Wal­lace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl review – an Aard­man banger

For a cer­tain demo­graph­ic of soci­ety – par­tic­u­lar in Great Britain – Feath­ers McGraw is up there with Nor­man Bates and Max Cady on the Great­est Cin­e­mat­ic Vil­lains of All Time list. His noto­ri­ety is all the more impres­sive for the fact he nev­er utters a sin­gle word in The Wrong Trousers, a sem­i­nal work from Aard­man Ani­ma­tion fea­tur­ing their beloved obliv­i­ous inven­tor Wal­lace and his long-suf­fer­ing loy­al dog Gromit. The nefar­i­ous silent pen­guin was locked up in a zoo for an attempt­ed dia­mond heist some 21 years ago, so he’s had a lot of time to plot his revenge.

Wal­lace and Gromit, for their part, have spent the past 20 years work­ing on their var­i­ous busi­ness ven­tures, as doc­u­ment­ed in A Close Shave, Curse of the Were-Rab­bit, and A Mat­ter of Loaf and Death. But Wallace’s staunch belief in tech­no­log­i­cal suprema­cy despite the long list of mishaps in his past con­tin­ues to frus­trate poor Gromit. Case in point: Wallace’s lat­est busi­ness ven­ture involves his robot­ic gar­den gnome Nor­bot, who can car­ry out var­i­ous odd jobs around the neigh­bour­hood. While the busi­ness is an instant suc­cess, Wal­lace care­less­ly ​“ren­o­vates” Gromit’s prized gar­den in the process, and the poor pooch is left in the dust as Wal­lace enthus­es about the won­ders of his mod­ern tech.

…Which is all very well until Feath­ers McGraw catch­es wind of Wallace’s work, and sees an oppor­tu­ni­ty. A clas­sic revenge tale unfolds, as McGraw assumes con­trol of Wallace’s gnome army and sets about tar­nish­ing his rep­u­ta­tion – and retriev­ing the dia­mond he stashed before his apprehension.

After the dis­ap­point­ing Chick­en Run: Dawn of the Nugget, it’s a relief that the sec­ond fea­ture-length Wal­lace and Gromit adven­ture (sixth over­all) is quite delight­ful, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en that there’s a gen­er­al feel­ing of dimin­ish­ing returns when it comes to a vil­lain come­back sto­ry. But the sim­plic­i­ty of Feath­ers McGraw feels refresh­ing in the age of end­less lore: he’s sim­ply an evil silent pen­guin. His beady black eyes con­tain noth­ing but malice.

Mean­while, Wal­lace and Gromit’s clas­sic odd cou­ple dynam­ic hasn’t real­ly evolved since their 1989 debut; Wal­lace is a chat­ty Holme Val­ley native with grand ideas, and Gromit is the fed-up but loy­al side-kick who’s much smarter than his human realis­es. The joy of Wal­lace and Gromit comes from this con­sis­ten­cy being paired with Aardman’s world-class ani­ma­tion. As in the delight­ful Curse of the Were-Rab­bit, Vengeance Most Fowl demon­strates the beau­ty of hand-craft­ed film­mak­ing, while Mark Burton’s script embod­ies the home­spun charm that the duo have become known for. While Wallace’s obses­sion with tech and the sub­se­quent fail­ure of this could be read as a warn­ing against over­re­liance on machines (and indeed AI, which could nev­er pro­duce art this orig­i­nal and charm­ing) it’s been a tenet of the series for decades, and feels true to char­ac­ter rather than an attempt to attain mod­ern relevance.

Packed with sight gags, puns and quin­tes­sen­tial Aard­man humour (“That’s just an inno­cent nun out for a plea­sure cruise!” a cop­per remarks on see­ing Feath­ers dressed in a habit cap­tain­ing a nar­row boat) the film remains true to the spir­it of the source mate­r­i­al, stick­ing with a sim­ple premise and sav­ing flour­ish­es for the ani­ma­tion, which is as colour­ful and intri­cate as we’ve come to expect, par­tic­u­lar­ly when pay­ing homage to the icon­ic kitchen chase scene of The Wrong Trousers. Teamed with for­mi­da­ble voice tal­ent in the form of Ben White­head (who has played Wal­lace since Peter Sal­lis passed away in 2017), Peter Kay (repris­ing his role as bum­bling cop­per Albert Mac­in­tosh, in a per­haps unin­ten­tion­al indict­ment of the British polic­ing sys­tem) Lau­ren Patel (as Macintosh’s hard-work­ing pro­tegeé PC Mukher­jee) and Reece Shear­smith (voic­ing chip­per robo gnome Nor­bot) it’s a cosy, clas­sic Aard­man treat, per­fect for Wal­lace and Gromit fans of any age – and Feath­ers McGraw remains as men­ac­ing as ever.