IndieWire recently traveled to Aardman Animations in Bristol, England, during the last week of shooting “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” the stop-motion studio’s second animated feature from its flagship franchise. Netflix, which dropped a new trailer (see below), has qualified the film for Best Animated Feature Oscar consideration ahead of its streaming premiere on January 3, 2025.
In the latest buddy comedy adventure, eccentric, cheese-loving inventor Wallace (Ben Whitehead) creates a “smart gnome” named Norbot (Reece Shearsmith) to make gardening chores easier for his pooch pal, Gromit. However, the gnome improvement becomes an AI nightmare, thanks to old foe Feathers McGraw (from the Oscar-winning short “The Wrong Trousers”).
IndieWire visited the puppet department to learn about the latest Aardman advancements from creative lead Anne King, spoke to animator Will Becher about a difficult breakfast scene between the two pals, took a peek at a sinister set with cinematographer Dave Alex Reddit, and talked to directors Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham about Norbot, Feathers, and Wallace’s tech obsession.
The puppets are still made the old-fashioned way at Aardman: clay in combination with silicone with ball and socket armatures on the inside. Wallace & Gromit are about 8 inches tall, with Norbot and Feathers slightly smaller. Both Wallace and Gromit were overhauled since they were last seen in the 2008 short “A Matter of Loaf and Death.” This marks the second movie since their Oscar-winning feature debut in 2005, “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”
“The armatures were all a bit old and knackered,” King said, “so we knew we’d have to build a whole new set of puppets. We did develop [Wallace] from scratch; we re-sculpted the puppet with Nick and Merlin, and then we’ve cast a lot of parts into silicone rather than clay, although we’ve used a lot of clay for the puppet as well.” A clay hand and silicone arm allow greater movement, though clay takes longer to sculpt. Clay is still used for greater expression, whereas silicone is better at handling action poses. Wallace’s face, though, saw a return to his classic look after the more caricatured-looking experiment for “A Matter of Loaf and Death.”
Norbot, who has a mechanical mouth, required 3D printing for both his internal parts and head due to his complexity. But, after briefly toying overall with a more humanoid design, they reverted back to the more appropriate robotic look. Feathers, meanwhile, is a clay puppet with silicone feet. “We re-sculpted it to get the ratio of the beak and the eyes just right,” King added. “And the eyes are actually glass pins that we just bought from pin manufacturers, but they’re moulded on Feathers.”
During the early breakfast routine, where Wallace emphasizes invention over personal interaction, Gromit reveals subtle exasperation. This became the hardest acting moment in the entire film, requiring seven takes and three different animators to get just the right expression from the eyes. “Most shots, it’s one take and it’s in the film,” Becher said. “And because it’s organic and because it’s handmade, every animator has a slightly different style of performance and it’s part of my job to work with the team as a whole to make sure that we cast those animators into the right areas.”
The most visually arresting set was the Cellar Cauldron, where Gromit spies a team of smart gnomes secretly building something in the shadows. It looks very Expressionistic with flashing lights and sparks flying, and, typical of the franchise, was mostly shot in camera.
However, for DP vet Reddit, the scene offered a rare opportunity to recreate a personal memory that has stayed with him for decades. “It’s a great scene of industrial mayhem and a frighteningly iconic image,” he said. “About 45 years ago, I used to travel up from the Midlands to Leeds, and going through Sheffield at night, you’d go for the steelworks, and you’d look outside at night, and you’d see something like this. It’s like going through hell. I mean, I had it in my mind way back then. What a crazy image.”
Lit from behind, the scene was further enhanced by back projection with a video projector. “I think I’m actually projecting some different shapes on there as well,” Reddit added. “The animator can step these through one frame at a time. I bought a baby video projector on eBay. It’s mounted on the back there, along with the rest of the lights, and they’re all pre-programmed.”
For franchise creator Park (who participated in a Q&A via Zoom because he had COVID), “Vengeance Most Fowl” provided an opportunity to explore the ubiquitous role of tech and how it nearly wrecks the friendship between Wallace and Gromit. He had been thinking about the idea of a smart gnome for a long time, using their garden gnome as a jumping off point.
“This just came about with the simple idea of: What if Wallace built a smart gnome to help Gromit in the garden?” Park said. “And what happens to that gnome? Does it go wrong? Well, it inevitably does. And then we were working with that for quite a while, kicking it around, and then it just seemed like it needed some extra kind of darkness, a bigger conflict, and actual motivation for [Norbot] as well. And that’s where Feathers McGraw was there as a gift, a perfect kind of solution, really. The most popular question people ask is ‘When’s Feathers coming back?’ No one can quite remember how the suggestion of Feathers being involved came around, but it was like a light bulb moment that answered a lot of story conundrums early on.”
The film also gets to stretch the yin and yang rapport between Wallace and Gromit, with the former an agent of chaos and the latter the smarter agent of order. “Gromit just wants a nice, easy life,” Park continued, “and, physically, Wallace is all over the place. He’s always doing something. And, from just a stylistic performance point of view, Feathers is very contained. And that power is in his stillness.”
For co-director Crossingham (who participated in the Q&A at Aardman), the question of how far they push tech in the film was an important one. “I think it is relevant and pertinent that technology is proliferating on a massively fast track in the world around us,” he said. “And we do touch on it, but it’s more the relationship of technology and how it affects Wallace and Gromit.”
But Wallace does have a computer for the first time. “And it’s a weird hybrid of early ’60s/’70s tape kind of computers. And a slightly 1980s keyboard, so it’s nothing specific,” added Crossingham. “Finding that balance was really critical so that it felt appropriate to their world.”
Yet even though Wallace and Gromit’s world is very ’60s/’70s retro, Park hopes people will buy into the fact that Wallace creates an AI. “Norbot becomes like the new favorite,” he said. “So it’s like any obsession, really. I’m not saying that tech is bad, but it’s about who’s in control, and there’s a lot that just seems so unnecessary. And in their world it’s crazy inventions rather than artificial intelligence or anything like that. But the main thing is they’ve kind of lost touch with each other.”
“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” will stream on Netflix January 3, 2025.
