Fowl Thoughts

It's been over 30 years since the characters Wallace & Gromit appeared in their first animated short. I still clearly remember the feeling of watching it (and the two shorts that followed) for the first time, and being blown away by what I'd seen. It was "shock and awe" in entertainment, my mind buckling to comprehend what minute detail and massive scope had been captured in stop-motion animation.

Wallace & Gromit have since moved on to occasional full-length features. The world of animation has moved on too, to a place where it's all too easy to be jaded about what can be rendered at the touch of a button And while underappreciated toil does go into great-looking computer animation, there's still something alluring and mind-boggling about stop motion, about the knowledge that every object you see on screen was physically built, and every movement created by hand, one painstaking frame at a time.

So yeah, the newest Wallace & Gromit movie, Vengeance Most Fowl, still wowed me. At 79 minutes, it's certainly short for a modern movie -- even an animated one. But at 24 hand-staged frames per second, 60 seconds per minute, the visual marvel of the movie becomes quickly apparent.

As with all movies from Aardman Animations (Wallace & Gromit films included), the script seems written specifically to stretch -- to the breaking point -- the boundaries of what seems possible in stop motion. Vengeance Most Fowl includes scenes with dozens of moving characters (moving in perfect unison!). It extensively features water, carefully dripping off or pooling on surfaces. A spectacular finale is set in a massive environment that could only have been achieved using an enormous filming stage... or a carefully crafted series of models in a staggering number of different scales. (That's part of the charm; you can't be exactly sure how they pulled it off.)

For long time Wallace & Gromit fans -- or people who now watch those original three short films that started it all -- Vengeance Most Fowl is also rewarding for bringing back an established character (seeking the titular vengeance). Yet despite this, story isn't a particularly strong aspect of the film. As I said, a key element of a Wallace & Gromit script is the set pieces that showcase what the animators can do. It feels like a summer blockbuster in that respect, the story spackled in between the big action.

The other key element of a Wallace & Gromit story is just how much Gromit the dog suffers in silence. Yes, stop-motion animation is by definition a "cartoon," but Wallace & Gromit is always especially cartoonish in how little its characters change and how much everything adheres to formula. 30-some years later, I'm a bit less charmed by that formula, and I find it slightly harder to laugh at the treatment of poor, put-upon Gromit.

But any shortage of charm in the storytelling is more than compensated for by the spectacle of the animation. So ultimately, I really enjoyed Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. It just misses out on my Top 10 Movie list for 2024 (though if I'd watched it sooner, it would have enjoyed a short stint there before being displaced). I give the movie a B+.