made for children – except they were being discovered by adults who celebrated and delighted at the quirky sense of humour and uniquely British provinciality of the characters. Thirty years on from when the first Wallace and Gromit shorts appeared, Aardman have squarely positioned themselves to be making product that is aimed for the international family market. Watching Vengeance Most Fowl feels a different experience to when I originally discovered the Wallace and Gromit shorts back in the 1990s. It is less a sense of discovery and charm than cosily settling back into the familiar company of an old friend.
(l to r) Gromit, Norbot the gnome robot and Wallace
After watching Vengeance Most Fowl, my feeling is that Wallace and Gromit work better as short subjects than trying to extrude them out to fill a full film. That said, there are still plenty of charms to be found. The opening is another round of Wallace’s nutty Rube Goldberg inventions – from automated devices to wake and bathe him to the Dress-o-Matic and a device that pops up toast and automatically pelts it with jam. The twist the film offers about halfway through is to then deprive Wallace of his inventions.
The script is filled with word play. The introduction of Norbot is the opportunity for the script to serve up a maximum amount of gnome related puns – gnome improvement, gnoming devices and the like. When Wallace is in pursuit of Feathers, he ponders aloud “If only there were a way of rebooting them [the robot gnomes]” whereupon Gromit opens a cupboard and a torrent of gumboots fall on Wallace’s head.
Vengeance Most Fowl hits its stride when it gets to the wacky comedy sequences on which all the good Aardman films are founded. There is a sublimely nutty sequence where Feathers McGraw creates an improvised extension arm with a rubber glove on the end out to poke out through the slot of his cell door past the dozing security guard (stopping to hold a handkerchief to the guard’s nose lest a feather cause him to sneeze and then tucking it back into his pocket) and then to use the computer to remote access Wallace’s home and change the Norbot’s settings from Good through Pleasant, Unassuming, Dull, Mildly Annoying and Grumpy to Evil. The climax features a chase sequence with Feathers McGraw escaping in Wallace’s van rebuilt to be powered with gnome feet (which skid when turning corners during a chase) with Wallace and Gromit pursuing on a swivel chair powered by a leaf blower, followed by a chase aboard barges that takes place at 5 mph.
