Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

Rated PG because the Norbot gnomes get a little bit scary when they turn evil.  My kids, who aren't always the most brave, were able to handle this.  It's kind of silly when cottagecore OGs have to fight some kind of penguin supervillain.  All of it is in a very lighthearted tone, so there's not much to be concerned about.  But there still is an intimidating threat at times when everything comes at Wallace at once.  Nothing to worry about when it comes to parenting though.

DIRECTORS:  Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park

The odds on me making any kind of real headway in today's blog is slim.  How is it that Sundays end up being the most stressful days of the week.  I have oh-so-many goals per day and I've been squeezing these to-dos in the last hour.  It's not through lack of trying either.  So I'm trying to knock out a blog about Wallace & Gromit before I have to fold laundry and staple student essays.  We'll see how much I can get done and go from there.

We can all read the room on this one, right?  Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl could be the best animated movie ever made.  There's no way that it would win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.  I have an oddly long history with Wallace & Gromit.  My art teacher in high school used to put these things on all of the time and I started to love them.  I already dropped the Cottage Core reference earlier, but they might be the most soothing form of children's entertainment while being simultaneously funny.  In my head, there were dozens of Wallace & Gromit movies, but there are only two.  Apparently, everything else was a short or a television program.  Still, I forget how much I like Wallace & Gromit.  I guffawed harder while watching this movie than I can say about any of the other animated features this year.  It's not like I disliked the other movies so far.  It's just that Wallace & Gromit has the ability to sneak up on you with an unexpected gag while providing some unfathomable impressive claymation.

But I'm also forced to be critical.  Wallace & Gromit, for what it is, never will be really challenging.  I know.  I'm bringing politics into what is the most vanilla content ever made.  I know.  I'm a bad person and some of you are rolling your eyes incredibly hard.  Wallace & Gromit loves staying in its lane too hard.  Again, it's been a minute since I've watch a Wallace & Gromit movie.  But really, this series hasn't really grown all that much in terms of adapting to the 21st Century. Perhaps that comes from the notion that the world that Wallace and Gromit live in doesn't really make major leaps in attitude.  Wallace entertains himself with making Inspector Gadget style technology. We live in a world where iPhone generations are the only major leaps in tech, yet we get these gear-and-sprocket hands that consume Wallace.  Norbot, as adorable as he is as an attempt to talk to contemporary audiences, is a kind of invention that would have worked in the '90s as much as it would have worked today.  It's cute.  It's just not very heady.  

Spiraling out of this, while I liked the movie a lot, the story of Vengeance Most Fowl is painfully forgettable.  I may have been influenced by a review of the movie when it first came out criticizing it for being almost superfluous as a story.  I hate to agree --again, because I really enjoyed the movie --but that review might be right.  Wallace and Gromit are afraid of changing.  They pride themselves on being characters who are incapable of growth, despite the fact that we see some emotional frustration coming from Gromit.  I think that Gromit keeps going through some kind of existential dread because Wallace is incapable of seeing him beyond the notion of being a sounding board for Wallace's obsession with Wensleydale cheese. (I'd like to point out: Vengeance Most Fowl might be the most cheese light Wallace & Gromit trope and I don't know how I feel about that.) 

But in terms of what does work, it does nail the heart of a story like Wallace & Gromit.  I like the idea that two friends who have grown to know each other for so long have still fundamental issues with expressing that love.  If anything, Vengeance Most Fowl is a reflection on not recognizing each other's love languages.  Wallace uses his talents to try to make Gromit's life easier.  The problem is that Gromit doesn't want his life easier.  He's a bit of a luddite.  Heck, the movie borders on being almost technophobic in its criticism of "these inventions these days."  Norbot (whom I enjoy quite a bit) is an incredible piece of tech that Wallace almost accidentally creates.  The intention behind the creation is wholesome if not crucially misunderstood.  Gromit enjoys his frustrations with the garden while Norbit does the job of a hundred soulless gardeners in seconds.  Gromit, being mute, is unable to express his frustration that his only outlet is being taken over by someone who doesn't belong there.  But Wallace becomes the villain when he starts marketing Norbot to the neighborhood.

And for a while, I thought that Vengeance Most Fowl was going to be a display of how tech will ultimately be the death of us all.  In an era where AI is in every part of our society, I can kind of see where that would go as a story.  After all, Norbot is hacked, turns evil, and makes an army of evil Norbot clones.  If that didn't seem to be a condemnation on society's dependence on convenience at the expense of artistry, I don't know what it would be.  But oddly enough, Gromit learns more of a lesson than Wallace does.  I mean, a lot of that comes from the fact that Gromit --a dog --is more emotionally intelligent than Wallace --and fully grown man --is.    But Gromit is the first one to forgive Norbot.  (He should. Norbot steals the show of the movie and I get it.)  Part of that comes from the fact that he's able to divorce himself from intention and result.  He understands that Wallace created Norbot from a healthy place.  Sure, he didn't think it through.  Gromit gets Wallace's dopiness.  And through that emotional intelligence, he learns to respect Norbot, despite the fact that Norbot is not conscious.

I have to tell you.  I like Feathers McGraw.  I mean, I only kinda sorta remember the first story with Feathers McGraw.  I was glad that this movie caught me up pretty quickly.  But it's such a great and silly villain that kids can appreciate.  It was odd though.  I had to keep explaining that the rubber glove was a disguise for a penguin to look like a chicken.  The disconnect was that my kids didn't understand why he wanted to disguise himself like a chicken.  The inherent funniness was lost on them.  It was even more lost on them when Feathers McGraw disguised himself as a nun.  It doesn't matter.  Violet was cracking up about all the slapstick so I didn't have to explain it.  

The more I think about it, Vengeance Most Fowl might be my favorite animated film of the year.  I still have to watch a couple of them. But in a year where there hasn't been any real top notch, life-changing movies, Vengeance Most Fowl was a pleasant experience.