"Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl" - Cracking

Josh
Jan 8, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Apr 24, 2025

Merlin Crossingham; Nick Park (2024)

Feathers McGraw is easily sitting within the top 10 for movie villains.

It was pretty exciting to see not only the return of Wallace and Gromit since their 2008 short A Matter of Loaf and Death, but the return of one of the better antagonists in the series, Feathers McGraw. Nick Park returns with Merlin Crossingham to create the sequel to the Oscar-winning short The Wrong Trousers (1993). And as it stands, is a much better and refreshing return to form after the rather disappointing Chicken Run 2: Dawn of the Nugget (2023). With Chicken Run (2000) being my favourite Nick Park production, I was hesitant when we were getting hit with another sequel. However, Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, was simply delightful and a reminder of how charming and imaginative all the various forms of animations can be.

Opening directly after the ending of The Wrong Trousers, with the imprisonment of the brutal McGraw who’s serving time rightfully in a zoo. While Wallace and Gromit are living their lives in the usual fashion, going about their home in a Ruthgoldburg style. As it takes place back to back with the original, the original voice actor, Peter Sallis, passed. Yet the new voice actor, Ben Whitehead, does a very good job hitting the charm Wallace in those older shorts.

As they live their lives with an overreliance on Wallace's inventions to do the most mundane of tasks, the bills are racking up. With a spark of inspiration from watching Gromit in the garden, Wallace invents a robotic gardening garden gnome called Norbot, Reece Shearsmith, that can help spruce up the yard. Although being able to clean up the yard quickly, it turns it into a lifeless brutalist garden full of straight lines and sharp edges. Yet neighbours think it’s impressive enough to start a business with the gnome to start bringing some paper. However, when McGraw catches wind of the newfound stardom, he turns the gnomes against the town, and in turn, Wallace, to escape the zoo and steal back the diamond he had hidden in Wallace's house.

It almost seems like a work of genius to combine the message about the reliance on technology, one could even go far enough to call out AI and mix it with one of the oldest and most hands-on forms of animation out there, clay-based stop motion. As it embraces all the imperfections that come with clay from little nicks to light thumbprints on the model. Whether he means it or not, his inventions remove the small joys in life, from making tea to patting your dog. Even with the complex automation of the inventions we ironically have to watch Gromit perfectly time the pulling of levers to ensure their morning routine contraption works correctly. Yet it isn’t a movie that is fully against technology, it leans into how you use it. Don’t let it take away the human touch but utilise it to help elevate your work. Even Park and Crossingham embrace modern-day CGI to create water effects that blend seamlessly with everything else.

It was nostalgic to see these characters on screen again and even better it didn’t feel like a desperate sequel to something that was 31 years old. Unlike another certain movie whose name won’t be mentioned but rhymes with Ricken Cun. The animation is perfectly executed showing that Nick Park hasn’t lost his touch when it comes to complex set pieces. I can only once again hope that this can be another wake-up call to other studios that there is more to animation than just photorealistic environments with goofy-looking characters. And that it’s worth taking a chance on different mediums for future creatives.

Vengeance Most Fowl 60 second review