Directors Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham bring back the enigmatic villain Feathers McGraw in Aardman and Netflix’s new comedy, combining animation mastery with nuanced, non-speaking characters that never work as hard as when they’re not moving.
By 2005, Nick Park had already spent 16 years with his Wallace & Gromit characters, seeing them through mechanical trouser malfunctions, getting framed for sheep rustling, and facing off with were-rabbits. And it was that year he came up with a new Wallace & Gromit storyline and technological terror.
“It was just about gnomes back then,” shares Park, explaining the origins of Aardman Animation and Netflix’s upcoming stop-motion comedy, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. “Wallace creates a smart gnome to help Gromit in the garden. It was only a half-hour idea for TV. Thinking on it over the years, it was always lacking a bit of something, like a sinister motive behind it. Why did the gnomes go wrong? And then Feathers McGraw was the perfect gift. There he was, just sitting on the shelf.”
Park and Merlin Crossingham dusted off The Wrong Trousers’ silent, villainous, penguin – who served as the first true antagonist in the Wallace & Gromit franchise – and gave him a knack for computer hacking to reprise his evil ways in the aptly named Vengeance Most Fowl.
In the film, which debuts in the U.S. Wednesday, December 18 in select theaters and January 3 globally (except for UK/IE) on Netflix, Gromit’s growing concern that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions proves justified when he invents a “smart” gnome, Norbot, that seems to develop a mind of its own. When it emerges that a vengeful figure from the past – Feathers – who Wallace & Gromit helped imprison many years ago, might be (definitely) masterminding things, it falls to Gromit to battle sinister forces and save his master… or Wallace may never be able to invent again!
Reece Shearsmith (League of Gentleman, Inside No.9) lends his voice to Norbot and Ben Whitehead stars as Gromit, the eccentric, cheese-loving inventor from the North of England. Whitehead previously worked with Peter Sallis (the original voice of Wallace) on several Wallace & Gromit brand projects. The voice cast also includes Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Diane Morgan, Adjoa Andoh, Muzz Khan, and Lenny Henry.
Check out the trailer:
Vengeance Most Fowl is the sixth Wallace & Gromit film overall, the first since A Matter of Loaf and Death in 2008 and the second feature-length film following The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005.
“It’s great to be back with them in a feature,” says Park of his Wallace & Gromit characters. “They’re like family, really. They’re our children who we’ve grown up with. And it's great working with them again.”
Crossingham, who directs with Park on the new film, first joined the world of Wallace & Gromit as an animation director for Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions TV series, which aired in 2002. For him, the 35-year-old franchise’s longevity can be credited to the consistency of Wallace and Gromit’s oddly sweet and incredibly comedic relationship. “I think what Nick found was something that many people relate to, whether they're pet owners like me who talk to their dogs like they’re human all the time or if they’re people like Gromit who feel misunderstood,” he says. “And it's the underdog story, but that might not have been an intentional bit.”
Park inserts, “No, but it’s funny how a lot of things happen accidentally. A Grand Day Out was my student film at the National Film and Television school in London. And no one had done clay animation at the school before. I was going to make Gromit talk with a Scooby Doo-type voice, but I found it so difficult practically to move his mouth where we sculpt every frame. So, I just started moving the brow, and then found, in that instant, that Gromit was born.”
From there, Gromit not only became an expressive dog companion, but also a sentient, highly intelligent but long-suffering being. Gromit’s personality greatly contrasted his master who was, in Park’s words, “a well-meaning idiot.”
“It was suddenly a very funny relationship that resembled an elderly couple, where they always will get on, and they will always look out for each other,” says Park. “That's what's carried on in each film and we try to stretch that relationship a bit.”
And test it. Even before Feathers hacks into Norbot, the gnome proves problematic for Gromit. Norbot, while landscaping, destroys Gromit’s meticulously cared for garden. At night, Norbot makes annoyingly loud vibration noises and face distortions while charging… in Gromit’s room. As he endures these irritating machinations, Gromit displays the gamut of emotions: surprise, annoyance, frustration and anxiety. And, despite Gromit’s lack of speech, accurately, intelligently, and humorously expressing complex emotions on the face of a Claymation dog is not as easy as one might think.
“Gromit has always been a challenge for the animators,” says Crossingham, whose had plenty of experience working with the character himself.
Park adds, “It’s hard to teach other animators how to do it. We’ve had whole animation classes beforehand where the animators have to train up, even ones who’ve done it before. We have to remember that Gromit is the protagonist in these stories and we’re seeing the world through his eyes. So, they all have to train up on exactly how Gromit’s brow moves – not too much, not too little – and being confident with him, but not too reckless.”
Though it depends on the experience of the animator, these classes typically last around three weeks.
“The tendency is to over-animate Gromit,” says Crossingham. “And if you over-animate him, it does dilute the power of his expression. It’s very much the same with Feathers.”
Next to Gromit, Park and Crossingham share that Feathers is the biggest challenge for character animation as he has no pupils and, unlike Gromit, no brow.
“We decided we're going to stay right on track with the way Steve Box animated Feathers in The Wrong Trousers, with deliberate and nuanced movements,” says Park. “We even have to debate how he blinks. ‘Are three blinks too much?’ The simpler he is, the more screen presence he seems to have, and the more enigmatic and mysterious he is. Even when he turns his head and looks at the camera and blinks, we use a specific camera move so it becomes more cinematic. Just a musical sting and a blink can make the audience believe that he's thinking, and the cogs are turning in his head.”
Even with all the technology involved in crafting Wallace’s inventions and all the stop-motion effects involved in the chaotic action sequences inevitably needed in any Wallace & Gromit adventure, Park and Crossingham didn’t forget it’s the characters and the puppetry behind them that have always carried the true magic of stop-motion.
“It’s one thing to move a puppet to create movement, but it’s really about making the audience believe that puppet is a character and has a soul and is a living thing,” says Park.
“And the next step beyond that,” adds Crossingham, “is that you understand what they are thinking. You can animate a head-scratch. But that’s not a thought.”
The ability of an audience to observe the details of human behavior is what first attracted Park to Claymation, and he’s always tried to incorporate subtlety and stillness into his films despite working in a fast-paced industry hell-bent on delivering innovative action sequences and effects.
“I remember the first test of Gromit's face with his eyebrow moving and I was amazed that people were instantly attracted to it and intrigued that little movements on the face and brow could be so powerful,” says Park.
Crossingham adds, “And that’s unique to stop-motion and the way we make these films. It lends itself to stillness without dying. Not all animation does that and it’s something we lean on quite heavily over. When you don't move our characters, they work harder than when they are moving.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
