We all love it when a classic screen villain makes an unexpected return. That certainly drives “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” the first Wallace & Gromit feature since 2005’s Oscar-winning “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” and the first film to feature the beloved characters since 2008’s “A Matter of Loaf and Death” (Oscar-nominated, didn’t win). The villain? Feathers McGraw, the larcenous penguin (disguised as a rooster thanks to a red rubber glove) from 1993’s “The Wrong Trousers,” which, yes, won the Oscar for animated short.
This time around, Feathers frames cuddly inventor Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead) and his beloved pooch Gromit for a series of crimes by hacking into the “smart gnome” Wallace has invented, named Norbot (voiced, with appealing impishness, by Reece Shearsmith).
Director Nick Park said that the central idea for the new film had been hanging around since “Curse of the Were-Rabbit:” “What if Wallace invented a robot gnome to help Gromit in the garden?” The idea, the team figured, was enough for a half-hour short, at least—a treatise on technology gone wrong and the callousness of artificial intelligence, made in stop-motion animation, the most painstakingly hand-crafted art form. “That seemed too normal, and we’d done that many times,” Park said. “We needed something—a more sinister motivation behind the gnomes. And something that is more personal.”
Enter Feathers McGraw. “That was something very personal—him languishing in prison for 30 years,” Park said. In that moment, the movie went from a short to a feature. But how do you follow up one of the most beloved short films of all time? “I remember expressing anxiety about that early on because “The Wrong Trousers” is so held up now, I didn’t want to spoil that in any way by creating a story that doesn’t need to be there,” Park said. “We saw it very much as a companion piece.” If you’ve already seen (and likely adore) “The Wrong Trousers,” there’s plenty to latch onto in “Vengeance Most Fowl.” But if you’ve never seen the earlier short, you can enjoy it just as well.
Of course, one thing they needed was a climactic chase. The chase in “The Wrong Trousers,” which involves a train set, a stolen diamond and a gun, is so iconic that Steven Spielberg has sung its praises, and it helped inspire another great train chase, in Gore Verbinski’s “The Lone Ranger.” “I was very conscious as a new directing partner with Nick that I didn’t want to put myself in a position where we were trying to one-up the train chase,” director Merlin Crossingham said. “We needed to do something very different and equally bonkers.”
Park said that the idea for what would ultimately become the chase was pitched early on. “It’s such a British, silly idea: It’s on one of these quiet backwater canals, but it’s a Bond-style chase.” The team joked that it was “The Fast and the Furious” at four miles an hour. It posed an interesting conundrum: Hang on the slow-moving nature of the chase but still keep it exciting. “It could just fall really flat,” Crossingham said.
After a couple of rewrites, they found the key to the sequence’s success. “It became important that the action supported the emotion of the journey that the characters needed to go on, rather than the action being a set piece for no apparent reason,” Crossingham said. “It ended up being story-driven, which is absolutely fundamental to it working.”
Out of the movie’s 15-month shoot, the chase took nine months to figure out and film. “The actual animation wasn’t the thing that took the longest,” Crossingham said. “It was figuring out how to do it or setting it up, getting the camera speeds, or the testing of it. Once we figured that out, then the actual execution of it, I’m not going to say it was straightforward, but it wasn’t the lion’s share of the work.”
This story first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap magazine. Read more from the Awards Preview issue here.
